Friend Outreach

Friend Outreach lets volunteers text their own friends from their own phones. Each volunteer picks friends from their phone contacts in the Solidarity app, texts them, and marks who confirmed. You see the counts and the friends on your list.

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Available on Professional plans and above.

Friend Outreach is under Field → Friend Outreach in the dashboard. To create and edit a program, a Team Member needs the Manage work lists permission.

Modes

The mode sets how a friend confirms. You choose it when you create the program. You can't change it after creation.

In Form mode, only a submission of the page you choose confirms a friend. On an event page, only a Yes RSVP counts.

Create a program

1. Go to Field → Friend Outreach and click Create New Friend Outreach.
2. Enter a Friend Outreach Title. Volunteers see this title in their workflows.
3. Choose the Mode.
4. For Form mode, choose the Page.
5. Click Create Friend Outreach.

A new program is open for seven days. You can change the dates on the Details tab.

Details

Program Availability sets when your volunteers can pick and text friends, with Begins At and Ends At.

Message is the text that the app puts into the volunteer's messaging app. The volunteer can edit it before they send it. Write it the way you would text a friend. The message can use these merge tags:

Show Prior Confirms controls what a volunteer sees about friends who confirmed another way:

• In Pledge mode, Yes shows a friend who already confirmed with another volunteer as confirmed, so this volunteer does not text them. No shows each volunteer only the friends they confirmed.
• In Form mode, Yes shows a friend who already signed as confirmed, so the volunteer does not text them. No shows the volunteer only the friends who sign through their own link.

A change to No also hides the confirms that volunteers already saw.

Reminders are automatic. A volunteer gets a push notification when a friend they picked a day ago is not texted yet. They also get one when a friend they texted two days ago has not confirmed yet. Reminders go out at most once a day, between 9:00 am and 8:00 pm in your organization's timezone.

Text templates for a program are on the Automations tab. Volunteers see them when they tap Text again for a friend.

Add volunteers

A volunteer must be on the program's team to see it. Add volunteers on the Team tab, or share the magic link. See Magic Link Team Recruitment. You can also send a push notification to the team from this tab.

Volunteers need version 2.6.3 or later of the Solidarity app.

What volunteers do in the app

1. In the Workflows tab, the volunteer taps Text Your Friends.
2. The volunteer picks friends from their phone contacts. Only the friends they pick leave the phone, with the first name, the last name, and the phone number. A volunteer can add up to 200 friends at a time.
3. The volunteer texts each friend from their own phone, with the text app, WhatsApp, or Signal. The message is already written.
4. In Pledge mode, the volunteer marks each friend who agrees as confirmed. In Form mode, the friend confirms when they submit the page.

A volunteer can also mark a friend as not interested, or remove a friend from their list. The volunteer gets a push notification when a friend confirms.

Pledge mode confirms

When a volunteer marks a friend as confirmed, the app asks whether to add the friend to your list.

• Yes adds the friend to your People. If no Person has that phone number, Solidarity Tech creates one in the volunteer's Chapter. Text messages are turned on for the Person, unless they replied STOP earlier. The volunteer gets credit as the referrer, unless someone else already has it.
• No counts the confirm, but does not add the friend to your list.

A volunteer can undo a Pledge confirm.

Form mode confirms

Each friend's personal link carries the volunteer's referral. A friend confirms when they submit the page through their link. A submission from the same phone number also counts. Submissions count until 30 days after the program ends.

A friend who submitted the page before the volunteer picked them counts as Already signed.

What Solidarity Tech records

When a friend who is a Person confirms, Solidarity Tech records a friend relationship between the Person and the volunteer. The confirm also shows in the Person's activity.

To find the friends who joined your list, use the People filter On the list through Friend Outreach.

Privacy

Only the volunteer sees the names and numbers of friends who are not on your list. The dashboard shows only counts for those friends.

Solidarity Tech deletes the friends who are not People 30 days after the program ends.

Results

The CONFIRMED column on the Friend Outreach page shows the friends confirmed out of the friends picked.

The Results tab of a program shows:

• Friends picked, Texted, and Confirmed
• On your list, with a link to those People
• Already signed, in Form mode

The By volunteer table shows the same counts for each volunteer, plus NOT INTERESTED. The totals count each phone number once, so a friend that two volunteers picked counts once in the totals.