Maximizing phone contact rates w/ Ken Tracy of CampaignHQ

from Season 2 Episode 1 of The Art of Campaigns

In this episode of The Art of Campaigns, I sit down with Ken Tracy, Chief Client Officer at Campaign HQ, to chat about the state of phones on campaigns. If you run campaigns and rely on phones, this one is worth your time.

You can watch here, or read below to get the strategy guide based on that conversation.

The 3% contact rate problem

The Democrats released a 2024 retrospective that included a genuinely alarming 3% contact rate on phone calls, despite record-high call volume. Ken and I unpacked what likely went wrong and how a professional phone program, by contrast, can hit 25 to 50 contacts per hour.

80% of your voter list is now a cell phone

80% of the numbers you pull from a voter file today are cell phones. That shift has real implications for how you structure a phone program, how you budget for it, and how you think about the technology your vendor is using. Ken gives us some tips on how they've adapted.

You shouldn't be charged more for cell phone calls

This one genuinely surprised me. A court decision in 2022 (Duguid v. Facebook) clarified what counts as an automated dialer, and effectively opened the door to dialing cell phones the same way you dial landlines. The cost difference that used to justify upcharging for cells no longer exists. If your phone vendor is still billing you more per call for cell phones than for landlines, they are taking advantage of the fact that most campaigners don't know this changed. Now you do.

STIR/SHAKEN and the spam filter problem

I had never heard of STIR/SHAKEN before this conversation, and I'd bet most campaigners haven't either. It's a technical framework used by carriers to verify that the number showing up on your caller ID is legitimate and not spoofed. In practice, it's what determines whether your call shows up as a local number or as "Spam Likely." Vendors who are doing this properly rotate caller IDs, purchase numbers that have been verified through the STIR/SHAKEN protocol, and avoid burning through numbers so fast they get flagged. When buying numbers for any outreach, just ask your vendor whether they follow STIR/SHAKEN. If they don't know what you're talking about, that's your answer.

Questions you should be asking every phone vendor

There's no true apples-to-apples comparison between phone vendors, and most campaigns don't know what to ask. Do they charge per connected call, per dial, or per hour? Where are their callers based, and are they accent-neutral? Do they scrub your list before calling it? Campaign HQ, for example, only charges for connected calls. Others structure it differently. Knowing how billing works before you sign lets you compare programs fairly and avoids nasty surprises on the back end.

Contact stacking: layering phones, doors, and texts

Contact stacking is something I've been talking about for a while. It's the practice of layering your voter contact touchpoints so each one reinforces the last. I wrote about it in detail for Partisan if you want the full breakdown. We talked about making a quick call to a neighborhood before your volunteers walk it, letting people know someone is coming, who they are, and why, which dramatically improves the odds that the door actually opens. The prep call costs almost nothing and changes the entire dynamic of the knock.

Teletown halls are more versatile than you think

Most campaigns think of teletown halls as something for big statewide races with large budgets, but Ken made a convincing case that they scale all the way down the ballot. Even beyond basic voter contact and persuasion, teletown halls are genuinely underused for volunteer and donor recruitment. You can invite people via text, warm them up with a call, host a live Q&A with the candidate, collect key-press responses to identify supporters and issue alignment, and then follow up immediately with the people who engaged. That follow-up window matters more than most campaigns realise.

Cell phone spam filtering is worth planning around

Toward the end of our conversation, Ken made an observation that probably deserves its own post entirely. Android and iOS have introduced spam filtering systems that a lot of people claimed would completely kill text outreach for campaigns. What Ken's team found in testing last summer was more nuanced: deliverability stayed flat, and in some cases responses actually went up. More on this soon.