In An Age of Remote Phone Banks and Lower Connect Rates, Dem Company Impactive Thinks It Has a Solution

A Democratic phones company is launching a new predictive dialer it hopes will help campaign phone banks ramp up the number of calls necessary to reach voters effectively in 2022. 

“A decade ago, [the connect rates] were at, what, 20 percent? It may have even been higher at one point. And it’s just slowly come down. If they were at 20 percent, making five calls to reach somebody is a lot less than making 20,” said Naseem Makiya, founder and CEO of Impactive, which was formerly known as Outvote.

Makiya said his company’s predictive dialer, built in-house, enables staff and volunteers to make up to 10 times as many calls an hour and allows for more complex script flows with the respondent’s answers automatically synced back to NGP VAN. “It just becomes that much more important as it starts to become harder to reach folks on these channels.”

It’s also geared to help volunteers who are working remotely, which is increasingly the norm for phone banks running during the ongoing pandemic. 

“It’s harder to manage these things remotely: you’re less able to control the environment — even down to the level of training and support folks receive. So [the dialer] has to be that much more intuitive on the user side. It has to be more accessible and it has to work across the different devices that they’re using,” he said. 

“This will be the first dialer where volunteers can actually do a full phone bank from their phone. So they can just call in, they can make calls, and they can do it all from their phone so they don’t need a laptop or a desktop computer to be sitting there and doing it. That adds a level of convenience and accessibility for a lot of volunteers.”

Makiya, whose company is backed by startup incubator Higher Ground Labs (HGL), said the idea for the dialer came from a debrief with clients and practitioners post-2020. In fact, Makiya said his company, which also offers peer-to-peer texting, hadn’t initially anticipated developing a new predictive dialer.   

“When you talk to everyone after the cycle, and they’re all like, ‘We need help here.’ That’s why you shift the road map towards that,” he said, adding that not enough startups are paying attention to what campaign professionals are saying they need. 

“There just wasn’t enough competition in the dialer space. There wasn’t really much at all. So I do think there is a question around what problems are all these folks solving,” he said. “Because the problem before was you’d look and there just wouldn’t be that many companies. But now, campaign mangers, digital organizing directors and so forth they’re just overwhelmed with the amount of pitches they’re getting from this new tool, that new tool. It’s hard for them to triage all that and run a very exhaustive evaluation process and understand who they should go with.”

Makiya added that more tech companies need to start listening to what stakeholders want and responding to it. To date, the process “is not all necessarily driven by the stakeholders,” he said, despite the proliferation of political technology startups on the left. 

“Make sure the tool you’re building is solving the problem because I don’t think that’s always the case and that kind of leads to the difficulty in the evaluation process,” he said.