Mobile Commons: Call Routing and Advanced Targeting – Mobile Commons FAQ

Title
Mobile Commons: Call Routing and Advanced Targeting

Resolution Summary

Provided information on Call Routing and Advanced Targeting

Answer

How Auto Routing Works

In order to correctly auto route a caller we will need to know their address. We can grab this location information from a caller's profile in Mobile Commons. If you do not have your subscribers location or a caller is not yet a subscriber, we can ask them to supply their zip code via the phone pad later in Advanced Behavior.

For US Congress and US Senate routing we only need zip code. However, to route your callers to their local state-level legislators we will need a full address. The best way to get this full address is via a text messaging conversation or by capturing this information on a web form.

If an mConnect user is in a split district and we are not certain of their particular legislator (this may happen if we do not have detailed or accurate enough address information for them) they will be given a list to choose from instead of directly connecting them to a legislator.

The audio ahead of a caller being connected will state the legislator's name and title that they are being connected to.

If you are launching an mConnect from the web, you can have people enter their address into the web form. When they submit the form and the call is triggered, they will be auto-routed to their correct legislator.

We offer the following auto-route options:

Switchboards

Capitol Switchboard: you do not need to capture & assign any geographic information to use this option
Whitehouse Switchboard: you do not need to capture & assign any geographic information to use this option
Whitehouse Comment Line: No Longer Providing Voicemail Option, January 2017; you do not need to capture & assign any geographic information to use this option

US Senator: In order to route callers to their appropriate US Representative we will need to assign a State to the caller. We can derive state from simply the area code + 1st 3 of a phone number to get state. This is however, not very accurate. Because of the mobility of phone numbers it is not usually a good indication of a callers state. To accurately assign a state and therefore correctly route to US Representative we recommend collecting Zip Code. Zip code is easiest to collect from both callers and subscribers and will accurately assign a state to the caller.

US Senator (Any Office): Find all active offices with phone numbers and route callers between them. If you know where your legislator will be (i.e.at capitol vs in district) you should route your calls accordingly, although staffers will likely pick up in both locations.
US Senator (Capitol Office): Will send callers to a senator's office in Washington D.C.
US Senator (District Office):Will send callers to a senator's office(s) in their home state

US Congress: In order to route callers to their appropriate US Representative we will need to assign a State to the caller. We can derive state from simply the area code + 1st 3 of a phone number to get state. This is however, not very accurate. Because of the mobility of phone numbers it is not usually a good indication of a callers state. To accurately assign a state and therefore correctly route to US Representative we recommend collecting Zip Code. Zip code is easiest to collect from both callers and subscribers and will accurately assign a state to the caller. If we have state we will assign the first congressional district for that state. For accurate congressional district information and therefore more targeted routing, we suggest capturing full address.

US Representative (Any Office): Will find all active offices with phone numbers and route callers between them. If you know where your legislator will be (i.e.at capitol vs in district) you should route your calls accordingly, although staffers will likely pick up in both locations.
US Representative (Capitol Office): Will send callers to a congress person's office in Washington D.C.
US Representative (District Office): Will send callers to a congress person's office(s) in their home state

State Senator: In order to properly assign your callers their correct State Upper and State Lower we must have a complete address stored in that caller's profile.

State Senator (Any Office):Will find all active offices with phone numbers and route callers between them. If you know where your legislator will be (i.e.at state capitol vs in district) you should route your calls accordingly, although staffers will likely pick up in both locations.
State Senator (Capitol Office): Will send callers to their state senator's state capitol office.
State Senator (District Office): Will send callers to their state senator's local district office.

State Representative: In order to properly assign your callers their correct State Upper and State Lower we must have a complete address stored in that caller's profile.

State Representative (Any Office): Will find all active offices with phone numbers and route callers between them. If you know where your legislator will be (i.e.at state capitol vs in district) you should route your calls accordingly, although staffers will likely pick up in both locations.
State Representative (Capitol Office): Will send callers to their state representative's state capitol office.
State Representative (District Office): Will send callers to their state representative's local district office.

US Senator:
If you choose to target US Senators, you can target one of the 2 Senators, leave as the default "Round Robin", or choose "Neither". If "Neither" is selected, callers from that state will connect to a randomly targeted senator from another state.

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US Congressperson, you can target by clicking into the box labeled "Click for a list of representatives" and then choose the targets.

Select the box for "If we don't have an exact district match, let users choose reps from a list", to prompt users to choose their Representative from a list if we can't determine it from their zip code. If we don't have an exact match and we have the zip, they will get the choices. If they don't know, they will go to the switchboard. And if there are more than 5 possibilities, they go to the switchboard.

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To properly route State Senators and State Representatives a callers district must be known. In order to determine and assign a district you must collect building number, street address, city, state and zip.

The best way to ensure that you have all the information you will need to route callers to their state-level legislators is by collecting this information via SMS and upon collection of this information triggering your mConnect. You can use Liquid Templates to supply a different message to subscribers whose information you've already collected than to subscribers whose information you have not yet collected. Please watch our webinar on Advocacy Phone Calls for an example of this strategy.

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