Recently, I had a chance to visit with Russ Walker, former managing director of Freedom Works for America, a Super PAC.  Russ was the director during three election cyles from 2010 to 2014,  Freedom Works supported candidates for the Congress and US Senate who were free market, smaller government advocates. During our conversation, Russ was able to recount some of the successes he had with Freedom Works and how Action Solutions was able to partner with him to achieve those successes.  “When we ran a Campaign in Utah, it wasn’t easy to get volunteers as we didn’t have a large pool of names or a volunteer base, so our email list was not very large.  When we began a campaign, part of it was getting people out to meetings… We would use the services of Action Solutions to autodial invites to people… and it increased our turnout significantly.  I don’t think we had a meeting where we didn’t have 100 people show up,sometimes we had several hundred show up, When a typical email went out or if we just set up a meeting with an email invite, our turnout was always less then the number of people who had RSVP’d for the event.. So we learned quickly that we needed to augment our email invites with what I see to be the least expensive means to get people out to events and meetings, which is through autodial invitations…and we were very successful in getting people out to these events which then, once they were out, we could train them and activate them and get them involved in our campaign.”When I asked about the meeting attendees and who they were, here’s what Russ said: “it was a good mix, we’d always have some of the people we had seen before, the most active people and that’s a small group. But often we got people out who hadn’t been active for a while and sometimes we got people out who had never been active before at all, and essentially weren’t on any list… and then we asked them to sign up and invited them to become part of our campaign.

I asked Russ if he had an idea of what percentage of his attendees were “new bodies?”  Russ responded “Sure, 20%, maybe up to 50%, and like in the case of Utah, we needed a lot of people to show up to the caucus. We would train people about what to do at the meetings. We needed a new group of people to show up and we were able to get a whole lot of new people involved.”

Next week, we’ll have more of my conversation with Russ Walker.

Call or email Action Solutions today. If you have any questions or would like more information regarding options available for communications campaigns, contact Jeff Kubler at 888-761-3003, or at jeff@actionsolutions.net.