Remember that community organizing does not just mean going somewhere in person. Phone banking is hugely important for us. It helps us connect with local organizations. It helps us spread the word about events and initiatives. A single person who is willing to be annoying about using the phone and calling people in person can have an outsized political influence. Believe me, as a group, if we are as a group annoying about being on the phone and speaking to our neighbors, we are going to have way more pull than we would have organically. And I’m going to show you how to do that.

First of all, in order to run or participate in a phone bank, you need a list of contacts. One of the most important parts of having a phone bank is a list of people to call. And this can be soft targets. Don’t say, well, I can’t call anyone. Wow, call who calls nowadays. That’s something for boomers. Boomers and older, right? Wrong. Look for organizations that legally have to take your calls or just organizations that want them.

We’re talking about churches, libraries, bars, bookstores, other community spaces that are interested in upcoming events. Now, obviously, if you can, like find people and groups that have upcoming events coming, that’s even better. But if they are just have our standing event spaces, this is good too. And depending on the scale of your phone bank, there’s software that can manage the calls. Like you could use RingCentral or call Hub or something like that. But really for us, if you just send a Google sheet, like we’ll. If you make a Google sheet, and we’ll probably have a sample Google sheet here for phone banking, and you fill that out and you send it to us, that works wonders.

Third thing you need is a phone script. Having a script just makes your calls consistent. You don’t have to use your script every time you make a phone call. It’s just, you know, once you start to get in the groove, you’ll just start mixing it up yourself. But this script is just going to say who you are, why you’re calling, and something that you want. Here’s an example.

Hi, my name is Bob. I’m calling you with Mosaic Atlanta. We’re talking to community spaces in Atlanta to see if you’re interested in hosting an event to support. Name something Reading. We think it’d be a great way to bring people together. And this can be. If you’re reading a book, you can say you’re doing political education, like a book club reading, you can say that you’re doing.

And honestly, a book club reading is the easiest thing to do. But if you want to say you’re holding a social event at a bar. If you want to say you’re doing a reading at a library, whatever it is, right? And you just want to be presentable and normal and personable. These calls, really hearing yes or no does not matter. The issue is that most of the places in town are a question mark. We don’t know whether to mark them green or red.

Atlanta is a large city, so if you say something that separates yourself from a spam, call, hey, love your bookstore. I live in Decatur and I go by there sometimes. Whatever it is, you don’t have to lie. But just call, talk to them, follow up. And the idea is, we’ve done a lot of the work here for you. You should be able to just point them to our website. You can talk about one of the running campaigns like, the rent is too damn high, and tell them, hey, we’re gonna pass this petition around.

The reason why we have that is so that there’s a petition that we can always pass around. So follow up is also key. A lot of the times you call and they’re like, hey, call us back later, or send an email. If you need to, like, have an email sent or a phone call sent, that’s like, something that we can help you with. And remember that everybody’s not comfortable running a meeting or organizing an event. You don’t have to do all of that. You don’t have to put anything together yourself.

Even just talking to someone and saying, oh, those guys at this bar were interested. And now three months from now, we can call them and say, hey, you talked to Doug. Yeah, you remember Doug? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were with Doug, and we were talking about hosting a book club there.

That’s super valuable. Now. The conversation is a lot smoother, right? So there are simple ways to help with a phone. Just finding interested venues is huge for us. Sending an email or making a phone call and letting us know how they respond. You can also, when you see an event that’s coming up on the calendar, just talk to it with people in your community.