Everything You Need to Know About Voice Broadcast

by Mac Wright, Jr., Win Your Race, Inc.

Six Reasons to use Personalized Political Voice Broadcast in 2003:

1. Voice broadcast will produce more votes dollar-for-dollar than any other medium.  The cost of direct mail is climbing and the effectiveness is sinking. 
2. Voice broadcast is the only medium that is both targeted and focused.   TV and radio are neither – They are shotgun in their approach.  You spend money to deliver your message to your opponent’s advocates as well as to people who are not registered to vote.  Direct mail can be targeted to your advocates but you cannot make them read it.  Well less than ten percent of the voters who read mail read it.  Almost 100% of the voters who receive your message from us on their answering machine listen to it in a focused manner.
3. The cost per effective message is the lowest of all mediums.  When you factor in the cost the mail pieces that are not read, the cost for each piece of direct mail that is read can surpass $5.00.  TV and radio go off the scale because they are shotgun mediums.   Personalized Political Voice Broadcast by comparison can be under $0.15 cents for a delivered and listened to message.  And that is for a message delivered to an answering machine and not a live pick-up.
4. The ability to deliver a very personal message directly to the voter in an auditory manner.  It is a fact that the spoken word is remembered four to five times as long as the written word.  You cannot give voters a vision of what you can and want to do for the district unless they can hear your voice.  You can express a level of warmth, concern and sincerity with voice broadcast that no other medium can equal and one that can turn the undecided voter to one that will vote for you.
5. Voice broadcast alone can win an election.   No other medium can make that claim.  In an odd year when most elections are local in nature, your opponent will probably not be doing voice broadcast.  This will give you a distinct advantage when you do.  A series of three to five broadcasts to answering machines will give the candidate a close election every time.  And, you can do five broadcasts to answering machines for less than the cost on one direct mail campaign to the same list.  Intelligent voice broadcast will result in a turnaround of as many as twenty percent.  Councilman Rick Shiver of Daytona Beach was down by 19% on Thursday, did a “Wild Weekend” series of calls and won on Tuesday by 33 votes over a two-term incumbent.
6. Overall cost per vote.   When the final tally of votes received divided into total campaign expenditures is made, the campaign that chose voice broadcast will always produce the lowest cost.  In any business small or large, the company that can produce units at the lowest cost prevails.

SUMMARY:   You have to grab the imagination of the voter and do so in a cost-effective manner.  Personalized Political Voice Broadcast is the only way to do this.

How to pick a voice broadcast company:

1. Call the references.
2. Talk with the voice broadcast company personnel and determine if they are just technical people or if they also have a grasp of strategy and issues.
3. Ask to visit the broadcast facility.   You don’t really go, but it is a good way to flush out the pretenders.  If the sales person hedges, this is a certain sign that you are buying from a reseller that has little or no control over critical decisions relating to your broadcasts.
4. Do not do a “Combo” or hybrid type strategy whereby you deliver a message to either a machine or a live pick-up whichever happens first.  The only effective messages are those delivered to answering machines.  Messages delivered to live pick-ups are irritating and have no value.  If a voice broadcast company tries to convince you that combo calls are the way to go, what they are saying is that they cannot do machine-only calls because they have not spent the money on the necessary programming or their equipment is simplistic. 
5. High capacity is a necessity.  Companies that cannot do at least 1,000,000 calls a day or more can have one or more of the following results:  (1) Calls that drag on all day sometimes finishing at the legal cutoff of 9 PM (8:30 PM in some states) or dialing campaigns that do not finish at all. (2)  Truncated answering machine messages.  The voters will only received half of your message.  (3)  Calls delivered at 3 AM. 
6. Fiber Optic is a necessity.  For best voice clarity, your calls must go through a center that only uses fiber optic cable.  NEVER go with a company that uses “Voice over IP” or Internet delivered calls.  A good indication that this is the technology being used is the price.  If the pricing is too good to be true, then it is either Internet dialing or the company is going to collect for three or four calls and only do one. 
7. Reporting is a must.  Related to the “One for threes” above, you must receive a report very soon after dialing.  Ask to see samples of reports for other candidates.

SUMMARY:   All companies will tell you what you want to hear when you quiz them.  Call the references.