Saturday, December 16, 2006
Are Phones Obsolete? The Evolution of Telephone Consulting
By J. Todd Foster
Campaigners for Patrick Murphy were staring the May 16 Democratic primary in the teeth. In 48 hours, voters in Pennsylvania's 8th District would go to the polls. There were plenty of volunteers to make get-out-the-vote calls, but not enough phones.
It was May 14, and a Murphy staffer took a suitcase into the basement of a campaign volunteer's home in Bucks County. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a dozen telephones, plugged them into a computer, and within five minutes, the group began using the Internet to call local voters.
There were no expensive phone line deposits to pay the local telephone company. No waiting for the telephone company installer or promises he would be there between 8 a.m. and noon or 1 and 5 p.m. two weeks down the road, when it would be too late.
A handful of volunteers and staffers made 2,000 get-out-the-vote calls in two days, and Murphy won with nearly two-thirds of the vote against his Democratic challenger.
In Virginia last year, four "phone banks in a suitcase" traversed the red state on behalf of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine.
"I'd like to think we helped him win," said Will Stone of the Washington-based political consulting firm Advocacy Inc., which developed the "phone bank in a suitcase" and deployed it for the first time in Kaine's campaign.
Stone charged the Murphy campaign $750 to rent the "suitcase" unit for one week. But for candidates who envision a long-term use for the systems, they can purchase one for $5,500 for a 10-phone unit and $8,000 for the 20-phone model.
It's impossible to quantify how much of a difference the technology made in Virginia -- or to weigh it against the failings of Kaine's Republican opponent, Jerry Kilgore, whose negative campaigning turned off moderate voters and sapped his huge philosophical advantage in the conservative state.
But Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) -- using cyberspace to deliver telephone calls instead of using buried or aerial utility lines -- is the future of candidate outreach, experts say, because of free or low-cost calls.
The leader in VoIP, Skype Technologies Inc., is not charging its U.S. and Canadian customers for domestic telephone calls for the rest of this year. The company, owned by eBay, believes it will make its money by further penetrating the North American market; already, Skype has 100 million registered global users who purchase a tiny piece of software and can talk free to other Skype users around the world.
U.S. and Canadian users, however, can call any landline or mobile phone free until the end of the year. The company makes its money off calls to and within other countries, as well as through voicemail and call forwarding.
Skype bills its calls as having "superior" voice quality and "secure and encrypted communication -- nobody's able to listen in."
But Marty Stone of Stones' Phones, a Washington campaign-consulting firm that uses telephones to reach voters, isn't buying the new technology -- literally and figuratively.
In May, Stone (no relation to Will Stone) was on the phone with a representative of Emily's List -- a political network of pro-choice Democratic women. The rep was using VoIP.
"I suggested she get a landline phone if she is talking to donors," says Marty Stone, who argues against VoIP's claims of comparative or superior voice quality.
"My business is based on charges per call," he says. "I could increase my profits" with VoIP, "but I'm concerned my quality would go down."
Marty Stone also fears a new phenomenon: SPIT (Spam over Internet technology), the telephonic version of Internet junk mail.
A recent story in the Wall Street Journal stated VoIP "is providing an opportunity for hackers, mischief makers and scam artists."
On June 7, U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie in Newark, N.J., announced the arrest of a Miami man for hacking into VoIP providers and routing their calls over his network and then charging them exorbitant fees.
"Emerging technologies and the Internet represent a sea of opportunity for business but also for sophisticated criminals," Christie said in a written statement released by his office. "The challenge, which we and the FBI continue to meet with investigations and prosecutions like this one, is to stay ahead of the cyber-criminal and protect legitimate commerce."
Marty Stone says saving money by using VoIP also is not worth the security risks.
"People are hacking into VoIP networks and routing calls," he says. "Plus, this is not regulated. … It's a lot cheaper, and we are constantly battling against people who say ‘I can get that for two cents a call or something like that.' … We've always competed in an environment where there's somebody out there selling our product for a ridiculous price.
A new age dawnsVoIP was born five to seven years ago. The technology converts a person's voice into a data packet, similar to the format used by e-mail and text messages. The data packet is stuffed into an electronic envelope and transmitted over the Internet, where the data is reassembled before the receiver opens it.
Think of this analogy, says Joe Mandacina, vice president of corporate communications for Sprint: Imagine the phone call being a letter-size sheet of paper. The paper is cut into many pieces and stuffed into an envelope. When the envelope arrives and is opened, the page has been reassembled.
Early on, VoIP calls were highly fragile, meaning the reassembly part didn't always work correctly. Today, the quality of voices carried over the Internet seems indistinguishable from those delivered over landlines.
Many of the interviews done for this story were conducted with sources whose phones are connected to the Internet -- something an interviewer would not know unless told.
Companies are producing combination cell-VoIP phones. One minute a user can make a wireless call from her car, and the next she can toggle over to an Internet connection from her home, Mandacina says.
Increasing numbers of telephone customers are scrapping their landlines in favor of wireless or Internet phones. At Ford's Detroit headquarters, the automaker recently purchased 8,000 Sprint wireless phones for its office staff and yanked out their landlines, Mandacina said. Today, 85 percent of the company's business is in the wireless arena, with the remaining 15 percent tied to landlines.
"I think it's going to have an immediate and dramatic impact on the traditional phone companies," Mandacina said in reference to VoIP.
But what about on the campaign trail? The answer depends on which political consulting firm you ask.
Many political consultants whose weapon of choice is the telephone make much of their money on long-distance charges.
"If we wanted to reduce our costs, we could look at going through the computer in order to dial those numbers," said Linda Cherry of Cherry Communications in Tallahassee, Fla., a firm used by Republicans and conservative causes. "But our bigger cost is labor" -- hiring the staff to make the calls.
A cheap delivery system, she says, is no match for good communicators who can deliver a candidate's message with passion and clarity directly to voters.
Washington-based Advantage Inc. operates a traditional phone bank. Saving a few cents per call will not transform the industry, says the company's vice president, Aris McMahon.
"Technology evolves. Other products were supposed to blow us out of the water, and they've gone belly-up," he said.
Adds New York-based political consultant Steve Goldberg: "When you factor in your phone price, it's pretty cheap compared to labor."
The message or the method?
Bob Roberts, a political science professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., has studied campaigns since the 1950s. In 1964, the battleground for the Lyndon Johnson-Barry Goldwater presidential race was on the three major television networks. More than 40 years later, the battlefield has splintered into just 12 swing states such as Florida and Ohio. Advertising dollars have followed the fighting.
As a result, the rest of the country does not receive a campaign's national message, Roberts says. Instead, voters get bits and pieces from phone banks or over the computer.
"There isn't a nationwide dialogue," Roberts explains. "Now you can target these factions by what's going on in their community; that's how narrow it can get. It's not good for the country at all. It reinforces the idea that a campaign is about what I can get out of it for my neighborhood and not for the good of the country."
While traditional phone banks -- and the cheaper VoIPs -- will continue to be effective tools with older voters, future campaigns will require flexibility, Roberts says.
Young voters are using cell phones and PDAs -- off limits to campaigns because the charges would fall on the voters who receive the calls.
"An increasing percentage of people you'd want to contact don't have [landline] phones," Roberts says. "It's going to affect everyone. Traditional phone bank companies are going to have more and more difficulty contacting voters. The way people are communicating is fragmenting. Campaigns will have to make use of multiple techniques to get to voters rather than relying on the traditional standbys -- TV commercials and phone banks.
"That's the dilemma all campaigns are facing now," Roberts says.
VoIP, he says, won't revolutionize political campaigning -- but the Internet will and is. Candidates will have to use pop-up advertising on Web sites frequented by young voters, Roberts says. Candidates will have to write their own blogs.
"Campaigns are much more comfortable with traditional phone banks, he said "They will have to adjust."
Finding its niche
Will Stone of Advocacy Inc., the firm that developed the phone bank in a suitcase, says the technology will not replace traditional landlines.
"We're not trying to replace the professional phone bank operation," he says. "Just because you can make your own commercials with a Mac computer and PhotoShop doesn't mean I'll recommend it."
The phone bank in a suitcase is ideal for taking campaigns to volunteers and voters in rural areas, he says. Campaigns cannot afford to staff every town in a district.
"This takes the campaign to places that were largely overlooked. You give me 10 people, I'm gonna bring you the phone bank," Will Stone says.
In addition, the phone bank in a suitcase can blunt the huge financial advantages of incumbents.
The key to the technology is bandwidth. The more Internet horsepower, the more phones can be plugged into the computer line.
Despite Will Stone's assertions that a dial-up line can accommodate two phones, a campaign computer expert who did not want to be named for fear of losing his job responded: "impossible." The first phone line, he notes, requires 90 kilobytes, with each subsequent line requiring 60KB. A dial-up connection provides only 56KB.
Kevin Druff was the database administration and field technology coordinator for Tim Kaine's gubernatorial campaign in Virginia. The system worked well in metro areas with readily available high-speed bandwidth.
"I would not say it was an unequivocal success," Druff says. "We deployed 12 lines in a house in Fredericksburg [Va.] on Election Day. Where we had the bandwidth to support it, it was a success."
As the Democratic primary neared in Bucks County, Pa., last month, Patrick Murphy's campaign managers realized they had more volunteers and staffers than phones. So Daren Berringer, a senior political adviser, made a quick phone call. A staffer coming up from D.C. was able to pick up a phone bank in a suitcase from Advocacy Inc. and then drive three hours to Bucks County, north of Philadelphia.
"Within 5 minutes, we had 12 phones up and running," Berringer says. "Every phone line that you install, you have to put down a $350 deposit. For us to do this for 12 more lines, that money is doing nothing to help us and is just sitting in a Verizon bank account.
"This is one of the best tools that are out there," Berringer continues. "Activists in rural areas never get to get into a campaign headquarters. All they need is a high-speed Internet connection. We can take the actual campaign operation right into their home."
J. Todd Foster is a freelance journalist based in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where he also is the managing editor of The News Virginian in Waynesboro.
posted at 5:18 PM
