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.
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
- Contacts get distributed to agents in goals based on their assignment status. Here are some things to think about when creating goals. If a contact is:
- Unassigned: any agent in the group can message and respond to the contact. Threads with Unassigned contacts are designed to be more flexible so when a contact replies, they’ll get a response from an available agent. We recommend leaving contacts unassigned when you want to reach out to your contacts and don’t mind which agents message them.
- Assigned: the contact will only be messaged by their assigned agent. Threads with assigned contacts are designed to maintain a consistent relationship between specific agents and contacts in a group. However, contacts can be reassigned to a different agent or unassigned and the conversation history will be preserved for any new agent messaging on the thread.
- For more information, see How can agents message contacts?
- We strongly suggest that Political campaigns leave contacts unassigned, as it is the most flexible option for sending out a high volume of texts.
- Agents are expected to continue the conversation with contacts.
- 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 leave contacts unassigned.
- 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.
- Generally, text banks and GOTV efforts leave contacts unassigned to make sure that contacts aren’t left hanging after the text bank is over. Team Outreach leaves contacts unassigned when it doesn’t matter who is speaking to contacts, allowing them to add teammates as agents and they can share the work.