NewTalk Beta Is Here!

We’re so excited today to share that we’re officially launching NewTalk Beta—the next iteration of ThruTalk, our lightning fast calling tool. NewTalk is the outgrowth of hundreds of meetings, thousands of lines of code, a swimming pools’ worth of coffee and/or tea (depending on the GetThru team member), and a whole lotta love for the clients who will put it to use! Here’s what you can expect from our efforts so far.

What Does “Beta” Mean?

Beta means that NewTalk has successfully “graduated” from its earlier Alpha phase, where it was tested for several months by our team alongside some thorough and generous clients (thank you Alpha testers!). Moving from Alpha to Beta means the core dialing functions have been tested at scale, and the tool has sufficient features to run a highly effective calling program.  

Beta also means that, while we are ready to launch this to a larger audience, there are a few more key features we want to complete before we consider this a full-fledged v 2.0 of ThruTalk. For this reason, we’re offering NewTalk Beta at an introductory rate of 3.5 cents per dial. We talk more about pricing later on, but for now here’s a peek at what you’ll find in NewTalk Beta.

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"Our volunteers have absolutely loved the new layout and on the day we switched from Legacy to New we nearly quadrupled our contact rate" - Sam Sobolov, Pallone for New Jersey

What’s New in the NewTalk Beta?

The short answer is everything. But here’s some specifics: 

• Improved UX/UI: NewTalk features a modern, intuitive UI for callers, which they can access via  their phone or VOIP.  . And we’ve overhauled the admin tools too –we can’t wait for you to see how easy it is to build scripts in this thing!

• New Infrastructure: NewTalk is built on entirely new infrastructure to increase stability and reliability. For those familiar with Legacy ThruTalk, that means no more LiveVox!   

• Unified Platform: Two words: one login. With NewTalk, gone are the days of tabbing between ThruTalk and ThruText to manage your outreach program, or reminding volunteers of multiple logins. Now, one sign-on gets you into one platform where both tools are available. This not only means managing your outreach program from one tab, but also that Admins can use the “Group” feature to upload shared lists for both Talk and Text.

• Real-time Lists and Dials Visibility: Admins can now monitor which lists are being called, how many dials remain on that list, and which lists are next.We can hear our ThruTalk veterans breathing a collective sigh of relief right this minute and we want you to know, this one’s for you. 

• VAN Group and Question Import – In NewTalk Beta you can import lists and survey questions / activist codes from VAN using an API key. We’re still putting the finishing touches on the final component of our VAN sync, exporting results in real time via API, which will be ready very soon!   

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Along with all that’s new, there’s one unique behind-the-scenes feature we are bringing over from Legacy Talk that we want to highlight: 

• Manual Dial-Pacing: We have highly trained humans monitoring your dial pacing to minimize wait times and drops. This allows ThruTalk to consistently generate 250+ dials / caller / hour . We’ve got a whole explainer on this coming your way next month, so stay tuned.

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“The platform is easy to use and the support has been excellent!!” Jay Williams, Director, Clean Up Oklahoma

What Can I Expect Later On?

There’s a few things we’re still working on for this cycle, and we want to be transparent about what you can expect to see a little further down the road this year. This includes:

• VAN export:  Sync data collected in ThruTalk to VAN via API 
• Call forwarding: Send all incoming calls to an organizational number 
• Custom variables in scripts: To make it easier for callers to have more detailed conversations 
• Strike lists: Upload one time exclusion lists 

We’re working tirelessly to roll out a full feature set for NewTalk and will keep you updated as we introduce more features into the tool. But if you take one thing from this entire blog post, it should be this: NewTalk Beta isn’t just a better calling tool than legacy ThruTalk, it’s a great calling tool, full stop. 

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"I found so much success with the new version of ThruTalk that I immediately shared it with three other candidates!" - Democratic Candidate for State Rep, Michigan

Great. How Do I Get Started?

I know, it’s exciting right? We’d love to get your campaign or organization up and running on NewTalk Beta today. There’s just one more thing we need to tell you: NewTalk Beta costs less than legacy ThruTalk. As long as you’re okay with keeping some extra money in your budget since we’re charging an introductory rate of 3.5 cents per dial (which will become 4.5 cents per dial September 1 and remain at that rate after), we’d love to help you get started today.

• Sign up for NewTalk Beta: if you don’t need to see the tool in action and want to request an account immediately, you can sign up here.
• See the tool in action: Spend a few minutes with our team walking through the tool in real time to get a feel for the platform and get your questions answered.

Some Final Thoughts

We try not to be too precious about our work, and building this new dialer is partly just a software company making our software better. But it’s also about our deep connection to the progressive movement and our role in it. We are proud of the value Legacy ThruTalk has provided since 2018. But we built NewTalk because we believed our clients and the movement deserved something better. We know we can’t fix everything in this broken world. But we can deliver products that make it easier for the “fixers” among us to work better, faster, and more efficiently. We hope this helps you do that. Happy calling.

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