The first thing you need to figure out is when you’ll host your call party. We suggest that after work or on the weekend is best, but it’s really up to you. It is important that you finish making calls by 8pm on a weekday, and 5pm on a weekend, to abide with Australian Telecommunications Standards. The ACF dialler tool won’t allow you to make calls after this time.
You should pick a venue that has a space big enough for everyone to sit together for a briefing and also has space for people to spread out — it can get pretty noisy once everyone is on the phone! Meeting rooms at your library, a quiet space in the local pub or your home are all good options.
If possible, decide on the day, time and location of your next calling party too - you’ll have great people joining you at your first calling party, so this is an awesome opportunity to invite the group together again for another.
To make your call party a success, you need people there. This is not only so that we can get to the scale we need to in order to have an impact this election, but also so that your party is fun! We want this to be a good experience for people and to help them feel the power of the big movement we’re all part of.
The rule of halves: on average, you can expect about half of the people who RSVP to your event to actually show up. This means that if you want 5 people at your event, you need to get 10 to commit to coming.
You should start with a target number of attendees based on the capacity of your venue and the number of people you know who might be interested. Keep in mind that groups bigger than about 20 can be a bit unwieldy, though you want to get as many people as you can to create a good vibe and to make a big number of calls.
We have written some example invitations to help you recruit your mates and community! In addition to creating an event on our website, you should also think about calling people, sending emails, texting them and creating an event on social media. People often need to hear about an event multiple times before they commit to coming along and some people check their Facebook more than their emails (or vice versa), so don’t be scared to contact people a few times in different ways!
You won’t be on your own in this process! ACF staff and a team of volunteer leaders will be here to support you.
Calling party host welcome sessions
We're running online welcome sessions for everyone who's hosting calling parties! Come along to learn more about hosting, meet others and ask any questions. Next welcome session:
If you can't make it to an online session, you can check out the recording of a previous one, or book a time to have a phone call with a member of our team!
You can also connect with others hosting calling parties via the Facebook group or on Slack – an instant messaging platform that will allow you to talk to ACF staff and other volunteers in real time. You can use Slack on your computer through your web browser or download it as an app on your computer and phone. If you haven’t used it before, check out our user guide. You will receive an invite to Slack when you register your event on our website. Check your spam folder if you don’t see it in your inbox.
Please be patient if you don’t get an answer to support questions immediately. We will get back to you as soon as humanly possible – we have a lean team and rely on volunteers to get to scale. At peak times we can get overwhelmed by requests! Other call party hosts may have similar queries to you – so by joining us on the host welcome sessions and posting your questions to Slack or in the Facebook group, we can respond in a way that everyone gets to see the answers!