Using the Warren Switchboard

Recruitment is at the core of being an event host, and calling potential new volunteers directly is one of the best ways to recruit new people to join this fight. Since Elizabeth launched her campaign at the end of 2018, hundreds of thousands of supporters from across the country have signed up to volunteer with the campaign through our website.

Switchboard is our tool that allows us to plug these potential new volunteers into local volunteer efforts — like your events.

We’ve created a nifty video for you on how to use Switchboard below:

To get access to the Switchboard, please sign up for a 30 minute Switchboard training here

So to recap, the steps are:

(1) Pick a local event (or better yet, a few local events in separate tabs) that you want to shift prospects into and open it (them) in your browser.

(2) Go to switchboard.elizabethwarren.com and log in with your email address.

(3) You’ll receive a secret code sent to your email address. You use this code to log in - no passwords needed!

(4) (FIRST USE ONLY) Fill out your information. Your address is used to get the prospects closest to you.

(5) One the home page, you will find a red button that says “Request Prospects”. Hitting it will pull a batch of 10 volunteer prospects that are closest to you. Even better, if you want to pull a list of volunteer prospects closest to the event you’re recruiting for, you can paste the url of that event into the Event Link box on the right of the screen.

(6) Your list of prospects is divided into 3 tabs: New, Attempted, and Successful.

• New: people whom you have not called yet.
• Attempted: the people whom you have reached out to but were unable to contact.
• Successful: People you spoke with and/or scheduled into an event or 1:1

(7) When you have a volunteer prospect pulled up, you will see a few pieces of their information:

• Phone Number
• General Location
• Remaining time to contact the lead (there is a 7 day expiration on each contact before they go back into the pool of prospects)

(8) As you call through the list of volunteer prospects, use the Switchboard Talking Points as a guide. The goal of a Switchboard conversation is to schedule a prospective volunteer for an event or training. Remember this as you reach out and have a conversation with them!

If you successfully contact this volunteer prospect, choose the “I talked to” option. You will be asked to note if they were scheduled into an event, a training, a 1:1, or if they are not scheduled (e.g. if they will be away for 2 weeks and they asked you to call them again afterwards).

(9) If you don’t successfully reach the volunteer prospect, you will be asked to choose an option to further describe the situation. The ‘Unavailable’ options will place this person into your “Attempted” tab, and you will have seven days to try to contact them again. The “Unreachable” options will remove this person from Switchboard altogether, so that neither you, nor other switchboard users, will see that prospect again.

If you are presented with people you are uncomfortable calling (e.g., your boss, your ex-partner, a neighbor with whom you’ve been fighting, etc), you can choose the ‘Skip this person’ option to remove them from your prospects. They will still be placed back into the general pool of contacts so that the next Switchboard user in your area can contact them.

Click here for talking points when you’re using the Switchboard.