Hey there, Admin!
While everyone using Hustle does some pretty incredible work, it seems everyone uses the tool just a bit differently. The reason for this is often internal practices, organizational structure, and agent-bases who do the text messaging that you set up.
We’ve broken down the best practices by the general categories Hustle typically works with. While none of these are holy-grails, they certainly had input from each area’s Client Success team to get you up and running as soon as possible, and keep you going for the long haul.
Education
Labor
Non-Profit
Politics
As someone working on a political campaign, you are likely working with lots of different volunteers, and focused on reaching as many folks as possible! Here are some tips on how to use Hustle the most efficiently for those goals.
Political: Groups
Political: Tags
Political: Custom Fields
Political: Assignment Strategy
- Most likely you have your entire list of contacts broken up into smaller lists, where you like to keep the data about them separate. Hustle allows you to do this through Groups. For example, If you’re a congressional race and your lists are broken into counties, you should have one group per county. Sticking with this example, if you need to segment your lists within your county groups, they should use tags or custom fields (we’ll talk about this a bit more later).
Note: The group location will determine the area codes of their agents phone numbers.
- If you’re looking to have conversations with contacts over a period of time from the same phone number, they should be remain in one group, rather than being added to multiple groups.
- Using the list name/universe name or geographic region are easy ways to keep your groups organized, and easy to recognize for your admin volunteers.
- Tags are a very useful tool. You can use them to target contacts within a group who meet a specific criteria. You can also use tags to collect information about your contacts during your conversations, such as whether a contact is undecided, or if they are a potential volunteer. You can also use them to re-target, such as creating a goal to target only the ‘undecided’ folks.
- Here are a few tags to consider when setting up your Hustle organization:
- Wrong Number
- Volunteer
- Moved
- Already Voted: Use this during GOTV - mark people as already voted during your conversations and exclude them from your 2nd and 3rd pass
- Undecided: Use this If you don’t use VAN surveys goal type
- Ballot Mailed: Use this for Mail Chase use cases
- If you don’t have a VAN integration, and therefore can’t use the VAN surveys goal type, they should create an “Undecided” tag. This will help when you’re ID’ing supporters.
- Custom fields are an easy way to target contacts within a group by demographic data or location (district, ward, precinct, etc). You can also use custom fields in the script to provide voters with their polling location during GOTV.
- Here are a few Custom Fields to consider when setting up your Hustle organization:
- Polling_place
- Precinct
- District
- Age_range
- Language
- Ethnicity
- Propensity score
- We strongly suggest that Political campaigns use the Anyone Messaging Strategy, as it is the most flexible option for sending out a high volume of texts.
- Agents are expected to continue the conversation with contacts.
- If you reassign contacts, that does not reassign an existing conversation with that contact -- the conversation does not get passed on too. This simply allows for a different agent to send the initial message in a goal and continue the conversation from there.
- A new agent = a new phone number. If one agent is assigned to a contact on one goal, then a different agent is assigned for the next one, the contact will get texts from 2 different numbers.
- Only use Assigned Contacts if you want to build a relationship between the agent and the contact over time - you may do this if you are building out your volunteer universe. Otherwise, it will be easier for your campaign to use FCFS
- Contacts within that group will always get texts from one number regardless of which agent is texting them.
- Within a group, the conversation thread is transferred to whoever is talking to the contact at that time.
- You can set the amount of time you want unread messages to stay with an agent before the conversation is available for another agent in the group to pick up.
- Always use FCFS if you have volunteers who are texting for you. This will allow them to pick up whoever is available when their shifts starts and hand off the conversation when their shift is over
- Assigned Messaging Strategy
- Anyone Messaging Strategy -- First Come, First Serve Goals
- Generally, text banks and GOTV efforts use “Anyone” assignment strategy to make sure that contacts aren’t left hanging after the text bank is over. Team Outreach uses “Anyone” when it doesn’t matter who is speaking to contacts, allowing them to add teammates as agents and they can share the work.
