Best Way to Avoid Annoying Campaign Calls During Election Time
2020 is right around the corner everyone and you know that means! Time for all the campaign calls. We have all had these kinds of phone calls before. The phone calls from a political campaign asking us to vote for a candidate, ask us to volunteer for the campaign, to donate to the candidate, or to even answer a survey about that candidate. It’s annoying and can be extremely frustrating especially when you have those calls at inconvenient times. Well, I can share a few secrets from the campaign side of the world that will help you avoid these calls from happening, or at least reduce the amount you receive.
So why would I want to share these secrets, especially when I am working in the campaign world and I want your vote, your money, and your time? Well the answer is pretty simple, I don’t want to waste my time. Campaign staff wear all types of hats during the day, from being fundraisers, digital marketing, canvassers, phone bankers, marketers, editors, etc. This means we have 100 different things we need to do every day and only ~12 hours a day to do them. Some of those things include talking on the phone a lot and a lot of the time, campaign staff are being yelled at over the phone or dialing hundreds of numbers a night. Therefore the best thing for you to do is to be honest with us.
Legally (I don’t know under what law section or code, but I’ve campaign executives tell me this) if you say you don’t want anymore calls, campaign staff can no longer call you for the rest of the election. This is probably the best thing you can do. If you do this right away then this should prevent future calls to your phone from that campaign. But what about if you want to receive calls just not one every week? Well the best thing you can do is to be honest with whatever staff or volunteer your on the phone with. If you want to volunteer with a campaign and don’t want to be harassed constantly by that campaign tell the Field Organizer or volunteer about your schedule. If you do end up scheduling a volunteer shift with a campaign and then flake, the staff will continue to call you. Just be honest and tell them solidly no, or a solid yes and work with them to schedule your shift.
In terms of surveying, if you take the ~2 minutes to answer they few questions the staff or volunteers have, they more then likely will not call you again for anything. Again this honesty is truly helpful at the end of the day for both parties. You get less calls, the staff is able to move on to the next call. If you do ignore them, you will probably get another call just because the campaigns need that information.
I know these calls can be annoying, trust me campaign staff are not fans of them either because they are slogging through so many. On average, my call goal a week for volunteer calls as a Field Organizer in VA is 1900 calls a week. I much rather have you answer the phone and then not have to talk again then to have to keep calling your number and still hear the same dial tones over and over again.
