The Challenge
5th Square is an urbanist political action committee that supports candidates committed to policies that provide greater access to transportation, land use, and public space for all Philadelphia residents. 5th Square was interested in increasing engagement with members and supporters through their contact lists. While traditional email communications proved effective, 5th Square was also looking for more direct and interactive ways to communicate with its supporters. Further, 5th Square needed a solution that would not be an administrative burden to its communications team, many of which worked remotely.
The Solution
AG worked with 5th Square’s executive team to design a text messaging application that allowed them to send bulk and direct sms messages to supporters through the organization’s existing communications platform, Slack.
Our Approach
Given that 5th Square is a largely distributed team with many members of its executive team working remotely, AG wanted to design a solution that would leverage the existing tools its team was comfortable using -- particularly, Slack, to coordinate communications and Nationbuilder, to manage supporter contact lists. With this in mind, AG designed and built an application that allowed 5th Square executive members to send text messages directly from a dedicated, private and secure Slack channel to a supporter’s registered phone using a Slack slash command. AG built the application in the Laravel PHP framework and used Slack and Nationbuilder APIs to integrate it with those platforms.
The AG application acts as intermediary between Slack and the eventual recipient of the 5th Square text message. Authorized 5th Square members draft a message in Slack in a private channel and send it to the application using a specially formatted slash command which contains the content and a supporter list code. The Laravel application then retrieves a list of phone numbers from 5th Square’s Nationbuilder database, using the Nationbuilder API, formats the message sent from Slack, and sends out the messages to supporters using Twilio’s SMS API.
Message recipients can reply to the message and the application will route the message back to 5th Square’s private Slack channel. Notably, the application does all this without storing recipient phone numbers. Instead, it leverages the security of Slack and Nationbuilder, retrieving only what it needs via their APIs.
Outcome
5th Square happily reported higher engagement with its supporters using text messages over other, more traditional, forms of communication like email. Executive team members also found it to be a more personalized and intimate way to communicate with supporters, all of whom were more likely to respond to a particular call to action.