Groundgame

A multi-channel communications pipeline for activism and political organizing.

Prototyping

Role
Product Designer (UX/UI)

Company
Majority Labs

Year
2021

The Problem


Grassroots organizing is the powerhouse of American politics. Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) strategies have been refined to a science of proven best practices; if you can communicate with a group of people across multiple channels (email, text, and phone) in a strategic order from least to most expensive (i.e. emails are cheap, calls are expensive) you will maximize the impact your organization has at the polls. These strategies are backed up by an increasing number of independent studies.

Despite this, the technology is not as straight-forward. Organizers coordinate between suites of communications tools that do not integrate with each other, constantly exporting and importing lists from sales-oriented CRM tools, often relying on massive Google sheets. Training anyone to use this system pulls precious resources from a campaign and managing these lists is a full time job. Organizations can deal with lists of hundreds of thousands of contacts and spend millions of dollars on SMS carrier charges alone.

The Hypothesis


A streamlined, multi-channel communications tool designed for specifically political organizers will send more contacts down the happy path, saving campaigns resources and maximizing their impact by facilitating best-practices with ease.

The Solution


We designed a 3-in-1 pipeline tool that combined Email, SMS, and Phone banking tools to maximize the effect of campaigns. A campaign is created using a simple flowchart interface that called journeys. An organizer could create a journey by choosing which communication channel is used, in what order, and what communication contacts will receive next depending on their answer. A certain period of no response, an organizer could also automate a nudge. To sort contacts within a journey, messages could be coded to include yes or no answers, with a few shades in between.

A list of contacts is added at the top of the funnel. Depending on the nature of their answers, they descend through the pre-designed campaign like discs in the game of Plinko. Contacts who take the “happy path” would make it all the way to the bottom, and a list would be generated that could allow an organizer to filter the contacts involved in the campaign by the nature of their answers along the way and export new tags for their existing lists.

The campaign manager would simply need to make sure organizers were on hand to answer text messages and make phone calls; the queue for both are completely automated and streamlined so that a volunteer with little context would simply have to press “next.”

Core Features

  • Customizable and pre-built communications pipelines using binary “if/then” responses

  • Phone banking interface

  • SMS chat interface

  • Bulk emailer

  • Simplified CRM database with tagging and filtering

  • Additional option to “nudge” a contact after a given time inactive