I serve as a campaign chairman and general consultant for our clients at Team Blue NC, which means I develop and implement the strategies for fundraising, voter education, and grassroots operations of the campaigns we tackle. Our most recent candidate was a Democrat running in a historically red city where 70% of the county voted Republican the year prior—so we knew our work was cut out for us. Democrats typically underperform in the county’s municipal elections, too. To get our candidate across the finish line, we had to motivate people to vote while also pulling 20% of voters away from the Republicans.
Team Blue NC’s co-founder, Becky McBride, pushed me to try texting because she had success with it in the 2020 elections. People already knew who our candidate was, so our strategy became activating base Democratic voters and undecided voters with text messages. Our goals were to show them where and how to vote—and we knew we could do that because the text messages would get delivered and read.
Becky and I chose Text Request because their customer support was so invested in making sure we had everything we needed. James, the representative I worked with the most, was absolutely fantastic and so patient. He walked us through every step of getting registered with Campaign Verify and was there whenever we needed assistance. We started using Text Request four weeks before Election Day, but we were still able to pick it up and make an impact immediately with help from James.
Our team went charging in and sent about three Peer to Peer text campaigns every week. All I had to do was create the campaigns, and then Becky could go in and hit the send button. She would then give me a comprehensive report generated by Text Request on how many messages were sent and how many people opted out so we could remove them. Our volunteers' morale dramatically increased when they didn’t have to make calls anymore. They were freed up to do door knocking, staff polls, and assist with other GOTV efforts.
We had a target universe of around 4,000 voters, and we were able to successfully contact most of them anywhere from four to six times before Election Day using Text Request. We would not have been able to contact that many voters that many times through phone calls.
Our campaign was by far the most active in the county. In fact, we were so active and effective, the local party was looking to us to educate people on how and when to vote. Text Request helped solidify our candidate as a leader and someone who knew how to get information out. The results spoke for themselves. In a three-way race, we won more than 46% of the vote.
