Jim Reno for City Council: Personal Connection at Scale with i360 Call

Working with limited funds and short on time

Jim Reno, the trusted 20-year City Council incumbent for Ward 6 of South Carolina’s 5th largest city, Rock Hill, needed to protect his seat from opponent Barrett Maners who offered residents change and a new perspective.

Maners’ campaign proved to be an agile one with an aggressive ground-game, knocking the doors of an impressive number of Rock Hill residents in an effort to establish a personal connection with potential voters. Reno knew he couldn’t rely on his record of accomplishments alone and needed to reestablish his relationship with the constituency that had supported him for 20 years.

Being a local campaign, Reno didn’t have exhaustive funds and was in search of a strategy that would enable him to personally contact as many voters as possible in as little time as possible without breaking the bank.

Maximizing reach and efficiency through i360 Call

With their budgetary constraints in mind, the Reno campaign turned to a political technology solution promising to meet their voter contact needs. Finding the product to have too large a learning-curve, the team went back to the drawing board and decided to contact i360, which presented them with their solution – an intuitive and affordable technology package that could be used by the candidate himself to contact his supporters personally and at scale.

In no time, the Reno Campaign was set up with i360 Call, i360’s predictive-dialer app for smartphones, tablets and desktops. Even with limited experience utilizing mobile dialer apps, the candidate was able to quickly pick-up the technology and use it successfully.

The target recycling feature was a particular advantage as it automatically moved those voters the candidate was unable to connect with back into the target universe, making the campaign’s voter outreach more effective and efficient – something that wouldn’t have been possible to keep track of manually.

Using the Basic Search tool in the i360 Portal, Reno’s campaign consultant, Chris Slick, was able to create custom target audiences of voters that had a record of being active in recent midterm elections and were aligned with Reno according to the i360 Affinity model. Thanks to i360 Call’s versatility, Reno could contact these voters from anywhere, whether from home, from the office, or from the road – an advantage that proved critical to Reno’s busy schedule.

Through this outreach, the campaign learned from Republican voters that they weren’t being contacted at all by Reno’s opponent, Maners. It became clear to the campaign that this was a true R vs. D election; therefore, it was all about turnout on October 17.

Knowing this, Reno customized his message, reinforcing his relationship with constituents and encouraging voters to go to the polls and cast their vote for him.