Indivisible influences legislation and encourages civic engagement 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 legislative victories, but check out our other success stories with Indivisible focused on electoral wins and meeting fundraising and volunteer goals.

Programs

Engaging with Virginia voters on Confederate monument legislation in 2020

Challenge: In 2020, the Virginia legislature had an opportunity to pass a bill to allow cities and counties to remove Confederate statues and monuments.

Solution: Indivisible wanted to reach voters to inform them of the opportunity to contact legislators about the monuments bill, so the organization created a program where volunteers contacted Virginians using TextOut. 

Program: The organization sent a series of texts informing voters about the bill in the Virginia legislature and encouraged them to contact their legislators to support it. 

Results: Indivisible’s texts had an outstanding 18.2% response rate. Of those who responded, nearly 70% said they would call their representatives on the issue. The outreach was successful, as the Virginia House and the Senate passed the bill in fall 2020. The bill helped local communities take control of their public spaces and set the stage for future movements to remove symbols of past wrongs.

Helping encourage civic engagement for Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020

Challenge: With intense political focus on Trump’s impeachment in 2020, progressives knew that removing Trump from office was the best way to protect democracy.  Indivisible was founded in response to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, so holding him accountable for his corruption was important to the organization’s goals. 

Solution: Indivisible wanted to ensure U.S. Senators felt pressure from constituents to vote to convict in the impeachment trial. Indivisible decided to contact voters in key swing states via texting. 

Program: The organization ran texting programs with TextOut and encouraged voters to contact their Senators and ask them to convict Trump. 

Results: Indivisible sent 762,000 texts about impeachment to voters in 2020, which helped pressure certain Senators to vote to convict. While Trump was ultimately acquitted in three states where Indivisible targeted Senators (Colorado, Arizona, and Georgia), those seats flipped from Republican to Democratic control in the 2020 elections. 

By the Numbers

• Indivisible sent 762,000 texts about impeachment to voters in key swing states

• During Indivisible’s program for the Virginia bill about Confederate monuments, the texts had an outstanding 18.2% response rate. Of those who responded to the texts, nearly 70% said they would call their representatives on the issue

• 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."