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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How do images and text show up when you add a link to your Facebook post or Twitter? Each one is different, Facebook has “Open Graph” and Twitter has “Twitter Card Tags”. Both allow you to tweak your message and show a short example of the content before someone clicks into your link.

Your Campaign Website

Your campaign website will be shared via social media channels. You can preview what a share would look like using the links below. If you have recently changed your website, you can use the tools below to refresh Facebook/Twitter’s copy of your website. Each page on your site can display a different image or message, make sure to test them all.

• Facebook Open Graph Debugger
  
• Twitter Card Validator

Ask you web designer to add the necessary tags to support Facebook and Twitter. If you are using WordPress, Yoast SEO provides options to choose what you want displayed. Squarespace also supports adding tags to your site.

ActBlue

The ActBlue default tag is “I just gave to Candidate” and displays when you post an ActBlue link on social media. You can update this per each ActBlue contribution form to customize your message and even add your own logo to the link.

Campaign Deputy Forms

Our hosted forms support both Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards. You can update the message of a form by going to the Style tab and adding your own custom message to the Social Media Message field. Our forms are used for many different purposes, each form will need to be updated with a Social Media Message. Our embedded form option requires your web designer to select the tags for Facebook to pick them up correctly. Have your web designer contact our support team for more details.

Email is constantly changing, and Apple recently made updates to their email service for emails hosted at the @mac.com, @me.com and @icloud.com email addresses.

Email security wasn’t well defined back in 1982, and allowed anyone to impersonate sending an email. An standard called DMARC stopped that and allows email providers to apply the most strict control. Apple chooses which servers are allowed to send emails from their domain, any other server will now be marked as spam, no exception.

Attempting to send an email from @mac.com, @me.com and @icloud.com outside of Apple Mail will immediately be marked as spam.

Apple Mail isn’t the first provider to do this, Gmail did this in 2016 and Yahoo in 2014. These changes help to limit the amount of spam from these domains and prevent phishing attacks.

If you want to send event invitations from an the hosts email address, it is now best to have them BCC their invitee list to give you the best chance to prevent you from being flagged with DMARC.

Sometimes an email will show “on behalf of domain.com” to work around this limitation with DMARC because the email address is actually written like the below address. Email clients make the format more human readable by showing the “on behalf of” separately. The resources link below has more detailed information about this and why you can’t remove it from Gmail, Yahoo, or Apple Mail.

personalemail=yahoo.com@send.mydomain.com

Resources

How Apple’s DMARC Changes Affect Email Senders

Gmail DMARC Update 2017

Why do some emails show “on behalf”