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The news is starting to get filled with talk of the next U.S. presidential campaign as candidates begin to announce their intentions to run.

One candidate already announced is Hillary Clinton, which brings to mind her last run for the presidency in 2008 when she lost to now-president Barack Obama.

While there were many reasons for her nomination loss in 2008, one was President Obama’s superior campaign organization; Obama’s campaign in 2008 was firing on all cylinders, and his ability to rally supporters was second to none.

Rallying supporters is a key component of any political campaign, presidential or otherwise, and auto dialer technology can play an important role in connecting with voters.

Auto dialers help volunteers reach voters by phone far more easily than when handed a calling list and asked to manually dial, because auto dialers eliminate the time-consuming task of wading through wrong numbers and unanswered calls. With an auto dialer, volunteers instead can spend their time actually talking with voters because auto dial software only connects volunteers with calls when they connect to a live person.

Another advantage of auto dialer technology is that it can help political calling campaigns avoid regulatory issues such as calling at inappropriate times of the day, an issue when it comes to volunteers who can be prone to making mistakes due to inexperience.

Auto dialers can be configured to keep a steady pace through predictive dialing that gauges the appropriate volume of calling so there is never an idle agent, or set up in preview mode to allow a level of manual intervention so volunteers can write notes after a call before accepting a new call.

Smart political campaigns also can use auto dialers for recorded political messages, canvassing electorate calling lists with candidate information. These systems can even be configured to start with a recorded message but then collect data from the voter or transfer the call to a live agent in the middle of a recorded message.

Campaigns with modest infrastructure and funding can also leverage auto dialers, not just big money campaigns with deep pockets. Auto dial solutions such as that offered by Spitfire are affordable for smaller organizations, too, and additionally can be purchased as a cloud service that doesn’t require hardware or software purchase.

Political campaigns that are not fully utilizing auto dialer technology are putting themselves at a severe disadvantage, because almost surely their opponents are using the technology.