{"id":1597,"date":"2016-11-15T18:42:11","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T18:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/hustle-is-the-grassroots-personalized-mass-texting-tool-we-need.html"},"modified":"2016-11-15T18:42:11","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T18:42:11","slug":"hustle-is-the-grassroots-personalized-mass-texting-tool-we-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/hustle-is-the-grassroots-personalized-mass-texting-tool-we-need.html","title":{"rendered":"Hustle is the grassroots personalized mass texting tool we need"},"content":{"rendered":"

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People hate phone calls and ignore emails, so how do you get them to protest, organize, fundraise, and fight for the causes they believe in? By talking to them like humans, one-on-one. This is the way Hustle motivates people to participate at scale, and how its messages reached 3.95 million voters on election day.<\/p>\n

Hustle is a text distribution tool<\/a> that allows organizers to quickly start individual, personalized conversations with huge numbers of supporters. It\u2019s like mail merge for instant messaging. You write automatically customized scripts, upload phone numbers, and assign staffers to text swaths of them one at a time in rapid succession. Supporters may reply directly to a real person that can convince them to act. And organizers can track their campaign\u2019s progress.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today Hustle announces it\u2019s raised $3 million led by Chamath Palihapitiya\u2019s Social Capital, and joined by\u00a0Index Ventures, Designer Fund, Canvas, and Matrix Partners. Hustle\u2019s tool has already been used by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and the American Federation Of Labor. But now Hustle will have the cash to hire engineers, designers, and a sales team to push into new verticals like retail, hospitality, and traditional non-profits.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to massively humanize communication. And not in a bullshit way, but in an actual \u2018we\u2019re connecting real people together\u2019 way\u201d says Hustle CEO and co-founder Roddy Lindsay.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Strength In Phone Numbers<\/h2>\n

\"hustle-text\"<\/p>\n

Agents can converse directly with supporters to convince them to act<\/p>\n

As one of the first data scientists at Facebook starting in 2007, Lindsay spent six years measuring the impact of connecting people. Later while volunteering at Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s immigration reform group Fwd.us, he witnessed the abysmal 1% conversion rate of email.<\/span><\/p>\n

While impersonal email blasts might get people to take lightweight actions like signing a petition, Lindsay says \u201cIf you want people to show up and participate in events, and become a meaningful part of a movement, you need to engage people personally.\u201d He experimented with personalized SMS calls to action, and saw 35%+ engagement rates \u2014 as well as an opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

To turn the idea into a platform, Lindsay teamed up with Perry Rosenstein, a startup product lead and political strategist who was Obama\u2019s Nevada New Media Director in the 2008 election. [Disclosure: Rosenstein is a friend and we built a social app together in 2013 called Signal that\u2019s since shut down.] Lindsay had a strong working relationship with Palihapitiya while they were both at Facebook, so he raised some pre-seed cash from Social Capital.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing that we did was hilarious\u201d Rosenstein says. \u201cWe ran an ad and put Roddy\u2019s phone number in it. \u2018Text this number\u2019. What was crazy about this was people would text it and we\u2019d have really intimate conversations with them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

People love to text. Hustle\u2019s research says 75% of millennials prefer texts to calls. The average pickup rate for calls from unknown numbers is 10%, but less than 5% for millennials. As for email, Lindsay says \u201cYou can throw all the algorithm soup at optimizing your campaigns, but a 1.2% [conversion rate] is a failure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hustle With Flow<\/h2>\n

Hustle was built for a\u00a0hierarchy of three different users: organizers, agents, and contacts.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the top, a handful of a organizers from a business, group, or campaign use Hustle\u2019s web interface to write scripts in the first-person, like \u201cHey insert contact name this is insert agent name from Fwd.us. I know you\u2019re interested in immigration reform and there\u2019s a rally next Tuesday at 7pm. Can I count on you to attend?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"edit-scripts-admin-view\"<\/p>\n

Organizers fill scripts with variables that automatically personalize for each message<\/p>\n

Organizers upload a file of names and phone numbers, or connect their CRM system to Hustle, then divide the contacts between their agents. Each agent uses Hustle\u2019s iOS, Android, or web app that instantly populates their name and the contact\u2019s name for each text. It then lets them optionally\u00a0customize the message, and hit send on one after another, achieving a state of flow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Contacts don\u2019t even know they\u2019re \u2018using\u2019 Hustle. They just receive the messages via normal SMS from a local Twilio-powered phone number, and can reply straight to the agent unlike with an email blast.<\/span><\/p>\n

If they RSVP yes or no, the agent can mark that down in the Hustle app. But if they respond with questions or excuses, like \u201cHow do I get to the event? or \u201cI have to watch my kids\u201d, the agent can coax them into the \u2018Yes\u2019 column by explaining public transportation options or that the event has on-site child care.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Organizers can watch the progress of their agents, nudging ones who fail to send their texts, and altering scripts with poor performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"hustle\"<\/p>\n

The Hustle team<\/p>\n

The idea is that with a few organizers and 1000 volunteers assigned 1000 contacts each, a Hustle campaign could personally reach 1 million people. Lindsay claims Hustle is 48X more effective than phone calling, since the response rate is at least 3X and you can send 16X more texts in the time it takes to make a call.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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With the funding and help of\u00a0Palihapitiya, Matrix\u2019s Ilya Sukhar (who sold Parse to Facebook), and Canvas\u2019 Ben Narasin, Hustle\u2019s wants to expand its diverse 12-person squad. It plans to hire a full team under its Director Of Sales Ysiad Ferreiras who got Hustle to $3 million in revenue its first year on the market.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hustle also\u00a0wants to build out sophisticated semantic analytics tools. Those could determine the highest converting question responses, or algorithmically alter scripts to be more or less formal depending on the recipient, like adding emoji when talking to millennials.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hustle charges a $0.30 monthly fee per contact in a customer\u2019s CRM, with discounts for yearly contracts and giant databases. Rosenstein says \u201cIn our sales cycle, we look at who does calls and we crush them.\u201d\u00a0Hustle plans to attack more potential customers still relying on phones and emails in the era of mobile messaging.\u00a0\u201cPhone call-making should just die\u201d Lindsay laughs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t\u00a0Squander The Spirit<\/h2>\n

\"hustling\"Others see the opportunity too. The Hillary campaign ended up building their own clone of Hustle called \u201cMegaphone\u201d, though clearly that didn\u2019t quite work. The mass email companies like MailChimp and Constant Contact might wise up and move into messaging.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hustle is also beholden to the platforms it runs on. \u201cWe\u2019re definitely at the mercy of carriers, hardware, and government\u201d Lindsay admits. Messaging is also shifting from the open SMS standard to closed apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger. It will have to avoid being perceived as a spam tool and banned by those who deliver its rallying cries.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur mission is not to be a text messaging company\u201d Lindsay says. Texting in 2016 happens to be the best way to have the most real conversations with the greatest number of people with the least amount of friction. That will change but we\u2019ll change with it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With the nation\u2019s fractured political landscape, more people than every want to get involved. Lindsay says \u201cIf there is a silver lining to the election last Tuesday, it is this: many of us are waking up to the urgency of the moment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But that intent is often squandered by tools that view activists as mere cogs in a campaign. Lindsay concludes, \u201cIt\u2019s easy to get people to raise their hand, but once they do, treat them like a person.\u201d They\u2019ll hustle. They just need their passion harnessed.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/lBOduofXcqg\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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