12 Steps to Avoid Common & Costly Mistakes in Your Texting Campaigns

Save money, build trust and drive real engagement with every message.

We have seen how thousands of organizations now integrate peer-to-peer (P2P) texting into their strategy to expand their reach. In today’s political landscape, texting stands out as one of the most effective channels for connecting with voters, donors and supporters in real time. It delivers unmatched engagement rates, instant feedback loops and highly personalized outreach at scale compared to similar channels of remote outreach.

But like any outreach effort, texting can quickly become costly and even harm your reputation if you skip the fundamentals.

Based on our experience supporting over 3,500 organizations, we have identified the most common and costly mistakes campaigns make - and how to avoid them. This guide walks you through 12 key steps to take before, during and after your texting campaigns to protect your budget, credibility, and results.

Before Your Campaign Starts

⚠️ Common Mistakes: Skipping the fundamentals, like procrastinating on 10DLC registration, clear objectives or data hygiene, can lead to blocked messages, wasted budget and lost credibility.

Before sending a single text, make sure to cover these basics:

1. Tackle 10DLC registration early
   Many campaigns that have texted in the past may not realize that they need to allocate time for 10DLC registration before they can start texting - we are no longer in a turnkey texting environment. Cell phone carriers fully enforce 10DLC as the standard for political, nonprofit, and business texting.  Registration is not optional. Without it, messages are almost guaranteed to be blocked or flagged, leading to wasted spend and lower engagement. Our 10DLC Registration Guide walks you through everything you need to get registered quickly and correctly, with expert support and no hidden fees.
   
   
2. Define your objective
   Are you trying to mobilize voters, raise funds, or collect survey data? Success looks different for each goal. Clarify your primary objective early so your team knows exactly what to measure and optimize. If fundraising is your goal, here are 3 fundraising peer-to-peer texting examples proven to work that can help guide your approach
   
   
3. Check your data quality
   In general, poor data drives up costs, lowers delivery rates and damages your campaign’s credibility with carriers and recipients. While advanced P2P texting platforms like ours will automatically remove duplicates, landlines and anyone who has opted out, more work is needed to send the kind of highly-targeted texts that move people to action. Clean data is critical if you want to send texts containing custom placeholder fields (think “Hi @first_name@, find your polling location is for @zipcode@ by...”), which are proven to be highly effective if the data is correct, but very off-putting to recipients and damaging to delivery rates if it is wrong.   💡Our team can easily append your data for you with great rates through one of our highly reputable data partners.
   
   

Building Your Campaign

⚠️ Common Mistakes: Rushing setup without reviewing scripts, checking media, segmenting audiences or planning strategy, causing errors that damage trust and frustrate voters.

As you set up your campaign, focus on structure and quality control to avoid costly errors: 

4. Review your scripts
   If you are using AI to generate messages, such as ChatGPT or our native AI Assist message writing assistant, be sure to double-check for accuracy, voice and tone. Then, always use the final approved version of your message. Typos and outdated content are visible to thousands of voters.💡Our in-house short link tool lets you shorten and brand URLs, boosting both click-through rates and trust.
   
   
5. Check media formatting
   If you plan to send MMS or video texts, confirm that files load fast and display well on mobile settings. Nothing is more frustrating than going back and forth with your designers when your test texts are not coming out just right. 💡 Our system has safeguards in place to make sure they stay within optimal carrier file size limits.
   
   
6. Segment your audience
   Make sure your message only goes to the right voters, districts, or interest groups. Incorrect targeting wastes budget and increases complaints.💡Our Smart Segmentation features enable you to create custom groups with ease, making precision targeting simple.
   
   
7. Plan wisely
   Many campaigns complain that they are not seeing the results they want from texting after treating it as a one-sided mass blast channel. For example, simply asking for money on a random Thursday or urging someone to get to the polls on election day does not yield good results. Why? No thought was paid to planning for building name recognition (or a relationship) with voters, timing to avoid busy traffic moments, or capturing an opportunity arising from the news/events in the community. 💡New to texting strategy? Our team has strategists on standby to help you build a smart texting plan.

Once Texts Are Rolling Out

⚠️ Common Mistakes: Failing to monitor the delivery and performance of your text projects and leaving genuine replies unanswered.

While your texts are going out, stay alert to catch issues early and keep engagement strong:

8. Monitor delivery rates & performance
   Our support team actively monitors all outgoing message traffic to identify and resolve issues promptly, ensuring reliable delivery performance. However, it is essential to review delivery, response rates and click-through rates after the text project finishes to determine what resonated with your audience and what did not before sending your next project. This is valuable data that many campaigns leave on the table in the business of the season.
   
   
9. Respond in real time
   Engage quickly with real replies and suppress spam or abusive responses to maintain credibility. 💡 Our Tap-then-Send feature makes responding instant and straightforward, helping texters manage conversations efficiently at scale.
   
   

After the Campaign Ends

⚠️ Common Mistake: Wrapping up without analyzing overall performance or documenting lessons learned could mean losing valuable insights that could make the next cycle more effective.

Once the campaign wraps, turn your results into insights:

10. Report on your primary objective
    Knowing the outcome of your efforts and tracing it to your various outreach efforts will help you plan budgets for your next campaign. For GOTV efforts, measure turnout or ballot returns within your targeted universe based on click-through rate across email, text, CTV, digital, etc. For fundraising, track dollars raised directly from texting efforts vs direct mail. You get the picture - it is hard work, but is what separates average campaigns from stellar ones.
    
    
11. Analyze your best and worst messages
    Identify which scripts, media, or calls to action drove the strongest engagement and which ones underperformed.💡Our Full-View Dashboard includes detailed information about each client’s messaging progress and topline stats for all texting projects, making it simple to compare results and spot patterns.
    
    
12. Document lessons learned
    Capture what worked and what did not to start your next campaign stronger. Create clear recommendations for your team: what to repeat, what to adjust, and what to stop.

As we saw in 2024, the campaigns that consistently refined their strategy around what actually worked, whether it was 1-to-1 engagement, fundraising sequences, or rapid GOTV messaging were the ones that broke through and won.

Bottom Line

P2P texting is one of the most powerful tools in modern campaigning when tackled with discipline and care. Clear compliance, strong data hygiene, structured processes and active monitoring are the difference between wasted spend and vote-winning outreach.

By following these 12 steps, your team will not only avoid costly mistakes but also build a texting program designed for measurable success every cycle.

And with us as your partner, you get more than a platform: you get expert support, built-in compliance safeguards and tools purpose-built for political professionals, nonprofits and organizations that need reliable results.

Avoid the common mistakes. Win with confidence. Text with us🥊