In Seach of Phone Banking Software

By Laura Quinn, June 11, 2010

So here's a piece of software that seems pretty useful...imagine this scenario:

You have a bunch of volunteers mobilized to call constituents. Perhaps they're calling previous donors, to ask them to donate again.  Or they're calling around the community, to encourage people to come to a hearing.  Regardless, they'll need a call list with names and numbers, and some way to note who they spoke to and what people said.

You can certainly do this on paper, but then some poor smuck has to enter all the information as to who was reached and what their response was into the database.  Seems like something that software would be useful for, huh?  So I'm envisioning a tool that would provide volunteers with only their own list (or even just the next person to call), maybe over the web, so they could be either in person or remote.  And then they would get a little form for them to enter response information that would then go straight into a database, for easy loading into your constituent management system.

Sounds useful, huh?  And pretty simple. But I can't find anything like it that's straightforward and  reasonably priced.  This type of functionality sometimes comes packaged with expensive university management software, but that doesn't make sense if you're not a university.  Sungard offers SmartCall, but it's functionality is way overkill for most organizations.  MoveOn uses this functionality to mobilize remote phone-a-thon type actions, but they built it themselves.

What do you think?  Does anyone know of straightforward software to do this?

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Comments

CiviPhone

by David Geilhufe (not verified) - 2010-07-20 10:11

 You might check on the progress of CiviPhone... The goal was to add phone banking functionality to CiviCRM. Not sure if it is actually at the stage of a release yet.

http://civicrm.org/node/415

Events.org

by Katie (not verified) - 2010-06-22 16:12

 Events.org has an option for this in their software and they are very reasonably priced since most of their clients are non-profits.  The good thing about using them is that your volunteers can log in (all online), update their list with notes and the information never has to be entered again by anyone since you're only using database.  A great way to keep everything organized since all the info is kept in one place, especially useful when planning events and you need to solicit for donations.  It works the same with guest notes as well.  www.events.org

The Obama campaign had this

by Thomas Taylor (not verified) - 2010-06-21 03:48

for GOTV and it was considered very cutting edge at the time, which wasn't that long ago. I've read of a few other campaigns, most recently Bill Halter in Arkansas, using this technology - I don't know if Blue State Digital is the key vendor or not. I think it's overstating the case a bit to say that it's "pretty simple." For on site, I think export/import to spreadsheet is probably a good way to go, and what a lot of orgs are doing. When you want to go remote, then you have to account for people who don't complete their call list or get a busy, and cycle those constituents back into the queue. I bet we'll see this more and more from electoral campaigns and then it will trickle down to the SaaS vendors in the nonprofit space.

Google Docs and Forms

by Tal Frankfurt (not verified) - 2010-06-11 20:27

 Did you try Google Apps? It is free, easy to use and you can migrate the spreadsheet to most databases.

Tal

Google Docs and Forms

by Laura Quinn - 2010-06-14 12:04

 Yeah, you could certainly just download your data to a Google Spreadsheet, ask your volunteers to use that to find the numbers to call and add notes, and then re-upload it.   Seems like there's a lot of possibility for volunteers to mess up your data by accident though, doesn't it?  Does Forms address this -- could you use Forms to parse out the contact info and collect the response info one by one?