Bernie Sanders' Campaign used Hustle to Organise Volunteers

Re/Code

When it comes to the presidential candidate campaigns, you don't expect the campaign staff to be using an app to keep everything together. You still picture everything being so old fashioned, with files filling up rented offices as people call up random numbers and send out mass leaflets saying why this area should vote for this candidate. This isn't really the case anymore and Bernie Sanders is one of the candidates that is definitely embracing the digital age for his campaign.

Hustle is an app that allows organisers to send up to sixteen personalised text messages at a time. The contacts will have been gathered in the organisation's usual way and will be queued up. You can type in personalised messages and send them out within minutes. It's a practical way to handle something that could otherwise take one person hours of back and forth before they could even get one person to agree. Of course, it does still take more than one message, but Hustle allows them to send out multiple messages in quick succession in a way that feels personal, even if it isn't.

Roddy Lindsay was the man behind Hustle and he created the app with assistance from engineers who had been on the campaign circuit before. This previous experience with tech and with organising digital campaigns meant that they knew what needed to be done to make a more intimate sharing experience. In the past calls, emails and leaflets were all more easily ignored, but they found that people were more likely to respond to a text. This could be because unless you're out of service, you'll always get a notification to a text and you're more likely to read a text than answer a call from an unknown number.

In the USA, Bernie Sanders' campaigners have been using Hustle since the Iowa caucus. They've found that it's best for organising events. For instance, when a campaigner landed in Oklahoma they used the app and three days later 340 people turned up to an event in the area. Over those three days there would have been various conversations and those people would have likely gone on to personally send more messages about the event. That is what Hustle and their users are hoping for, to encourage more engagement within the events.

Hustle has been working well for the Sanders campaign with their quickly organised, text-arranged events. They can get as many volunteers as possible attending an event and then train them in one day. In the future more and more politicians are likely to attempt something like this and Hustle really seems to be the app to do it with.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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