On This Page

  1. On This Page
  2. About Phone Banking
  3. How you can help
  4. Our Plan
  5. What it’s like to phone bank
  6. Resources

About Phone Banking

Join us in phone banking 30,000 low-voting Wisconsin environmentalists and climate supporters! For the WI Climate Voter Campaign, we are using three methods to reach out to environmental voters: postcarding, climate conversations, and phone banking. The advantages of phone banking include:

  • Efficiency: Using dialing software, 20 phone bankers can dial 10,000 phone numbers in just one hour!
  • Accessibility: Volunteers can phone bank from home without revealing their own phone numbers.
  • Connection: We can have human conversations with other environmentalists and reach far beyond our own personal networks.
  • Repetition: We will be phoning many of the same people who also received a handwritten postcard from us. 

How you can help

  • Fall phone banking will start Thursday September 19th from 6 to 7:45 pm. We’ll phone every Thursday through October 31st. You don’t have to register. Thursday phoning zoom link.
  • Tuesday morning phone banking now available. Come at 10:00 if you need training, or jump right in at 10:30 if you don’t. Tuesday phoning zoom link.
  • Join the phone banking team to stay in the loop and get reminders.
  • Read the script and the FAQs and watch the script training video.
  • Recruit others to join us. We provide training at the start of every phone banking session, and they don’t even have to be from Wisconsin!

Our Plan

Our fall phone banking will focus exploring voters’ climate concerns as a motivation for voting in the general election. We are calling people who we expect to be concerned about the climate already but who always link that to voting, so this is a potentially powerful approach to increasing the turnout of environmentalists. We will use a script developed for us by an expert consultant in voter engagement, deep canvassing, and voter mobilization with a focus on hard-to-reach communities. 

To phone bank you need a laptop and cell phone. You’ll join a zoom meeting where you will get the code and instructions to connect to our autodialer called Hubdialer. Hubdialer does all the phoning, and the people you call don’t see your personal phone number ever. The script is displayed on your laptop and the system guides you through it, though you will want to print out the FAQs section. At the beginning of each session you get training on the script and how to use the system. Soon you’ll be ready to go!

What it’s like to phone bank

Here’s what Wisconsin CCL intern Jun Gesteland says about why he likes phone banking: 

“Today’s digital society has made it harder to find real human interaction, and the pandemic further isolated us in our own digital worlds. Phone banking allows us to reach out to people with our real voice—not with robocalls or automated emails. I think there is something special about a real human encouraging you to vote that a robot cannot provide. 

I also love the sense of community with phone banking. My favorite part of phone banking is the debrief at the end of each session, when phone bankers share stories about their calls. Sometimes a phone banker will talk about a fulfilling conversation they had with somebody. Other times a phone banker will share that they had a tough session, and we’ll give them encouragement. The debriefs remind me that I am not alone in climate advocacy and that no matter how many hang-ups I receive, and no matter how small my personal successes may seem, together, we can make real change.”

Resources