Data and analysis on political texting: open rates, reply rates, deliverability, cost, and what actually moves a race.
Texting is cost-effective, until it isn't. Here's how campaigns quietly waste money on texting, from filtered sends to bought lists to over-texting, and how to spend where it actually produces votes and dollars.
Young voters are text-native, but reaching them takes more than a text. Here's what the evidence suggests about texting youth voters, why relationship and relevance beat channel-native assumptions, and how to turn out a low-propensity group.
Texting and phone banking both use volunteers to reach voters one at a time, but they perform very differently. Here's how the two compare on reach, response, depth, and volunteer effort, and why most programs now lead with text.
Texting is most powerful as part of an integrated program, not a standalone channel. Here's how text works alongside mail, email, calls, digital ads, and the doors, and why coordination beats any single channel.
Some texting numbers look impressive and tell you nothing. Here's which texting metrics are vanity metrics, which ones actually measure a program's health, and how to avoid optimizing for the wrong thing.
Political texting went from an improvised tactic to a specialized discipline with its own tools, roles, and standards. Here's how it professionalized, what changed, and why the bar for running a serious program keeps rising.
Great texting programs aren't built on secret tricks, they share a handful of disciplines. Here's what the best political texting programs consistently do, from earned lists to relentless relevance, and why the fundamentals win.
A text a voter forwards or shares reaches people your list never could. Here's how the word-of-mouth effect works in texting, why relational and shareable messages amplify, and how to encourage it.
First-time voters want to participate but often don't know how. Here's what the evidence suggests about reaching first-time voters by text, why process help beats motivation, and how to convert willingness into an actual vote.
Cost per vote is the metric that lets you compare texting to other channels honestly. Here's how to think about texting's cost per vote, why it's usually favorable, and the traps that inflate it.
The texting mistakes that hurt losing campaigns are consistent and avoidable. Here's what they get wrong, from treating volume as strategy to skipping the fundamentals, and what to do instead.
There's no fixed percentage for a texting budget, it depends on the race, the goal, and the return. Here's how to think about allocating budget to texting, what drives the number up or down, and why cost per outcome matters more than a rule of thumb.