How an Instagram Chatbot Helped Mamdani’s Mayoral Campaign

Gabriella Zutrau is a veteran in the digital space. 

She’s worked as a digital and communications director for New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, consulted for the progressive advocacy powerhouse MoveOn and, most recently, worked on digital strategy for Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoral campaign. She’s also a content creator herself, running an Instagram account for her dog – Edna the Runt – that’s garnered more than 100,000 followers. 

So when she saw other creators using Manychat, a comment-to-direct-message chatbot, on Instagram to send links or collect emails from users, she wondered why the political space hadn’t picked up on it yet.

“I saw [creators] starting to use it to sell their Pilates ebook or get people to sign up for their master class,” Zutrau, an independent freelance digital consultant, told C&E in an interview. “And as soon as I saw that happening a couple years ago, I was like, ‘Oh my god, why isn’t anybody in advocacy and organizing and politics using this to do lead generation, to get people to sign petitions, to RSVP, to donate?’ ”

Zutrau first put her idea to work for MoveOn, experimenting with how Manychat could be best used in the advocacy space without “being spammy.” Earlier this year, she pitched the idea to Mamdani’s Communications Director Andrew Epstein. As Zutrau put it, Mamdani’s proclivity for going viral online made his campaign the “perfect use case” for the strategy.

The idea, according to Zutrau, is simple: using Manychat to turn Mamdani’s online enthusiasm into tangible action. 

Different Engagement Flows

The chatbot responded to hundreds of DMs everyday from Instagram users with requests to do things like volunteer, canvas or donate. It also responded when users mentioned Mamdani’s account in their Instagram stories. When users commented on posts with a specific trigger word, they would receive a link directly to their DMs. 

One Manychat flow asked users to opt in to receiving emails from the campaign simply by typing their email addresses in their DMs. The chatbot would then capture the email and add it to the campaign’s CRM. 

According to Zutrau, the benefits of Manychat are clear. It lessens the burden on campaign staffers to respond to Instagram DMs, while allowing them to turn their online engagement into more concrete action. At the same time, she says, it feels less invasive to users, because it relies on them taking some sort of action, whether it’s posting a comment, tagging the campaign’s account or sending a DM. 

“I think chatbots need another look, but so does the entire political fundraising ecosystem,” Zutrau said. “And what I found very cool and refreshing about working with ManyHat is that, because Meta has its own spam filters and won’t just let you spam people you don’t know, the interaction with ManyHat has to be more two-way.”

In other words, she said, the chatbot isn’t “bugging people because we bought their number or email from a data vendor. You messaged us, so we’re responding to you.”

There’s also an algorithmic benefit to using Manychat, Zutrau said. Instagram downranks accounts in its algorithm when they direct users to content outside of Instagram. With Manychat, users never leave the app. In turn, Zutrau said, “you’re getting people to both engage with your content and not leave the app.”

In the two months that Mamdani’s campaign used the Manychat feature, the chatbot sent over 77,000 messages and drove more than 20,000 clicks from Instagram DMs, according to Zutrau. The feature that collected users’ email addresses collected over 3,000 emails in the few weeks that it ran.

What’s more, the strategy cost the campaign just $318 – just over 3 cents per acquisition, according to Zutrau’s estimate.

Of course, she added, there’s a trade off in using Manychat. At a time when many voters and donors are feeling burnt out from campaign communications, the chatbot still has the potential to feel impersonal. Nevertheless, she said, it still helped Mamdani’s campaign engage with users that might have otherwise fell by the wayside.

“Do you seem a little robotic and spammy? Of course, you seem a little robotic and spammy. You are using a robot,” Zutrau said. “But also, is that worth missing out on all the messages and clickthroughs that you could be getting? Because this campaign simply could not have manually responded to 77,000 messages.”