Thomas Peters on Everything About Peer-to-Peer Texting

Our Founder and CEO Thomas Peters was a guest on the Social Media and Politics podcast where he talked to Michael Bosseta about how RumbleUp harnesses supporters attention with personal one-on-one text messages.

As Thomas explains, we built RumbleUp using our already existing uCampaign platform. It seamlessly integrates into the already existing ecosystem and infrastructure of our uCampaign apps, so we were able to pull some of the key elements into RumbleUp.

One such element is the gamification engine that drives uCampaign supporters to take action. This allows campaigns to track and see which of their volunteers are sending the most messages and incentivize their volunteer agents to send more. We were also able to reuse and refine our backend portal where clients go to setup their messages, review conversations and manage their entire campaign.

There is an increasing amount of hype around peer-to-peer texting this election cycle, and as Bossetta points out, it is really an old technology that has taken a long time for political campaigns to start using. Bossetta:

“It’s a medium that really hasn’t been exploited to its full potential by political campaigns, and that’s somewhat surprising because 90% of text messages are opened in the first three minutes and 99% actually get read.”

The main reason it has taken so long to catch on is because of the legal provisions that prohibit robo or mass-blast texting people without their prior consent to receive texts. This all changed with the realization that if these texts are sent out one at a time by a real person, they are not considered robo-texts and can therefore be sent to people without their prior opt-in. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities and its effectiveness was first used at scale by Bernie Sanders in 2015 when his campaign used the technology to text millions of young voters. Thomas comments on the transition to the new technology:

“Peer-to-peer is different in that you have to outsource it to lots and lots of people using their own human thumbs or clicking a mouse [to send].”

With RumbleUp, every text is sent by a real person and every response is part of a real one-on-one conversation with someone who is part of the campaign. This is not only good for the group doing the outreach, but also for the recipients. It gives them direct access to the campaign and allows them to get answers to any questions they have as well as a resource to find out more information.

Since P2P text messages must be sent by a real person, it means that campaigns need to crowdsource the sending. This is where our app comes in. After a campaign writes up a message, all their volunteers need to do is download the RumbleUp app, join the campaign, and start sending. One volunteer agent can send 2,500 messages/hour using our app, so it does not require a large team to scale quickly. Thomas points out:

“If you have a team of 40 people, you can send 100,000 messages an hour. That’s the kind of scale a big campaign needs to reach if they want to get their message across.”

One of the main reasons why peer-to-peer texting is so much better than mass-blast robo texts, and our favorite thing about it, are the quality conversations you are able to have with people.

Instead of a cold impersonal message reminding people to go out and vote, we always tell our clients to treat people like people. This means addressing recipients by their name and having the agent sending the message introduce themselves and the campaign or organization they are with. They can then engage them in a conversation and let them know that their opinion matters.

“The magic happens when they realize that it really is another person on the other end of the conversation who wants to talk to them about whatever the issue is.” -Thomas Peters

P2P texting is excellent for getting a message out to any audience. For political campaigns in particular, it is the perfect tool to get out the vote on election day, get people to come out to events, educate them on a candidates platform, request absentee ballots, raise money, recruit volunteers, etc. For any type of message, Thomas explains how:

“Nothing compares to the visibility of text messaging.”

People use their phones for everything and texting is the easiest way to talk to someone, so it only makes sense that the best way to get your message across is by texting them.

Listen to the full podcast bellow or visit Social Media and Politics. 

Also watch: 

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Texting Explained - Meet RumbleUp