We’ve been proud to offer the LeftApps toolkit since 2020, and are committed to continuing to provide helpful tools for Democrats and other progressives. Moving the remaining active users of LeftApps over to Switchboard (LeftApps’ parent organization since 2021, and also co-founded by Eric) will allow us to continue to develop new tools more effectively, rather than running duplicative services in parallel as we do now.
If you’d like to transition your LeftApps services to Switchboard or have any questions, please email [email protected].
Our shortlinks and ActBlue fundraising reporting systems have been fully replicated within Switchboard, and they are still completely free to use with no obligation whatsoever to use any of our other services. We can help you migrate your existing shortlinks and/or dashboard to Switchboard as well for a quick and easy transition.
Unfortunately since we first launched Spoke on LeftApps, carrier policy and enforcement changes have made it progressively harder for organizations to get their messages delivered managed via their own Twilio accounts, and we expect this to potentially get even worse as time goes on.
However, Switchboard’s messaging services are a great alternative to Spoke. Switchboard manages deliverability, relationships with the wireless carriers and their vendors, and sending phone numbers for you. You can send using Switchboard to all the kinds of lists you sent to using Spoke, and Switchboard also has many other great features, including not having to click send once for each message, scheduling messages in advance, and tracking who clicks on and donates through links in your message. Switchboard has simple pricing with no commitment or contract required:
Switchboard is a little more expensive than LeftApps Spoke for basic sending of 1-segment SMS, but sending messages that are 3 or 4 segments or longer on Spoke will actually be cheaper on Switchboard (since all messages over 160 characters still just cost 3 or 4 cents even if they are much longer), and since you don’t pay for sending to landlines or messages getting flagged by the carriers, you’ll likely save money there as well. And just as importantly, it’s much easier for us to navigate carrier issues given the breadth of work we do on this, and if you do run into any issues there we’ll work directly with you to get them resolved so you don’t have to deal with it on your own.
Your first $30 in Switchboard messages are free (i.e. 1500 SMS texts up to 160 characters, or 1000 messages that are longer or include an image) so you can try it out risk-free.
Over 900 Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations used Switchboard in 2022, and we successfully sent more than half a billion messages. If you want to get started or learn more, let us know at [email protected].
If you’d prefer to keep using Spoke, there are other great organizations that offer Spoke (at price points similar to Switchboard), including Scale to Win and Politics Rewired. Note that you’d be starting with new accounts with other Spoke services should you choose to go that route (while the underlying software is the same, the data is completely separate).
These tools only saw very light use in the 2022 cycle, and at this time we have not created equivalent tools within Switchboard. If you are interested in actively using these tools in 2023 and beyond, please let us know at [email protected]. We can’t guarantee that we will make them available but if enough folks tell us they would benefit from them that would help us know doing so is worth prioritizing.