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How to Conduct a Political Survey Through Calls and Texts

Surveys and reviews are essential if you want to be able to speak to the masses. Whether you are in business, retail, technology or politics, knowing what your audience likes and wants is going to be vital to your campaign strategy. Just like how Apple needs to know what kind of phone to come out with next, and what specs and features consumers want—political campaigns need to know what burning issues are on voter’s minds and what voters want in a candidate. When politicians and campaigns know this then they know how to better target their voters, and you guessed it, win their vote. Considering that only 2% of households have no type of phone service at all, conducting surveys via calling or texting is the way to go. It is the best way to reach out to America’s diverse population and reach people from all walks of life.

Start Brainstorming

Sit down with your campaign management team, and brainstorm the best questions to ask your voters. With political survey questions you can: develop strategic initiatives, formulate policies, generate new laws, and develop a strategic political campaign. Not only can these questions and surveys tell you how your campaign is doing, but they are also good for comparing you to your opponents. Want to know how you stack up against your opponent? What policies does your opponent back that is driving their support?

What Can You Do with a Political Survey?

The real question is, what can’t you do. Political surveys have endless possibilities, all geared towards making a campaign stronger and more effective. In the beginning stages of a campaign, surveys can help make decisions and initiate the campaign’s planning stage.
To have an effective campaign, you have to know how your voters feel about specific political issues, and whether your campaign speaks to them or not. Surveys take the guesswork out of planning and give real-time results. The last thing you want is to think that your campaign plan is perfect and flawless, but not ask the people what they think. Voters might not agree with you on certain matters, and it is better to know this sooner rather than later. This way your campaign can do damage control and win voters back.

Get real qualitative or quantitative data with surveys. Ideally, you are looking for quantitative data, as this provides concrete results. Quantitative data asks if voters are voting for Candidate A or Candidate B, the results of this might be 60% voting for A and 40% for B. This is factual data, no questions about it. Qualitative needs a little bit more interpretation. This kind of survey might be done with real people calling or going door to door, and the results of those conversations being jotted down. For surveys by texts and calls, try to stick to quantitative.

Not only can you build a campaign strategy with the results of a survey, but you can also find potential volunteers. Once you have identified supporters, you can send out follow up texts/calls that ask something like this, “Thank you for your support, would you consider helping our campaign and volunteering? Press 1 for yes, 2 for no, and 3 if you need more information.” This is a kind of survey as well, but with a different purpose in mind, but every campaign needs volunteers. If you are having trouble finding willing volunteers, try this method of recruiting.

The Many Types of Political Surveys and Polls

It is important to be familiar with the many types of polls, this way you can determine which poll methods to employ.

  • Opinion Poll: probably the most popular, asks a series of questions to help determine the general opinions of the public.
  • Benchmark poll: the first poll in a campaign, usually short and assess the likely support of voters.
  • Brushfire poll: is more of a competitive tool to assess candidate favorites among voters.
  • Tracking poll: tracks support over a period of time.
  • Entrance poll: taken right before voting occurs, to match actual poll results to previous responses.
  • Exit poll: conducted right after voters cast their votes, in order to indicate actual poll results.
  • Straw poll: used to see if there is enough momentum behind an idea or cause to address it and spend more time on that issue.

Examples of Possible Survey Questions for Calls and Texts When you use Robocent surveys, you have two options, call or text surveys. Both are great and useful. When you create a survey via phone call, the process looks like this:

  • The phone call goes out to the voter
  • Someone on the other end picks up
  • The callee can hear a question being asked by a prerecorded audio file
  • The callee can respond to the questions using the corresponding number on their keypad
  • The response is recorded and uploaded to a live user control panel, where all the answers from each call can be viewed after each call
  • Review responses and start on that campaign game plan

These might look something like this: Question 1: “Will you be voting for [insert candidate name] in the upcoming election? Press 1 for yes, 2 for no, and 3 for unsure/maybe.” The callee will then press the number that goes with their response, and then the next question will be asked. The best part about these surveys is that there are no limits. There can be an unlimited number of questions with an unlimited number of responses possible. Don’t overwhelm the voter with endless questions and responses though. Try to keep it simple. What you don’t want is them to get frustrated with a game of 20 questions and then they hang up. Ask questions essential to the campaign.

These kinds of surveys that use automated calls, are specific to landlines.

Yard signs are a campaign advertisement tactic, but you need the homeowner’s permission before placing yard signs on their lawn. Robocent has just the solution for you. Survey texts! This might look like this “Hi [insert voter name], can [insert campaign name] put a yard sign in your front yard to show your support for [candidate's name]? Respond with a 1 for yes, and a 2 for no.” Easy right?

You can also complete this same survey, by texting a link to the customer’s phone asking them to complete a survey. Here they will click the link, be redirected to a website with a series of questions, put in their responses, and submit their answers. Simple as that. There are a number of ways to utilize text surveys, allowing for creativity for your campaign. Not only that, but text surveys receive higher response rates than IVR surveys do.

Most, if not all of these surveys are universal between calling or texting. In either case, the callee is either texting back with the corresponding number to the given question or pressing the number on their keypad. You can develop questions for your campaign, and send them out to everyone, landlines, and mobile phones. This will guarantee that you are covering all bases and contacting everyone within your reach. ‘

With text surveys, you can even send follow up responses based on the answer that the voter gave. These can be responses that thank them for participation, direct them to your campaign website for further information, or you can even see how their response measured up to the other response from the poll. When you Send Text Blasts, you are using the most efficient technology out there.

Other surveys that you can do are surveys that use a 5-7 point scale. This would include questions that have responses like the following: strongly disagree, moderately disagree, slightly disagree, slightly agree, moderately agree, and strongly agree.

Keep It Sweet and to the Point

When formulating questions and possible responses, keep them concise and use simple everyday terminology. You are dealing with the general public, and you want to make sure you use easy to read wording that is not complex or confusing. If you use big words or wordy sentences, you might cause voters to hang up or just outright “delete” your text message.

Transfer Calls

Robocent has a feature called transfer calls. These RoboCalls call a voter and play a pre-recorded message asking them if they would like to be transferred to a campaign representative. If they select the option that approves the transfer, they will be directed to a real warm-blooded human. How great is that? Then the representative to personally connect with the voter, ask them questions, take donations, and answer any of their questions in return.

The Robocent platform is easy and intuitive to view all your survey responses from either calls or texts. Our technology provides real-time updates to questions and keeps you updated on the response rate of any survey. With the elections right around the corner, and the Pandemic making campaigning harder than ever, your campaign's saving grace is going to be text and call surveys. Don’t wait, know how your political campaign is doing today. Sign up for our many RoboCall and RoboText options, the perfect campaign partner for any budget.