Estimate campaign cost for political polling

Hi, We represent a political consulting firm and are planning on using your software for a political poll. we need to gather either 400 responses with a contact list of around 500,000 numbers. How many lines do we need to run this campaign and what would be the estimated time and cost of it? Thank you

For political polling, unless you have previous polling stats on the same contact list, it is hard to know the response rate (people will complete the full survey). Even for the same list, with different issues people care about or the competitiveness of the election, the response rate differs. So the best way to estimate is assuming you will need to run through the whole list.

Of cause you will get a better idea, say you run through 100,000 numbers. You can then adjust your campaign, such as reduce the number of lines or just stop the campaign when you get the desired number of responses.

Give that, here are some assumption you can make:

1. Each phone call will take about 1 minute. this include time for ringing the phone, playing your message, and for some people go through the whole survey.
2. If you need to leave message automatically on answering machines (such as invite them to call to a number to take the survey), your per call time could be 1.5 minute.
3. Normally, 50% of calls will be answered by machines

So using 1 minute per call, you will be able to make 60 calls in a hour on a single line. If you can call people 8 hours per day, you can make about 500 calls per day on a single line.

So if you want to finish the campaign in X days, for example 10 days. Then you need to make 50,000 calls per day in order to finish the half million numbers on your list. So you will need 50,000 / 500 = 100 lines/channels for your campaign.

In terms of the cost, we need to estimate the actual minutes charged. Since we only charge connect time with a 30/6 billing, most of calls will be billed at 30 seconds. If you go through the whole list at 1.5 cents per minute, 500,000 x 0.015 / 2 = $3,750. If you need to leave message on machines, then you can estimate each call will be 1 minute.

To get a better estimate, you can run a test campaign with a smaller list.