Indivisible reaches inactive donors and engages volunteers with TextOut

Background

Indivisible is a grassroots organization that works to resist the GOP agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies.

The Indivisible movement is a progressive grassroots movement of millions of activists nationwide. With a combination of local groups and a national team, Indivisible fights to defeat the rightwing takeover of the American government and build an inclusive democracy.

Indivisible Action, the organization’s PAC, has worked with Civitech’s SMS/MMS platform, TextOut, since 2019 on various outreach activities to voters and activists.

Challenge

In 2019, the team at Indivisible Action was looking for a tool to communicate with its members easily and mobilize them into action. The group also wanted a convenient way to meet their external and internal goals by reaching activists, donors, and volunteers.

Solution

By partnering with TextOut, Indivisible could add another tactic to help meet the organization’s electoral, legislative, activist, and internal goals. As a grassroots organization, Indivisible had several goals: help mobilize voters to elect progressive representatives, pass legislation and advocate for fair government, engage volunteers, and fundraise for the organization.

TextOut is a flexible tool that is an ideal fit for each goal. TextOut’s features make it easy to use for all types of programs.

We’ll share all the types of programs that Indivisible ran with TextOut, and we’ve broken them down by electoral wins, legislative victories, and meeting organizational goals. This success story focuses on fundraising and volunteer goals, but check out our other success stories with Indivisible focused on legislative wins and electoral victories.

Programs

Indivisible uses TextOut to engage inactive donor audience in 2023

Challenge: Donors are extremely valuable to nonprofit organizations, yet when donors drop off from regular giving, the organization can miss out on essential funding to run programs. Indivisible had a group of donors who hadn’t given to the organization in a year. 

Solution: Indivisible wanted to re-engage the inactive donor audience to raise money that could power future programs. 

Program: Using the TextOut integration with ActBlue, Indivisible contacted 10,000 people who had donated in the past but had yet to donate in the past year. Indivisible’s fundraising campaign highlighted abortion rights in Arizona. The organization created a specific ask for donations: to fund the electoral work to get abortion rights on the ballot in the state and hire a full-time organizer. The key was to keep the message direct and have a specific ask. 

Results: Indivisible sent more than 16,000 texts to their audience of 10,000 people and raised $4,000 with the campaign. Plus, the organization re-engaged many previous donors who had dropped off the radar. 

Engaging Indivisible volunteers with texting campaigns

Challenge: Volunteers are the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations, but it can be tough to keep people engaged in volunteer activities. Indivisible wanted a way to keep their volunteer base excited and motivated. 

Solution: Indivisible found that empowering volunteers to do texting programs helped increase engagement and satisfaction with the organization.

Program: Indivisible used TextOut to run mobilization programs, and the organization’s volunteer base acts as the texting group. The outreach efforts successfully engaged volunteers who value democracy and progressive values, and Indivisible harnessed the volunteers’ energy to reach voters. 

TextOut’s features make it easy for volunteers to manage replies. With TextOut’s PowerSend feature, staff members can send out the initial texts in large batches, and then volunteers can request replies to text, saving staff and volunteer time. 

TextOut’s data features also allow volunteers to respond to conversations without worrying about manually recording data tags. Then, the organization can export files from the programs and analyze the data based on the automatic tags. 

Results: The organization works with 2,800 volunteers regularly to run their texting programs, which helps increase volunteer satisfaction and maintain long-term relationships between Indivisible and the volunteer base. 

By the Numbers

• For a recent fundraising campaign, Indivisible sent more than 16,000 texts to their audience of 10,000 people and raised $4,000

• Indivisible has engaged 2,800 regular volunteers on texting programs

• Indivisible has sent more than 36 million texts using TextOut since 2019, which includes 392 individual programs

“There's really no other texting platform besides TextOut that would enable us to do the kind of texting we want to do, with dynamic scripts, experimental texting approaches, and volunteer moderation and local group texting that is truly peer-to-peer. TextOut helped us to navigate the many changes of 10DLC registration and is always improving the platform even more with features like power sending. All of it to have rich conversations with voters and our own members that aren't possible any other way! TextOut was essential to moving our voter contact program entirely digital during COVID and helped us win a 2021 Reed Award for Best No-Contact Field Program."