Text is an ideal channel for campaign communication — regardless of the circumstances — but there are questions about the design of these messages.
Long or short? Photo or video? Shortened link or not?
To get some answers to these design Qs, we turned to Sarah Porter, director of messaging operations, with GOP texting vendor RumbleUp. She spoke to C&E shortly before arriving on the ground in Milwaukee for the RNC:
Q: When it comes to design for text, particularly around fundraising right now, what are you noticing as far as the trend line?
Porter: Shorter SMS messages that don’t include any picture attachments oftentimes are charged per segment, so a smaller message will actually cost less. So the psychology there is, ‘if the message costs less then I get a greater return on investment for each person that donates.’
On the other side of it, messages that have an image, or especially a video, those actually receive typically greater engagement, whether that’s through donations or replies. And so even though those messages are more expensive, you actually do get a greater return on investment.
But there tends to be a little bit more of that sticker shock of, ‘Oh, I have to spend more money to send a longer message, to have a picture attachment to it.’ So it tends to kind of just come down to their strategy. We tend to give the advice that 450 characters is the sweet spot — a few sentences and a really great image or video.
Q: What’s working best in terms of picture versus video?
Porter: We always joke around that if a picture’s worth a thousand words, a video is worth a billion. We can do a lot with these videos. We see typically two strategies: [Sending] your made-for-TV-style ads. You already have this content, you might as well reuse it — get it directly to the specific people you want to see it. And with this technology, it’s compressed in a way that retains a lot of the audio and video polish. So recycle the content you already invested a lot of money in.
The other side we see is extremely personal, direct-to-camera [videos]. They whip out their iPhone, film themselves talking for a minute and send that, which we love to see because it feels really personal to the recipient. And those perform really well. But [when it comes to images], a square image performs really well because it doesn’t get cut off by an iPhone.
Typically we’ll cut things out to a square. A lot of times it is the content that they’re using on social. Again, recycling content also it helps with the stickiness of your brand because if they’re seeing it online, now they see similar messaging in your text message. It helps resonate with the voter.
Q: What type of messaging are you seeing get sent through text?
Porter: We see a lot with persuasion and actually also with voter ID. So to give a little background on my experience, actually, I worked on a congressional campaign in 2020, which is when covid happened. And going door to door canvassing really wasn’t advisable, it wasn’t safe. And we turned to texting as a means to have direct one-on-one voter contact. So with RumbleUp, we use peer-to-peer texting, and it’s a two-way channel. So you can actually sit there and have conversations back and forth with the voter. So you can send your persuasion messages, which are great. Those perform really well.
But also text messages that start a conversation: ‘Hey, here’s some information about the candidate. Can you count on your vote? Can she count on your vote? Do you need information?’ And start a conversation.
And then of course, GOTV is where we see the greatest uptick in traffic, right around the weeks leading up to the election.
Q: What about links? Those often seem a bit suspect in mass texts.
Porter: That’s a red flag immediately. If I get a text message, the first thing I’m looking at is the link. Does this look like a legitimate link or not? We have custom URLs that people can use to shorten up the message that will look more identifiable.