The 2008 U.S. Presidential election is less than a week away, and campaign teams are running out of time to contact constituents, encouraging them to vote. To speed up this process, organizations and candidates alike are turning to technologies like voice broadcast that can distribute information quickly and efficiently to a mass audience, or track the results of particular initiatives..
For example, non-profit MoveOn.org Political Action is using a voice broadcast solution from CallFire to streamline the tracking of campaign calling activity. The organization has 4.2 million members, and needed a system that could efficiently track the success of volunteers helping out at local campaign offices.
CallFire, which specializes in “cloud telephony” solutions for virtual call centers, voice broadcast and VoiceXML (News - Alert) systems, offered just what MoveOn.org needed to be successful this election season. The organization knows from past experience that volunteers-run initiatives can quickly get bogged down if reporting systems are overly complex or time-consuming to use. CallFire’s solution solved this problem, streamlining the process of tacking success rates for calling campaigns.
The organization’s volunteers can now call in their results via a phone-based interactive voice response (IVR) system, hosted using CallFire’s VoiceXML-based platform. Unlike traditional phone bank data collection, reporting calling results via phone is much more efficient.
“It has been a big challenge for us to figure out how to track the efforts of our members around the country,” said Adam Ruben, MoveOn.org’s political director, in a statement. “When we have 10,000 volunteers who need to report in on the same day, CallFire's IVR system is a breakthrough solution for us. CallFire helped us get the system up and running in a week, and it has been very reliable. It just works, and we can concentrate on other things.”
In particular, MoveOn.org was impressed with the scalability and cost-effectiveness of CallFire’s solution. Billing is flexible using a pay-as-you-go structure, and the Asterisk (News - Alert) VoIP technology that the solution is built on gives MoveOn the freedom to set up “calling parties” at the most effective times. The platform can handle several thousand simultaneous phone calls.
Dinesh Ravishanker, co-founder and CEO of CallFire, said that the company’s solution offers two main value propositions: fully redundant infrastructure, and flexible application programming interfaces (APIs). This means organizations can use the platform to create and manage large call campaigns without having to make long-term financial commitments.
“Our solutions are an ideal fit for non-profits like MoveOn that have an extremely large virtual staff and need to move quickly,” Ravishanker said in a statement.
CallFire, a privately-held company, is based on California.
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Mae Kowalke is senior editor for TMCnet, covering VoIP, CRM, call center and wireless technologies. To read more of Mae's articles, please visit her columnist page. She also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Mae Kowalke