What

Email and call-in campaigns, also known as “zaps” have become an often used tool in a growing number of people’s tool boxes. Whether calling/emailing into prisons to get someone out of solitary, to restore access to medical care, against slumlords in tenant battles, or attempts to get bigots fired, more and more groups are using this tactic in their struggles.

Why

Landlords, corporations, and prison officials operate out of offices that still depend on phone access (and, even more so, email inboxes) for doing business. Flooding offices with emails or phone calls effectively blocks a portion of their ability to operate, plus, if participation is widespread enough, it often punctuates a message by driving an office to pure bedlam. It’s not like writing a letter to your congressperson – no one is making an appeal to established power. We aren’t merely engaging in dialogue, but inducing a bit of crisis to shift power to ourselves.

This added punch of of operational crisis, which only takes place once a critical mass of participation is hit, really helps extract concessions and/or push back on repression that doesn’t stand up well in the light of day. The tactic can stand up well on its own, but also works even better as part of a strategic plan involving other tactics also.

How

Write a Concise Call to Action

You are speaking most likely to supporters or allies who don’t need your polemic or additional convincing. If there is a lot of additional background to convey, you can link or reference another article or post for those who need it. A giant rambling wall of text turns off motivation and engages next to no one.

Make sure the demands are SMART:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

Write a Sample Script

Plenty of people are self-conscious and a bit reluctant to call or email authority figures at some hostile institution. Throwing out an example of a brief message conveys the talking points reassures participants and gives them something to follow or expand on.

Pick Your Targets

Pick targets that will feel the pressure and are in some way vulnerable. Zaps for prisoners involves dealing with state bureaucracies and prison administrations. Avoid public relation officers and state directors; it’s already their job to lie and handle bad PR, but better to get them on the phone than nobody.

At prisons for example, wardens are essentially middle management who fear for their jobs. That is a possible vulnerability.  The point is to have an organizational and political analysis of the institution you are messing with. Pick targets that get results or are vulnerable over anything else.

Once you’ve identified the targets, call and/or email them and make sure the numbers are still active and correct. It doesn’t get much worse than trying to build a campaign, sending out a call to action, and then realizing that the number(s) or email(s) included are inactive.

Provide Multiple Emails / Phone Numbers

Once someone commits to participate, they’re oftentimes happy to call multiple numbers while they are at it. Rank them in order of importance and most importantly and test them. Public phone lines to prisons or jails more often than not have long, nested menus of numbered options to choose from. It’s better to get someone relevant on the phone, but better to talk to someone not as relevant than to only end up leaving a message. For emails, send one first yourself to make sure it is current and will not return an undelivered error.

Also, when all sorts of people are calling and taking over these offices with calls, it is often hard to get through. Emails, notably, do not encounter this issue. Give people a selection of numbers to call and they will keep trying, jumping from one number to the next – more calls land, more voicemail boxes get filled, and more pressure is applied.

Making the Call

  1. If you feel like it, block your number by dialing *67 before calling the prison
  2. Call the prison official designated in the post and say something based on the “script.” If you don’t reach the official ask to get transferred to them. If the person on the line won’t transfer you, express your concern to them instead. The more details the better; it reveals that you know exactly what they’re doing!
  3. In rare cases they may ask for your information. You’re under no obligation to give it! You can give something fake or just continue to repeat your concern.
  4. Report how many calls you made and any information you received from the prison (“Answering machine full” or “Warden said he’s received calls all day”) to the point person (if you’re part of a cluster).
  5. Be aware that people who answer these calls often resort to first to lying rather than correcting the issue when they get flustered by a lot of calls or emails, so zaps are typically continued until the impacted people themselves confirm that demands have been met.

Promote the Zap

Advance notice and dogged promotion makes an easily lost request into an event that looks worthwhile and is actually strategic, thoughtful, and supported. Like with any online outreach or social media campaign, carefully consider how best to reach people, when they are logged on, and how to stay in touch.

Use multiple channels – social media, email listservs, text messages, face to face meetings, etc. Get the call out in front of supporters in multiple ways. It’s a hectic world overloaded with media – you gotta cut through all that.

Set a Target Time Window

Set a day to shut that office down. Calls or emails trickling in over a week don’t make an impression. Make that request for a supporter’s time as concrete as possible. You can even have specific groups adopt chunks of time, ensuring you keep phones ringing and/or email inboxes keep pinging throughout the day.

Live Updates

For the day of the zap, consider having one or more people commit to being on social media to post real-time updates. This can help counter forthcoming lies from the institution, and adds to the zap’s visibility, and keeps momentum up for people participating.

Great things to boost:

  • asinine quotes from officials
  • reports of phones / inboxes being tied up
  • lies being told by officials
  • numbers of people calling / emailing in
  • when participants mention they called

If using social media, follow people who are participating to better engage with, repost, and boost them.

Follow Up

When an action is over, follow up immediately to let people know just how it all went, and follow up down the road to let people know what effect they had. Retain that commitment and energy. So much political work is like yelling into a black hole with little feedback or measurable success and is ultimately very draining and unsustainable. Zaps often (although not always) yield immediate results.

Longer Term: Organize a Zap Cluster

Phone Cluster

A phone (or email) zap cluster is like a phone tree, but instead of a sprawling massive list of contacts all in a centralized place a cluster is a smaller unit of trusted friends. There is nothing wrong with people being part of a few different clusters to help make sure information is being shared widely.

Organizing a zap cluster is helpful in getting people to follow through with a phone or email zap. It can be as simple as you and one other friend or a larger formation. We recommend keeping them to around 5 people though.

Once you have your cluster, choose someone to be the coordinator. This person is in charge of checking in with each person to make sure they followed through with the phone zap (or other action) and then reporting back. For IWOC, this means posting an update to the zap on our website, email list, and/or social media.