Campaigns have similar needs to some companies, scaling out their one-to-one communication across a team, and from one common contact point. Here at Campaign Deputy, we have internally been testing a new tool that allows us to provide Live Chat, Facebook Messenger and Text message support from one tool, and we did not have to build this one, just integrate with it. We have been using Rocket.Chat with Twilio for text messaging, and Facebook Messenger for our Facebook page. We looked at a lot of tools, and with prices approaching $20/user/month, we couldn’t find one we liked until we stumbled upon Rocket.Chat. We Self-Host, because we have the server space, you could to while their plans start at $4/user/month, it makes sense for a campaign to let someone else deal with the hosting.

We of course love the built in live chat, we can trigger custom messages per a page, if they spend more than a minute on a page, you can start to send them custom messages. Maybe a voter lands on your healthcare policy page, you could trigger a message to ask if they had any other questions about health care 2 minutes after they open the page.

Text Messaging is built in with Twilio. You can register a local phone number and integrate it into Rocket.Chat. Volunteers come and go, with one central platform you can keep the conversation going from one phone number and assign your team to built in queues, departments and more. If you are on the go, their mobile web app works great. We did have some issues with their Mobile App for Android, they are aware of the bug, so we encourage anyone to use the app in their web browser until that bug is fixed. A small price to pay for a tool that is 75% cheaper than most competitors, or free if you have an IT team. You do have to pay per a text message, and rates are $0.0075 per a text per Twilio’s pricing guide on January 2019.

This was just another tool we were impressed with and could see the potential for a campaign to use in the age where a strong digital strategy is needed for most campaigns.

Facebook support is easy to setup too. You can follow their documentation to setup the system, we had it setup in about 3 business days.