Peer-to-peer calling for campaigns

THE BRIEF

Australian campaigns had no serious peer-to-peer dialler of their own. So porting one became part of the job: we brought Scale to Win – the platform US progressive campaigns run their phone banks on – to Australia, and ran it across eight electorates.

Peer-to-peer calling is the difference between a volunteer leaving voicemails and a volunteer having conversations. The tooling for it existed, but not here – so the port was a deliverable of this project, not something that happened before it. A platform built for American campaigns assumes American numbers, American carriers and American hours; getting it dialling Australian voters, for Australian campaigns, on Australian time was the work that had to land before a single volunteer could pick up a phone.

Then we handed it over rather than operating it: organisers were trained to stand up and run their own phone banks, so the capability stayed with the campaigns instead of with us.

Eight electorates ran on it, and volunteers made more than 60,000 calls – real conversations about the climate stakes of the election, from wherever the volunteer happened to be. Our leverage was never building another dialler; it was porting a proven one into a country that did not have it, putting it in the hands of campaigns that could not otherwise have reached that scale, and wiring what it learned back into their data.