Congrats on putting it together so quickly!

It took me a while to figure out what it does and what I can do with it, and I'm still not totally clear, but that could be because I'm not familiar with phone banks.

I think it's time to show it to some potential customers and figure out what's keeping them from signing up and using it!

Great job!

You have picked a great market to build products for. Congrats! $$$

If you're looking for a new feature, I would suggest some type of offline mode. Many people have this image of a political phone bank being a room full of people on headsets with computer screens in front of them, reciting carefully-prepared statements. For centrally-run national campaigns, this is correct. But for more local ones - which make up the vast majority of campaigns, and the ones with the lowest barrier to entry - a campaign office is a vacant storefront in a mall, and a phone bank is eight people in some spare cubicles with old Nortel handsets. Find a way to make this software useful for them.

How? Maybe something like call sheets. I press the "Call Sheet" button, select that I want a sheet of 50 callers, and your software will generate a printed piece of paper with 50 names on it, with each name having the appropriate check-boxes next to them. I can then give that to a volunteer who will call the dial-in number, enter the PIN for that sheet, and your PBX will call though the names on the sheet they're given in the order listed, and they can check off the details. When they're done, they give it to a volunteer who does data entry about the results.

Want to get fancier? Make your call sheets optical-scan. Instead of handing the completed call sheet to a volunteer who does data entry, hand it to some guy with a scanner. The scanning volunteer places the call sheet in a standard $60 OfficeMax scanner, and presses the "Send PDF via Email" button on the scanner, and sends it to a custom email address you've supplied them with. Your service then scans the PDF, figures out how the volunteers have marked the sheets, and presents the results (and any ambiguities) to the volunteer who is doing data validation, as opposed to entry.

Two more (simpler) suggestions:

- The ways to respond to a call should be customizable, if they're not already. As opposed to just yes/no, I'd like my volunteers to be able to select a few checkboxes about each respondent (guesses at party ID, how committed they sound, possible follow-ups, etc.).

- Add some keyboard shortcuts. I know I said earlier that most phone banks aren't guys with headsets and laptops, but some are. For those keeners, may as well make it easy for them to do all their call categorization without having to keep mousing around.

Another interesting approach - and Obama's team did something like this - was to set up for distributed phone banking, taking advantage of people who have free evenings on their cell phones. A volunteer would dial into your system, get connected to someone to speak to, and then when the call finishes get kicked into an IVR system for categorization ("Press 1 for Democrat, press 2 for Republican, press 3 for Undecided" etc.). Once they've entered their IVR response, connect them to their next caller, and repeat until they hang up. You'd have to come up with some decent access control (to prevent opposition candidates from calling in and screwing with your voter lists), but it seems like you could probably do this whole module with some judicious use of Twillo (or whatever PBX you're now using as a back-end).

While I'm thinking about this, I would also reconsider your pricing model. There is nothing a campaign manager likes more than cost certainty, and right now your service doesn't have it. If I let a room full of volunteers at your service for four hours, I don't really know what it would cost my campaign, which would scare me. On the other hand, if you charged by the call I could say to myself "we want to do a call blitz tonight, so I'm going to budget out enough for 5,000 calls", pay that, and be safe knowing that no matter how productive my volunteers are, I'll be able to have a hard cap on how much I'm going to spend in a metric I'm used to using and can compare across mediums (engagement cost). Put another way, it's a hell of a lot easier to go to the finance committee/candidate and say "we're going to use this fancy new service to make 1,000 calls" as opposed to "we're going to use this fancy new service for 800 minutes, and I'm really not sure how many calls."

I had thought of a few different "offline" mode options. I'm not sure there is a market for printing call sheets and handing them to volunteers. Most campaigns are fine printing off excel pages and using that. Though it is worth more thought.

That call "tagging" is customizable by the campaign in the back end. As it is now though, I probably need to redo the buttons as many options would take up too much space.

Re: Distributed phone banking. That is the main target of my app. Having the volunteers call from home instead of having them come to the campaign office and work off of call sheets.

Pricing gets tricky. I am charged on a per minute basis and at this time I don't really have a good idea how long the average call would last. If they hit an answering machine it would be 1 minute, but if they have a good conversation with the voter it could be 5+ minutes. To charge on the per call level I'd be mostly taking a guess at this point. The per minute billing allows me to take most of the risk out of it.