I have been recently looking at political polling software like yours and couldn’t find on your website the margin of error of your phone surveys and was wondering if you have any data on that?

Margin of error is mainly determined by the sample size vs. the population size. Assuming random sampling, you should be able to calculate it from the sample size and population size. In reality, true random sample is not that easy. For example, older people tend to answer surveys more often then younger people – this is sometime called “weighting”. You will need to further adjust you collected samples to make it more representative. A good review of this topic can be found here: 5 key things to know about the margin of error in election polls

Voicent software does not control or collect margin of error info. There are too many factors go beyond the survey execution itself.

However, the software does provide survey result export, making it easier to send the data over to any data analytics program.

I am looking for a company that will do autodialing messages and polling for my political campaign that is coming up in the fall

Well, you definitely come to the right place. Actually, we currently have many campaigns and even professional polling companies use our cloud service. We have been in business for more than fifteen years. It seems political season is getting longer and longer – organizations are constantly communicating with their members using various tools on our platform.

Auto dialer, aka robo dialer or voice broadcasting, is a tool to deliver pre-recorded messages to a large list. The major advantage is that the tool does not require human intervention. Once a list and message is set for a dialer campaign, the tool will operate on itself. Use this tool for meeting notifications, get out to vote campaigns, and send out candidate personal messages to voters.

Auto dialer, in conjunction with an IVR app, can perform automated phone survey. On the Voicent platform, we offer end-to-end survey solutions, from survey design (simple survey design page to advanced IVR apps), to survey execution, to real-time reporting and data export. Our survey tools also apply to text message survey and inbound and outbound surveys. To learn more, please see:

How to do an automated phone survey?
How to setup an inbound phone survey?

Many organizations also utilize our predictive dialer to reach and connect with voters in a more personal way. A predictive dialer connects call to a volunteer only when the call is answered by a live human, thus saving a lot of time by handling the machine answer automatically (either skip or leave a message).

In addition, our platform also offer inbound auto attendant, text message broadcast and text survey, email broadcasting, and full voter data management using our built-in CRM.

Our cloud service offers both yearly and monthly subscription options. Many political campaigns find the monthly subscription offers the most flexibility. They can easily adjust the feature and tool set based on their usage, adjusting the number of users and capacity, thus optimize the savings for their campaigns.

What is the cost for automated phone survey?

For automated phone survey, the main factor affecting cost is the call volume. The larger the call volume and the shorter the time, the more lines/channels are needed. For example, if you have 10,000 calls to make in 8 hours, assuming each call is about 1 minute, then each line/channel can make 8 hour x 60 calls per hour = 480 calls per day. So in order to make 10,000 calls, you need about 10,000 / 480 = 20 lines. Once you have a good idea about how many lines you need, then it is easy to figure out the cost.

The basic monthly subscription fee:

1 users: $29 (each user comes with 2 outbound lines/channels)
18 additional lines: 18 x $7 = $126
1 caller ID: $2
Subtotal: $157

Usage fee (phone bills)

The phone bills are based on the total calling minutes. There are 4 different rate (4 cents, 3, 2, and 1.5 cents per minute). For example, monthly call volume that is greater than 25,000 minutes are charged at 1.5 cents per minute.

For details, including a pricing calculator, please see Voicent Cloud service pricing.