Phone Banking Toolkit (NDTC)
Summary
The National Democratic Training Committee’s Phone Banking Toolkit is the canonical US campaign-side volunteer phone-bank package: a persuasion script, a volunteer training agenda, a sign-in sheet, a tally/check-in form, and talking-points handouts — all editable Google-Drive templates designed for direct reuse by a state party, a candidate campaign, or a non-profit organising drive.
Body
The toolkit treats phone banking as a learned skill rather than as a task: the assumption is that a volunteer has never held a phone-bank conversation before, and every artefact is paired with a short training note that explains why the format looks the way it does. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit] The persuasion script is structured as a decision tree rather than as a monologue, with explicit branches for “supportive”, “undecided”, and “opposing” replies and a recommended close for each. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit] The training agenda walks a new volunteer through the script, the tally form, the do-not-call list, and the post-call debrief in ninety minutes. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit]
The tally/check-in form is the operational artefact that makes the toolkit more than a script: it forces a volunteer to record the call outcome and the issue-of-conversation flag in real time, which is what makes the aggregate data usable for the campaign’s later targeting decisions. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit] Talking-points handouts are written to be safe to read aloud verbatim — no jargon that would embarrass a volunteer or a contact — and to leave room for the volunteer’s own voice. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit]
The toolkit is openly published as editable Google Drive files, which means a campaign downloads the originals, replaces the placeholder candidate/organisation name, and re-uses the structure for its own script. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit] This permissive sharing is the toolkit’s main contribution to the broader literature: a state-party field director does not need to write a phone-bank program from scratch, and a non-partisan organising drive can adapt the structure by removing the persuasion branch and substituting a relationship-building one. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit]
The toolkit has a US-centric bias: it assumes caller-ID display, the FCC’s national do-not-call registry, and a vendor relationship with a dialer provider. [source: traindems-phonebank-toolkit] For campaigns outside the US, the script structure and the tally-form discipline transfer; the compliance language does not.
Use it for
A starting point for a campaign’s first phone-bank program; a volunteer-training curriculum in the first 90 minutes of a campaign; a script structure to adapt rather than to copy.