Track your Link Clicks

As the campaign trail moves towards November 3rd, digital teams are ramping up their analytics. One request we had was How do you track when something happened with your lists? We looked at how our internal sales team tracks their actions and worked on ways this could apply to a campaign. We found that campaigns could track the conversion but not the pipeline. It’s great to know you just signed up 100 more donors, where did they come from and how many didn’t convert?

We built dpty.us, a new URL Shortner to help track your links. You may have seen these in social media feeds from various tools, but they started to become expensive to enable an API, and then would require each campaign to setup their own account and setup an API key. Yeah, we just lost 90% of our campaigns right there. We wanted this to be integrated into Campaign Deputy, and we need a link tool for our future plans for broadcast texting.

Our Digital Dashboard is where we are migrating most digital tasks to.

We will be enabling our our new Digital Dashboard for campaign starting in July 1st, 2020.

For the techies in the crowd, we knew that the scale on this feature would be huge. We build it using serverless technologies and it’s currently hosted in an Ohio cloud datacenter. If 10,000 people click on a link in the same second, our cloud provider will instantly spin up our code to handle the load and then spin down those servers after the load drops. As the popularity of this grows, we will launch additional regions on the East and West Coast. Currently our average response time is 0.25 seconds with 95% of users seeing a response tie of 0.44 seconds. To most this will be almost invisible for them.

On the road to broadcast texting

While working with our campaigns, we wanted to provide something more than just sending out texts. We wanted to provide a way to automate or donor to the campaign in an automated way. We created a way to rent a Toll Free number or local number, and set up texting keywords or Opt-In flows that use AI to pull the name out of the response given.

Why Toll Free?

Toll Free numbers are a quick and very affordable way to get a number that can send more than 1 text a second. Local Area Code numbers are limited to 1 text per second while Toll Free numbers start at 3 texts a second and can be adjusted to send 25 texts a second. To send 1,000 text using a local area code would take 17 minutes, with a toll-free number it can take between 1 minute and 6 minutes.

What about a short code? Short codes are expensive and requires 8-12 weeks to setup with each carrier.

Short Codes are expensive. Our fee for a short code starts at $1,200 a month with a minimum of a 6 month contract. Most of that fee is paid to the carrier for registration and what they call a Monthly Maintenance Fee. It also takes 8-12 weeks to get approval for a short code. Based on your fundraising cycle, 8-12 weeks may be after your Primary or General election.

Why AI?

When we ran out first internal test, the opt-in flow picked up the wrong responses to “What is your name to confirm your opt-in?”. People would text back “My name is Charlie”, or “Sure, it’s Alex”. We realized that we didn’t want to store someone’s name as the whole response. We processed the response through AI to grab just their name to pick up “Charlie” , “Alex” as the name. This also helps to de-duplicate them in the system and check to see if there is already a record in your database.

Calls Too

Each phone number can be set up to forward a call to another phone. The person who is calling will show up on your caller id but the caller won’t have access to your phone number. With our P2P Texting campaigns, we see a few people who call the number back. We wanted to make sure if someone needed to, they had the option of talking to someone on your team.

Getting Started

Every active account will receive an email starting May 15th with details on how to set up their number. We are including 1 free toll-free number to every account. Make sure to provide feedback to your account manager with any questions, comments, or suggestions while using this new feature.

If you are not an active client, use our Contact Us form to see our latest demo.

April 2020 Updates

Campaigning in 2020 is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Campaigns have been adapting and so havewe.. We have seen a shift in donations, more to come later on that, and an increased use of our P2P Texting to reach voters.

Whats New

With teams meeting virtually, you can now track outbound emails in one of two ways. First, you can add an Activity to a profile to track of communications that aren’t a call. At the moment, we have only turned on Email tracking. We are looking to merge call time into our Activity Tracking soon.

New Add Activity option available

The second way, is a BCC Email. With each email you send, you can include your account’s specific email address in the BCC field and we will tag it to their profile. Saving you the extra step. The BCC email for your campaign will be your campaign’s full name followed by@campaigndeputymail.com. For example, your BCC email for “Alex for Senate” would be alexforsenate@campaigndeputymail.com. Check our our help documentation on how to automatically include this email as a BCC in G-suite, or Outlook.

Example of an incoming BCC email for a campaign

Mobile Texting

When we first launched our P2P texting, most volunteers were in the campaign office working side-by-side the Field Team for GOTV texts. Things quickly changed, so we changed our texting to have a mobile-friendly view.

Mobile view of texting.

New Domain Name

When we first launched, most websites ended with .com, .net, .org, or .io. Recent industry changes have allowed multiple new top level domains (TLDs) including .app. We wanted to let our security-minded users know that we also own campaigndeputy.app. It has the distinct advantage in that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari require all connections to be encrypted by default. Most connections only require it after the first connection. If you happen to block 3rd party domains as a privacy measure, please add an exemption for campaigndeputy.app in your browser plugin.

Other Updates

  • Fixed a padding issue on mobile devices for certain pages to make viewing easier.
  • Fixed an issue when editing debt payments that are linked to a disbursement.
  • Per new policies from the FEC, we moved a few compliance notes out of the memo field to the purpose field.
  • Fixed an issue with calculating Average Call Time on the call time report.
  • Thank You Note reports export dates to an easier date format.
  • Email images can be added while editing an email and can be dragged and dropped in the Editor.