Why Texting Beats Email for GOTV

here are two types of text messaging exchanges. Many are likely familiar with “warm” texting. That means you’ve got a relationship with the subscriber and they’ve opted to hear from you. Organizations have been building these kinds of lists for a while and much like email you can blast messages out to all your subscribers at once.

“Cold” text messaging involves using people to send messages one at a time to voters based on cell phone numbers purchased from a commercial data vendor. But doesn’t that violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)? Well, no, it doesn’t, because the texts are not being sent using “automated telephone equipment.” Rather, they’re being sent one at a time by humans hitting send from a real phone number. It’s not much different than phone banking (where you also make unsolicited calls), it’s just much much faster and less intrusive.

We’ve previously shared our research on using “cold” texts and one-to-one messaging to both turn out voters and to register voters. Our final 2016 experiment dealt with two topics, the first being the traditional “warm” texts. Vote.org was able to build a giant opted-in text list in 2016 because of the heavy use of the tools we offer on our site. This “warm” texting experiment was the largest one conducted to date with a total of 324,935 voters.

Our 2016 study showed important findings with effects on par with other non-partisan presidential year GOTV programs:

First and most important, texting works, both the “cold” and “warm” varieties. Overall, our study showed a statistically significant 0.5 percent increase in turnout (0.65 percent without factoring in social pressure texts). Sending people their polling place information and engaging in plan-making works to increase turnout.

Second, for one of the test conditions we used some light “social pressure” messaging. Voters were reminded that whether or not they voted was public record. This has been found to be effective time and time again in other modes of contact. That was not the case with this texting experiment. Social pressure messaging underperformed our other GOTV messages by a margin of 0.4 percentage points with to 0.65 points without.

Finally, doing GOTV using “warm” texting (0.65 percent) outperformed “cold” texting (0.2 percent), but the opportunity for scaling is much higher and the acquisition costs much lower for “cold” texting.



https://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/why-texting-beats-email-for-gotv