Civic engagement is more important than ever, so Daily Kos has made doing your part easier than ever

At Daily Kos, our motto is "News You Can Do Something About." We are constantly coming up with innovative ways to fulfill that mission, including using technologies that better serve our community of readers, activists, and partners. As such, we are introducing some new improvements in our Mobile Messaging SMS program.

We launched a mobile messaging program in 2018. Over the course of the program, we determined that you, the Daily Kos Community, do respond to mobile messages and use them to generate activism. 

Now that we know the mobile program is successful, we will be sending and receiving mobile messages from short code 62340, which is exclusively used by Daily Kos. We expect that the user experience will improve now that we are on our own short code. Sharing a short code with multiple groups and organizations seemed to cause some confusion and frustration with users, who were receiving messages from multiple groups.

What you can expect to receive on our mobile message list

Mobile messaging via SMS texts has been highly effective at mobilizing our community to make phone calls to elected officials, politicians, and sometimes corporate actors. Users receive a mobile message, with a clickable phone number, which instructs your phone to make a call. After you hear a short message about the topic and a script of what to say, you will be immediately connected to the officials that need to hear from you. It's easy and it works! In March and April, we drove tens of thousands of calls around COVID-19 relief, PPE for nurses, and other essential campaigns.

We also send messages about breaking news and critical analysis that you will only find at Daily Kos. Sometimes these are exclusive Daily Kos YouTube interviews, which can easily be viewed on smartphones with YouTube installed, or viewed on any smartphone’s web browser.

We are also scaling up our volunteer recruitment efforts heading into November 2020, most of which are virtual opportunities, due to COVID-19. Users will likely receive opportunities to help get out the vote, to help people file for vote-by-mail, to write letters or postcards to infrequent voters, or to attend virtual phone banks or virtual texting sessions. Many of our partners are using innovative tactics to prioritize the health of volunteers, while protecting the right to vote—even in a pandemic.

That's a brief overview of our program, which we know will continue to evolve with new ideas and activism opportunities, and we will continue to provide tools that empower the Daily Kos Community to impact the country, as well as tools for our partners and allies that will make it easier for them to succeed in their campaigns, and, of course, original, engaging content.

You can sign up to receive mobile messages on most of our petition landing pages, or this page here.  Every message will be identified with "Daily Kos" in the message. 

When you sign up for mobile messages from our activism pages, or if you are being introduced to our new short code 62340, you will receive a welcome message, with standard legal information like, text "Help for info" or "Stop to quit," which will automatically unsubscribe you from the mobile messages, or tell you how to reach us for technical help. All of this information is also in our privacy policy, and on the landing page disclaimer. Once you are subscribed, you can reply directly to 62340 from your mobile phone to reach our mobile inbox. We monitor these replies and try to respond to as many legitimate reply requests as we can.

As always, the Daily Kos community continues to make a huge impact with our collective activism as we push for justice and democracy. Upgrading our mobile messaging program is an exciting feature that will allow us to continue making change happen. 

If you would like to subscribe, you can do so on most Daily Kos petitions or by signing up here. If you've moved, you can also change your address information here.

This new technology was made in partnership with Action Network, an activism platform for the progressive movement, with additional features in development to be implemented this year. We expect additional features and innovative ways to use mobile messaging to communicate with readers and activists.

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