The challenge
Phone banks are only as good as the people making the calls. And for a union running national ballot campaigns across tens of thousands of members, getting enough activists to volunteer their time is a constant challenge. The biggest barrier isn't technical — it's motivational. If you're a branch rep in Glasgow and you're calling random members from a national list of 30,000, the work feels anonymous and disconnected. You don't know the people you're calling. They don't know you. The conversation is transactional at best.
On the receiving end, it's the same problem in reverse. A member who's never engaged much with their union gets a call from a stranger reading a script. They're polite, maybe, but they're not drawn in. There's no relationship, no local context, no reason to engage beyond the immediate ask.
"Before, when they were in a calling campaign with 30,000 people, it just felt quite anonymous for them — and you get less participation from the volunteers, and you probably get a slightly less receptive member on the end of the phone."
The old way
The union's previous phone banking system offered two options, both flawed. Either load every member into a single national phone book — fast to set up, but completely anonymous — or manually create separate campaigns for each branch, each with its own phone book and volunteer list. The second approach gave you local calls but required enormous manual effort: 50 branches meant 50 campaigns, each individually configured.
Neither approach matched the right caller to the right member in a way that felt natural. Activists who wanted to speak to their own branch members couldn't easily do so, and many simply opted out of phone banking altogether.
How they did it with Movement
Movement's volunteer matching feature lets the union run a single campaign while automatically routing calls so that activists are connected to members in their own branch. A rep from Glasgow calls Glasgow members. A NHS activist calls NHS colleagues. The matching is driven by data already held in the membership database — branch, employer group, location — so there's no manual assignment required.
"One thing that we're pleased to get set up was the volunteer matching. It's gone down really well with our local reps and activists because they want to talk to members in their branch. You start to build that relationship with your union rep."
The shift in volunteer engagement was immediate. Reps who had been reluctant to participate in anonymous national campaigns began signing up because they could see the direct connection to their own members. The calls themselves changed character too — instead of a stranger delivering a script, it was a colleague asking about the ballot and making themselves available for questions.
"When you get a phone call from Martin in your local office, he's asking about the ballot — it draws your awareness to it, but it also gives you the opportunity to ask a simple question. Like, am I allowed to bring a rep to this meeting? It gives them that tiny bit of engagement that perhaps they haven't got from an email or a text."
The union also found that the system was accessible to activists who aren't particularly tech-savvy. Many of the reps using Movement's phone banking don't work desk jobs and don't spend their days in software. Demo sessions got them up and running quickly, and the consistent feedback was that Movement is more user-friendly than previous systems.
"A lot of these activists aren't necessarily in software-driven desk jobs. So it's really good to see them getting on board. The feedback I had from them is it's more user-friendly than previous systems we've used."
"You could probably get more done with less personnel. But the big thing is — if you're an activist dealing with personal cases, and you're not particularly tech-savvy, you can get onto Movement for calling in a really straightforward way."
Features used: Phone banking · Volunteer matching · Audience segmentation
