As Deputy Campaign Manager responsible for field operations and voter contact for the Ned Lamont campaign in 2006, I needed to get hundreds of thousands of telephone calls made to voters. Ned had fifteen field offices throughout Connecticut but they couldn't provide the volume of calls necessary to win the Democratic primary.

PopVox allowed people to call from anywhere at their convenience, sometimes logging in to call for as little as fifteen or twenty minutes.

PopVox allowed our callers to reach three to four times the contacts per shift as compared to traditional calling... PopVox played a huge role in Ned Lamont's Democratic primary win over Joe Lieberman. Democrats could not taken Congress back without Ned's winning message against the War in Iraq, and PopVox helped deliver the win. I will be using PopVox in this year's elections and you should, too.

It increased my phone banking effiiciency by at least 50%, and phone-banking was more fun now that I didn't have to dial numbers and read scripts into answering machines. And it helps the campaign because they don't have to rekey information and can tailor phone-banking with a few administrative clicks instead of having to cut and recut lists.
It's great.

Read Matt Stoller's story >

Matt Stoller
Political Consultant

The John Hall campaign was the race that shocked the nation. Nobody took it seriously. No one saw it coming. Until 10:30 pm on election day, we were still considered "leans Republican" by all the experts. The New York Times called our win "the biggest surprise of the night." AP called it "stunning." Our pollster, Mark Watts, who has worked on scores of tight elections, told me that "John Hall is the #1 upset in the country."

Instead of just being the Home Team captain, I stepped up to run the entire phone program. [...] I know I'm biased, but in my opinion, it was phones that put us over the top. Commanding a grassroots army of about 450 volunteers, my program made 120,000 calls in four days. The scale was almost absurd. The results were obvious — high turnout in Dem districts, and high break of independents to Hall. The program worked.

Read Tate Hausman's story >

Iris and Dot are my new friends.

Iris is 74. She lives in Syracuse, NY. She has six grandchildren who delight her, but none of them live nearby.

Dot is 62. In the past two weeks, Dot and Iris and I have become friends, and more than friends-comrades-in-arms. Dot and Iris were the first two members of the Home Team, a volunteer program I'm running for my congressional candidate in upstate New York. The three of us share a passion for political change, and a belief that this year it can happen. Thanks to the beauty of the Web, we found each other easily. Or, more accurately, I hung out a shingle and they found me.

The Home Team is an experiment in the Holy Grail that all campaignsters like me are questing for — distributed activism. That is, using the Web to turn “armchair activists,” who are distributed across the town or state or country, into real world activists.

Read Tate Hausman's story >

Tate Hausman
Field Director for Phones