Justin Oberman’s post on the Edwards campaign’s recently launched SMS fundraising campaign prompted a series of questions from fellow TechPresident contributor Colin Delany about the ability of other candidates to replicate Edwards success.   

In response to Colin's questions, I was contacted by Edwards' Deputy Director of New Media Amy Rubin. She provided responses to Colin's comments. I have assembled his questions, her responses, and my commentary into this virtual interview.

Colin suggested in his post that there may be a novelty factor that makes Edwards' campaign hard to repeat:

"Novelty. This was the first such message from the campaign; future ones may not be so well received ('Another damn message from John Edwards? Delete!')."

Amy recognizes the novelty concern, but indicated that the campaign has a long-term strategy to help sustain the program after the initial buzz calms down:

"To address this, we are focused on a long-term strategy to keep people interested in SMS messages from the campaign, as opposed to just blasting them as much as possible before the novelty wears off. This means applying some more traditional marketing theories like incentive and timeliness to keep our retention rates high. It also means developing medium-specific techniques that will keep people on their toes. In other words, there are many layers of “novelty” within mobile marketing and we’ve only just tapped the first layer.

Also, it’s important to remember that primary motivation for participants is not technological novelty, but the desire to support John Edwards and gain access to timely and relevant content. A perfect example of this was last week when we used a clip from Elizabeth Edwards’ call to Ann Coulter on Hardball. Part of the reason that our numbers nearly tripled last night was not because of technological novelty but because we provided people with engaging and timely content that has proven to be of interest to many of our supporters.”

I think Amy's response is on the right track. Overloading recipients with too many messages is clearly a bad idea, as is offering the "same 'ol, same 'ol" message strategy over and over again. In addition to Amy's comments, it would also make sense to segment the list and develop separate email calendars for each segment to avoid over-saturation of the whole list.

Further, though there is the potential for candidate overload once other candidates walk down this road, as Colin suggests, subscribers are self-selected and will 1) presumably only subscribe to candidates they support, giving them a vested interested in getting the messages and 2) they will inevitably unsubscribe from candidates that either abuse the privilege of sending them messages or that they no longer support. Thus, unsubscribers are likely to represent only those who were done contributing anyway.

Next Colin raised concerns about about selection bias:

"Selection Bias. At this point, only the most dedicated supporters are likely to give out a cell phone number, and they're also the most likely to want to contribute. Supporters are likely to see joining an email list as less of a commitment than agreeing to receive text messages, so an SMS advocacy list may naturally slew toward the responsive."

Amy's response:

"Colin suggests that only the most “die-hard” Edwards supporters are signed up right now but that’s actually not true. Our most active supporters are very diverse and they tend to have already selected their medium of choice for engaging with the campaign. Some are One Corps members, others are group leaders on social networks, while still others are the most active contributors on our email list. Our most active supporters are segmented in various mediums and we have yet to really promote our mobile campaign to these key communities. Conversely, most of our mobile subscribers are people who want to learn more about John Edwards or they are people who signed a petition and gave us their mobile number. With this in mind, the “selection bias” actually works in the opposite direction – we’re starting out with the less-committed supporters and the more SMS campaigns we do, the more likely it is that our core-supporters will warm-up to this new medium. However, that is not necessarily the goal. While it’s great to have our “die-hards” on this list – especially because they are the ones most likely to patch-through and make a contribution - we are more than happy to engage with them wherever they are and we are not focused on weaning them off the medium of their choice. If you don’t like SMS but you love MySpace, then there’s no reason to pull you into our mobile campaign. Conversely, we’re focused on using SMS to reach a new audience – the people whose interest has been piqued by something they saw on TV, in the papers  or at a Small Change event but who really don’t want another email. Additionally, the more campaigns we do, the better we will know our audience. As we build our subscribers and fine tune our data (we) will be able to target our audience more accurately and ensure that our supporters are getting information relevant to their interests."

It is heartening to hear that Edwards' SMS recruitment is going deeper than the "die-hard" supporters. But even if it didn't, I am not sure if this is a knock on the strategy. Die-hard supporters are far more likely to be contributors. So a direct communication channel to them is a good thing.

Colin raised further questions regarding unsubscribe rates, declining rates of giving over time, and open and conversion rates.

Amy goes into great detail answering these:

"There is very little context in which to compare our data because this is so new – no one really knows what kind of numbers we should be shooting for so we’ve had to do a mix of comparing to email data and creating our own metrics.

"In an effort to measure that key moment when you see a small amount of text (typically a subject line of an email) and decide whether or not you want to take the next step we have compared mobile actions with the open and click-thru rates of emails. For example, the percentage of people who responded to our text with the word “call” is comparable to our average open rate on national emails and almost twice as much as our average click-thru rate. And the percentage of people who listened to John Edwards’ message and then pressed one to connect was also slightly higher than our national email click-thru rate. Additionally, we know that nearly 100% of the people that listened to the message, listened to the entire message. This is very promising. The message was probably longer than many would have advised but it shows us that people who want to listen, will listen to the whole thing. As opposed to email, where many people may think they want to read it – because of the subject line – but then quickly realize that they should have just hit delete. This statistic may speak to the unique experience of listening to someone’s voice as opposed to reading an email. But it may also speak to the fact that people understand that they can always go back and look at an old email anytime but listening to a message from the campaign has more of a one-time chance uniqueness to it -if they hang-up they are not sure how to get back. This gives us a rare opportunity to really hook people’s attention and drive them to the next step once they are listening to the message.

"Our unsubscribe rate was, as expected, slightly higher than standard SMS messages but not by a significant amount and certainly not high enough to suggest that people consider this spam. Additionally, the vast majority of people who connected to our phone banks expressed something you rarely hear when being asked for money – excitement. They were psyched about hearing the message and wanted to tell our volunteers how cool it was to have their phone ring with a call from John Edwards."

And the campaign is learning from its experience as it moves forward:

"... we will address a number of the issues and learnings from last week. For example, this time around, any key you hit while listening to the message will go directly to the phone bank. Another interesting fact we learned from last week was that nearly as many people called after the phone bank closed as when it was open.

With two new stacks of data on hand and the second quarter behind us we will focus on doing more targeted and incentive-based campaigns that not only offer mobile interaction but also tie into online activity rather seamlessly."

Amy also indicated in our conversation that the contributions in the second week of the campaign were triple those raised in the first, though she refrained from sharing the raw amounts at this time.

I was also impressed how they tranistioned from using a phone bank to process contributions to a recorded message driving contributors to the campaign website. Phone banks are expensive, and while they make launching a fundraising program such as this one easier, it would be a shame to let the program fizzle when the phone bank budget expired. Transitioning donors to give online is a great way to capitalize on the buzz created by the launch of this program and keep it working indefinitely.

So while the novelty will wear off and the potential to annoy subscribers always lurks under the surface, there are clearly emerging best practices that can give SMS fundraising legs to run.

And in a final note, this from Colin Delany (after reading a draft of this article):

"Thanks for putting this together, Alan, and thanks to Amy for being so forthcoming -- this is a lot more detail than we'd have been able to read otherwise. Amy had a very interesting point about people choosing their preferred communications channel, which is going to be one of the keys to long-term retention. As she says, text messages become just another way to reach supporters, and it sounds like I may have overestimated people's reluctance to give up a cell number, though let's keep an eye on that trend long-term. And I certainly should have said something about the effect of what feels like a personal call from the candidate, since that's clearly a good way to build a connection with a voter.

"You're also right that people who are unsubscribing are done with contributing anyway, but keep in mind that bad list-management practices can help to turn them off in the first place. It sounds as though the Edwards folks have really thought this one through, but as the tools become more common, not everyone will. Those of us who run email lists have seen how fast you can kill one if you're not careful with your message frequency and content. When I was raising these questions, I was partly thinking far down the road to the day when commercial and political communicators are going to be competing frantically for SMS inbox space. Proper execution will be key! Thanks again."