Phone Banking Team: About Us and Our Plan!

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

Join the phone banking team to stay in the loop
Practice with CCL National’s phoning or with Environmental Voter Project if you can
Become a phone banking host by learning to run our phone banking sessions
Participate in our phone banking sessions in the fall (we will train you if you aren’t already)
Recruit others to join us–we need about 60 phone bankers, and they don’t even have to all be from Wisconsin!

Our Plan

Phone banking is most effective shortly before elections, so we are preparing to phone bank before the August 13th primary and the November 5th national general election. 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.

Our plan is to phone bank 3 times a week for the 3 weeks before each election. We will need 60 phone bankers working in teams of 20, with each team phoning once a week for the 3 weeks. We also need team leaders and phone banking hosts.

To get ready, we host a “Wisconsin Night” every few weeks, where we encourage Wisconsin volunteers to participate in CCL national phone banking sessions done jointly with the Environmental Voter Project on Wednesday nights. No experience is required–we will train you. This is also training for our hosts and team leaders–so by coming, you support our volunteer leaders too! (Note: If Wednesday nights don’t work for you, Environmental Voter Project offers many more phone banking sessions you can sign up for here!)

Schedule

April~July: Training and practice
July 17th: Script training on our custom-designed script for Wisconsin
July 22nd-August 11th: Sign up to phone bank for the August 13th Wisconsin primary (exact dates TBD)
October: Sign up to phone bank for the November election (exact dates TBD)

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.”