Political text messaging software for campaigns: GOTV, finance call time, and volunteer rosters on one account.

The short definition

What political text messaging is, and what it replaces.

Political text messaging is voter contact by SMS (a standard text message) or MMS (a text message with an image), sent from a phone number your committee controls, to a list you can document. Rather than broad announcements, it carries the details that matter to one person at a time: their polling place, their shift time, their early-vote deadline, or a donation link they can use in a few seconds.

Campaigns send texts in two ways, and the difference matters more than the software you choose:

• Peer to peer (P2P): a volunteer or staff member clicks send on each message. It is slower and needs more people, but because a person starts each send, it is in a different position under federal law.
• Application to person (A2P): the platform sends messages on a schedule to a list you have sorted into groups. It is fast, it keeps a full record, and it is the method that requires registration with the carriers and documented consent. This is the method CampaignCNX+ uses.

Texting does not replace door knocking, and it does not replace phone calls. It replaces the reminder calls a volunteer used to make from a list at 7 a.m. on Election Day, which often reached voicemail. A conversation at the door is how you persuade a voter. A text is how you confirm plans, send reminders, give directions and collect replies. Campaigns that send long persuasion messages by text get opt-outs (people replying STOP to leave the list), while campaigns that use texting for reminders and logistics get turnout.

For the planning behind all of this, the complete guide to political text messaging for campaigns takes a program from the first list to the final send.

Timing

How SMS timing fits the campaign calendar.

A common mistake is to treat texting as a GOTV tool that is switched on two weeks before the election. By then you have no list, no record of consent, and no history with the carriers as a trusted sender. The texting program should follow the same calendar as the campaign itself. It runs in six phases, and each phase has a different purpose.

1. Filing and launch. Use this period to build the list rather than to send to it. Every petition signature, house party sign-in sheet, website form, and event RSVP counts as an opt-in (permission to receive your texts) if the form says so plainly. Start your 10DLC registration at this stage as well. The carriers review it while you do everything else, and it is what separates GOTV messages that reach phones from messages that the carriers filter out.
2. Primary build. Plan one or two messages a month, such as event invitations, a volunteer request, or a finance deadline. Sending rarely keeps opt-outs near zero and teaches the people on your list that a text from this number is worth opening. You will rely on that habit in October.
3. Primary week. This is the first real turnout test, and the least costly time to find out whether your merge fields are correct, your polling-place data is accurate, and your team can keep up with the replies. Treat the primary as a rehearsal for the general election.
4. Post-primary rebuild. The list you take into the general election will be different from the list you used in the primary. Add the county party file, the lists from endorsing organizations (with their consent status documented, not assumed), and the volunteers who joined during the primary. Then tag everyone again by precinct, support score, and vote-by-mail status.
5. Absentee and early vote. Send reminders to request a ballot, reminders to return it for voters who requested one and have not sent it back, and early-vote hours for the precincts where early voting makes a real difference. This is the phase where texting pays for itself, because once a voter has cast an early ballot, you no longer spend money contacting them.
6. Final stretch and Election Day. Send more often, keep messages shorter, and make every message about a location, a deadline, or a ride to the polls. This phase has the most published practical advice behind it, and our breakdown of GOTV texting strategies and voter turnout templates goes through the 14-day, 72-hour, and Election Day windows message by message.

Municipal races on an April cycle compress all of this into about ten weeks, which is why the registration and list-building work has to start the fall before. A school board or city council campaign that opens an account in March is not going to have a usable list by the first week of April.

Every phase above depends on dates your state sets, not dates you choose, so it is worth building the calendar state by state. For committees working the Illinois cycle, our breakdown of the Illinois political texting calendar maps these phases onto the state's early-vote window, mail-ballot deadlines, and consolidated-election schedule. For a committee working several states at once, Midwest regional text messaging covers the twelve states in the region and the three time zones a regional message has to be scheduled around.

The message itself

What a political text has to do in 160 characters.

The composer counts segments as you type. A segment is the unit a text is billed in: 160 characters in the first, 153 in each one after, and every segment bills as a message. This limit affects both cost and writing, and the effect on writing is the more useful one. A text that needs three segments is usually trying to say too much.

Every political text should include four things, usually in this order:

• Who you are. People read a first message from an unknown number with suspicion. Name the campaign or the committee at the start of the message, not at the end.
• Who they are. Use the person's first name at a minimum. Including the correct polling location for their precinct is what separates a text people act on from a text they ignore.
• One request. Ask for one thing, such as voting early, confirming a shift, or giving before midnight. A message with two requests usually gets neither.
• A way to opt out. Include opt-out language. The composer checks for it before the campaign can leave the review screen. Making STOP easy to find keeps your opt-out rate low enough that carriers keep delivering your messages.

Tone matters more in a text than in almost any other channel, because the recipient did not ask to be persuaded at 8 a.m. Write the way a person on the campaign would write, not the way a campaign mailer reads. If you want example messages for voter identification, persuasion, mobilization, and GOTV, the collection of voter outreach SMS examples and templates has drafts you can adapt instead of starting from a blank screen.

Committee structure

Coordinated campaign versus independent expenditure: running both without crossing a line.

A coordinated campaign texting its own supporter list and an independent expenditure group texting a persuasion universe are two different programs in two different legal positions. They should never share a phone number, a contact list, or a sender identity. Suppose a voter gets similar messages from the same number about the same race, once from the candidate and once from a group legally required to be independent of that candidate. That voter is likely to file a complaint.

The practical separation looks like this:

• Separate 10DLC phone lines at $5 per month each, registered to the correct organization. The phone line is what the recipient sees as the sender, so this is the separation that actually appears on their phone.
• Separate contact lists with their own consent records. Consent given to a candidate committee is not consent given to a PAC.
• Separate reporting and billing line items, so the invoice trail matches the entity that owes the money.
• Team seats limited to one program, so an IE staffer cannot see the coordinated campaign's message calendar and the reverse.

The platform keeps the programs separate and keeps an audit trail. It does not give you a legal opinion on the firewall (the required separation between the two groups); that stays with your compliance counsel. The same setup works for a state party running several candidate programs, or an agency serving several clients, without the lists ever mixing.

Budget

What a political texting program costs per voter contact.

Pricing is public and there is no contract. Pay-as-you-go is $0.06 per SMS and $0.18 per MMS with no monthly plan fee. Plans bundle volume and lower the rate: Basic at $55 a month with 1,000 included, Pro at $225 with 5,000 included and $0.045 overage, Enterprise at $695 with 20,000 included, $0.035 overage, two-way included, and five team seats. Phone lines are $5 a month. Data lookups are $0.015 each.

Here is an example with a realistic list: 6,000 targeted voters, each contacted five times across the last three weeks, for a total of 30,000 messages.

• Pay-as-you-go: 30,000 × $0.06 = $1,800.
• Enterprise: $695 for the month, 20,000 included, 10,000 overage at $0.035 = $350. Total $1,045, or about 17 cents per voter for five touches.

Message length changes this budget more than the choice of plan does. A 190-character message bills as two segments, so the same 30,000-contact program becomes 60,000 messages and the cost doubles. Cutting three words from a GOTV text can be worth more than any volume discount on the page. MMS works the same way at a higher rate: three credits per contact, so use it only when the image is essential to the message.

A more useful question than what a single text costs is what it costs to gain one additional vote. Texting is worth the money for reminders and confirmations but not for persuasion, which is why the programs with the best return spend almost the whole SMS budget in the early-vote and GOTV periods. Full plan comparison and add-on rates are on the pricing page. For a smaller universe, what it costs to text a local race works through the same math for a library board, a village trustee and a Chicago ward race.

The day after

What happens to the list after election day.

Most campaigns do nothing with the list after the results come in and then rebuild it from scratch two years later, which is the single most expensive habit in political data.

What to do in the first week:

• Send the thank-you. Send it win or lose, because it is the last chance to get a response while people still care.
• Export everything. Export the message history, consent records, opt-outs, and per-campaign costs for the wrap report and for the next campaign that uses the file.
• Keep the opt-out list forever. This suppression list (the people you must not text again) is worth more than the contact list. If someone who opted out in 2026 gets a text from you in 2027, the likely result is a complaint. Opt-outs stay flagged permanently on the account, which protects you.
• Be honest about whether consent still applies. Consent given to a candidate committee for one race does not transfer cleanly to a different committee, a different candidate, or an advocacy group that inherits the file. If the entity changes, the consent question reopens.

For committees that keep operating between cycles (an advocacy program, a county party, a PAC with a legislative agenda), keep the account active on a lower-priced plan and send once or twice a quarter. People who hear from you occasionally tend to stay engaged. People who hear nothing for eighteen months and then receive a sudden fundraising message tend to opt out.

Step-by-step plan

Setting up a political SMS program: the order to do it in.

If you are starting from nothing, follow this order. You can complete steps one through four in an afternoon. Step five is the one campaigns most often skip, and they pay for it later.

1. Open the account and choose a number. Carrier verification of a new toll-free number takes about three business days. Campaigns and committees can start on the free political trial, which includes 100 free SMS. You add a card when you pick your number, which is $5 a month.
2. Start 10DLC registration immediately. While the carriers review it, you can send from your toll-free number. Do not wait until you need it. A political committee also completes Campaign Verify (a check that confirms to the carriers that the committee is a genuine political campaign) before the carrier filing; for a local race, Campaign Verify for local candidates covers what it costs and how long it takes.
3. Fix your sign-up forms before your list. Every form the campaign owns (website, petition, event RSVP, volunteer sign-up) gets clear SMS opt-in language and records when and where consent was given. This step determines whether the whole program can be defended if it is challenged.
4. Import and tag. Load the voter file and the volunteer roster, match precinct, ward, and support score to custom fields, and run the DNC scrub before anything is sent.
5. Send to your own people first. Start with staff, the steering committee, and top volunteers. The free trial covers 100 messages, enough to catch a broken merge field before 6,000 voters see it.
6. Split the programs onto separate lines. Voters, donors, and volunteers each get their own line and sending schedule at $5 a month. Mixing a fundraising request into a volunteer shift conversation is a common way to lose volunteers.
7. Write the calendar backward from Election Day. Put the GOTV messages on the calendar first, then the early-vote messages, then routine messages filling in the weeks back to today. A schedule planned forward from launch always runs out of room at the end.
8. Staff the inbox before the first big send. Replies arrive within minutes, so the people answering them need to be ready before the message goes out.

Field operations, walk lists (the lists of homes a canvasser visits), and turf assignment are handled in Beacon, our field product, not here. This platform handles the messages, and dividing up canvassing areas belongs in that separate tool.