Your Guide To Sending Election Campaign Text Messages That Work
We’ve seen political campaign texting leading to improved reach to voters and higher voter turnout. That’s probably why you’re here too.
In the few months you have ahead of you leading up to November, how do you:
- Engage in interpersonal conversations with your supporters at scale?
- Educate and mobilize your voters?
- Add more volunteers to your campaign?
- Raise funds?
- Get out the vote and increase voter turnout?
See how to introduce text messaging into your election campaign strategy, create political campaign messages that work, and run a text messaging campaign for your upcoming elections.
Election campaign text messages: Use cases
Political campaigns have been using text messaging to their advantage. What are the best ways to do that, though?
1. Event invitation and alerts
The success of most events is defined by how many people are in the room. Invite your supporters to rallies, town hall meetings, and other campaign events via a text message.
The best part is that you can also get them to RSVP via text using autoresponders.
Filter out people who replied ‘No’ or didn’t turn up, and target them for your next campaign with a survey asking why they did not attend.
2. Important updates and announcements
Poll results, media appearances, and news related to your campaign need to reach all your contacts in a short time, so they don’t miss out. While a text broadcast with a longcode can send 3600 messages in one hour, a shortcode can send 100 times more.
That means you can reach between 3600 to 360,000 people within an hour! It is definitely worth looking into acquiring a shortcode to send out these types of messages to your supporters.
3. Educative messages
Engaging with supporters on issues that interest them can get them to connect with you. Having meaningful conversations about them helps them know your candidate better and increases the chance of them voting for you.
4. Offers and promotions
Give your early subscribers offers such as free fundraiser tickets, front-row rally seats, and so on. Promoting your campaign store items through political campaign texts is also a great way to raise funds.
5. Supporter surveys and collecting feedback
Surveys can help you engage your contacts, and voter identification is one of the most important use cases you can use surveys for.
Ask your supporters to share their views on an issue and know their stance on your candidate or if they’ve voted in the previous election.
You can either send a link to a survey or conduct one via political texting.
Now, tag your contacts based on their responses which will get synced with your CRM. You can now segment these contacts based on their responses and plan your follow-up campaign accordingly.
6. Endorsements
If a local paper endorses you, send your contacts a link to it. If a high-profile supporter has tweeted about you, share it with your contacts. Endorsements show your contacts that people are supporting your candidate and can inspire them too.
7. Fundraising
Reach out to your current and prospective donors and request donations by showing the impact it’s creating in real-time. Your supporters may feel more inclined to give if there’s transparency in communication.
8. Volunteer recruitment
You can send timely updates and volunteering opportunities to your most engaged supporters via political text messaging. Also, if your constituents can’t donate money, an alternative is to ask them to donate their time.
9. GOTV
Studies show that text messaging for political campaigns can increase voter turnout by around 1%. We all know how much that 1% can impact voting results. While elections aren’t until November, starting your campaign weeks in advance helps you stay on top of your contacts’ minds.
You can start by helping your contacts create a plan to vote. Sending your contacts information related to their polling location, date and time, etc., can help them get to the booths and vote.
10. Election day reminder
Send your registered voters a friendly message to remind them to cast their vote along with a link to help them find their polling booth.
Peer-to-peer texting is ideal for voter turnout campaigns due to its nature of having a personal touch while carrying out multiple conversations.
How to start a text messaging campaign for your upcoming elections
What are the steps that form the base of a successful campaign?
Let’s find out!
Get voters to opt in
Building a high-quality subscriber list is the backbone of all your campaigns. By turning your audience into contacts, you can engage with them personally and ultimately mobilize them to vote.
SMS Opt-in campaigns are one way to collect consent for auto-texting and more information about your audience. This information you collect helps you segment your contacts into multiple lists for more accurate targeting.
How to create an election campaign text message that works
One of the important steps in the whole campaign process is to get the messaging right so your contacts are compelled to take the desired action.
Let’s see how you can do that.
1. Be clear and compelling
Engaging your potential voters needs to include clear information at every stage of your campaign. For instance, your initial communication should inform your contacts about you, your party, your campaign, and your plan to improve the citizens’ lives. Then you can move onto forming a relationship and converting supporters into donors. Finally you can remind these folks very clearly that it is time to vote and their vote counts!
2. Humanize your message
While your text message should position you as a leader, humanizing it can attract more voters. The more human you sound, the more likely your supporters connect with your candidate.
So, keep your message natural, and use text abbreviations, emojis, etc. to sound human.
3. Incorporate MMS to improve responses
MMS is a text message format that accommodates an image, video, audio, and GIF, with up to 1600 characters of text.
Adding an eye-popping graphic to your text message can grab your contacts’ attention and encourage them to read your message. A study also showed that MMS had a 20% higher response rate than SMS.
The graphic can be a picture of your campaign store item or adding a personal touch using a voice or video recording of your candidate, a screenshot of a news headline or tweet.
4. Add a relevant link to your messages
Whenever you need your contacts to visit another platform from your text, include a link for the same. Link Shortener and Trackers shorten your links, so they take up less space and look clean.
Make sure the platform you’re leading them to is mobile-optimized, so your contacts’ experience is not hampered. Of course, there isn’t much you can do with an external platform, but if it’s your campaign website, your donation page, etc., look out for responsiveness.
5. Include a strong call to action
A powerful call to action is necessary to get your contacts to act. Strong verbs and time quantifiers like ‘vote today’, ‘donate now’, etc. help you do that.
Be it asking your supporters to share their opinion on a specific issue, visit your website, or contact your representatives, end your text with that call to action.
Begin Your Political Text Messaging Campaign
If you’re ready to give text marketing a try, we encourage you to sign up with us here at Robocent. We have everything you need to ensure you are reaching your voters with the most efficient campaign messaging.