Why host a phone or text bank to reach voters?
Phone or text banking involves individual outreach to voters through phone calls or text
messages. Contact from a trusted organization can help prepare and motivate people to vote and
is more effective than emails or postcards. Include phone or text banking as part of your Get Out
the Vote strategy in the weeks leading up to the election. Benefits include:
Flexibility to organize in-person, at a distance, all at once, or over many shifts
Enjoyable for your staff and volunteers
GOTV messages can be paired with wellness checks, invitations to events/services, or other
messages you want to get out to your community
Instructions for organizers:
Before starting, please read over this packet in its entirety. If you have questions, you can reach
out to info@nonprofitvote.org. Keep in mind that it may take 3-4 days for a response.
Every good phone or text bank has four key ingredients:
1. A list of clients/voters to contact
2. Staff or volunteers (bankers) to make the calls/texts to voters
3. A script to guide their interactions
4. A tracker to record voters’ answers and important notes: Download our template.
What if I don’t have a list of clients or community members that includes their name and
phone number? We recommend targeting a small geographic area (such as a City Council ward)
using the data firm L2. You can get a few hundred names and numbers for around $50 dollars.
Who should I ask to phone/text bank? How many people should I ask? For every 100 phone
numbers, recruit two people to phone/text bank for two hours (you could also recruit four people
for a Power Hour!) Consider asking staff to participate, as well as committed volunteers, members
of your board, or even program participants. Members of a local youth leadership program make
great bankers. Recruit bilingual speakers if many people in your community speak languages
other than English at home.
How do I use the scripts? How do I train my bankers? Download the phone banking script as a
Word doc here and download the texting script as a Word doc here. Text that appears in curly
brackets and highlighted should be filled with your organizational or state information. Head to
Voting In Your State for links to your state’s website. If text appears in double angle brackets, it
indicates that your bankers will use the dropdown menus in the tracker to select the voter’s
answer (ex: <<RECORD whether they’re voting early, by mail, etc>>). Start banking sessions with a
quick training: ask bankers to read through the script and then have them open the tracker and
review the options in each columns’ dropdown menu. Make sure there is a staff member or lead
volunteer that bankers can contact if there are questions or issues.