Republican campaigns this cycle could avoid a compliance headache thanks to a white-labeling strategy by texting vendor RumbleUp.
The Republican P2P firm has been while-labeling its products to the NRCC since 2020, and started working with the RGA last year. As of Wednesday, it’s added the RSLC to its stable for the 2022 cycle.
“The timing works out well because across all of our white-label platforms at RumbleUp beginning [Wednesday] we’re going to be offering 10DLC registration through those white-label portals,” said Thomas Peters, CEO of RumbleUp. “It’s a standard, easy process and it takes some of the weight and education off of the committees, and allows the software to do the process.”
That could provide a strategic edge as practitioners on both sides continue to grapple with the carriers’ rollout of the political texting compliance program, which is proving far slower than many had hoped.
When it comes to the RSLC, for instance, once a caucus or a down-ballot campaign is authorized to create an account in GOP Activate, the company’s white-label platform, they’ll see a prompt to register with the Campaign Registry once they log in.
Then they get a step-by-step tutorial, and by the end they’ll get a 10DLC-registered phone number and can begin texting for political-use cases. The system works with T-Mobile and AT&T, which are the carriers that currently require 10DLC registration for political texting.
Peters said the hope is that committees like the RSLC will benefit from campaign staffers having platform continuity in their texting campaigns and also get the benefit of having a coordinated training regime.
“In much the same way that WinRed has standardized Republican donations, the RSLC’s vision for GOP Activate is a way to standardize texting for campaigns so people can focus on doing their jobs and not on how the software works,” he said.
As part of the program, RumbleUp will also provide a playbook that provides a texting calendar that offers the campaign recommendations on what kind of texting they should be doing based on how far out they are from Election Day.
RSLC President Dee Duncan said in a statement: “GOP Activate is also a big win for the future of the Republican Party, as training our candidates to use this technology now will help them run better campaigns if they go on to seek higher office down the line.”
The RSLC can also work directly with campaigns depending on the state. In Virginia for example, the RSLC could fund a caucus account to help give them a boost on their texting budget. In other states, it could be a software as a service (SaAS) in-kind donation that the caucus or committee then has to fund themselves. “It’s a wide spectrum,” Peters said about state-level compliance requirements.
Down ballot, Democrats have a plethora of startup options compared to the right, but there’s a lot of churn in terms of market share, and that’s where Peters said he sees a clear opening for the GOP side: “What we’re happy to see on the Republican side is just steady growth. There’s a lot of continuity there.”
As far as a growth strategy for his business, Peters said he’ll continue to push white labeling but only as an offering to campaign committees.
“It’s an example of a really great network effect,” he said. “It allows committees to basically put all of their campaigns under one roof so they have access to data and they can see what the individual campaigns are doing. It also allows us to have standardized pricing across the board, and really cuts down on the back and forth of the sales process.”
