The Use Case
Organization: Political movement
Location: Portugal
Cause: Run my movement and win elections
Scale of use: National level
Number of volunteers: Over 5.000
Numbers of phone calls: More than 97.000
Main Goal: Mobilizing voters before the election
Favourite features: Mobile App, Phonebanking & political CRM
The Context
In November 2021, the president of Portugal announced the date for the upcoming legislative elections. The election will be held on 30 January 2022, leaving parties only a few months of preparation.
For the leading party, like the rest of the parties engaged, entering this legislative election was a difficult challenge to face. With only two months to prepare, they sought help and decide to take the challenge of digitalising their party.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge: time. They only have a few weeks to prepare and mobilize for election day. That is why they choose a digital tool to help increase efficiency, productivity, structure the campaign and the volunteers operations.
Bringing technology to the party and changing the way they do campaigning is a big challenge for them as “campaigning in Portugal is still very old school, not at all the American way”.
“Before using Qomon, the party lacked digital organization between its volunteers: they used to SMS them to organize their actions.”
The Quote
The reason they choose to use Qomon, is because they were looking for new tools to help mobilize and run their movement, and were especially interested in using a mobile app for the volunteers.
“We wanted to find new tools that would create an entire ecosystem with emails, texting and managing the database that we already had. And Qomon fit that really well, especially with the mobile app, which was a feature we were looking for but we never had.”
The Key Features
The main focus during election period is to mobilize the party’s supporters before the election (GOTV). They use the phone banking/calling action to galvanize their supporters at the beginning of the campaign but also asses the level of support they have.
They also use surveys combined with automatic emails to understand how people are feeling about their action and to know which area they have to prioritize in order to convince undecided voters.
They also work with the mobile app for internal organization.
“To be able to speak to our volunteers on a daily basis, whether it is through push notifications on the app, or by assigning them actions is really helpful”.
And for relational organizing: “we also make use of the app to share documents, images, videos with our volunteers which makes it easier for them to share it with people they know.“
Finally, they explain that phone banking with Qomon is useful when the candidate went on a campaign trail around the country to attend different events two weeks prior to the election.
“With the geolocalised contacts we have in our Qomon CRM and the mapping feature, we are able to target their calls, and mobilize additional people for the local events.”
The Key Results
Phone banking is their biggest operation with almost 600 volunteers using the mobile app to make calls on a daily basis. They carry out more than 97.000 calls so far.
And even if volunteering in Portugal is not common practice, they manage to gather more than 5.000 volunteers, which is defined as the biggest political volunteering system ever carried in the country.
These results exceed expectations and show how much when you provide the right tools to your volunteers, they can do a lot!
