Campaign software for school board candidates

There are 13,318 regular public school districts in the United States operating 98,577 public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Nearly every district is governed by an elected board, which makes trustee one of the most common elected offices in the country. What the job involves is at /learn/what-does-a-school-board-do.

Seats come in three shapes: at-large (the whole district votes), trustee-area or single-member district (only that area votes), and hybrid (you live in an area, the whole district votes). An at-large race in a large district is a name-recognition race; a single trustee area is often small enough to knock most of the likely voters yourself.

In most states the school board ballot carries no party label, so endorsements from the teachers' association, the local paper, and neighborhood groups carry more weight than they would in a partisan race. A handful of states do put parties on the school board ballot; check your state's guide at /run-for-office.

Turnout is the defining number. Texas is a useful yardstick because the Secretary of State publishes every statewide figure: the November 2024 presidential election drew 61.15% of registered voters, while the odd-year November 2023 election drew 14.43%. A May school election with nothing statewide on the ballot is usually smaller again, and the people who show up are disproportionately habitual voters. Vote history, not demographics, is the first cut in your universe.

You need a voter file with vote history before you knock a door. In most states the county elections office or the Secretary of State sells one to candidates at modest cost; the state guides at /run-for-office say who sells it and what it costs, and /learn/how-to-read-a-voter-file explains the columns.

Upload it as a CSV. Column mapping is automatic for the common formats (state exports, NGP VAN exports, and L2, i360, and Aristotle subsets), and the importer dedupes to one resolved record per voter. The file lives in a silo that belongs to your campaign alone, enforced in the database with row-level security.

Then cut the universe by history. Structured search filters on precinct, ZIP, district, party, and vote history; on the Campaign tier you can also type 'voters in trustee area 3 who voted in at least two of the last three May elections' and save the result as a list. Three lists cover most school board races: habitual local voters, presidential-year-only voters, and your own supporters.

Parent networks rarely show up in a county file: vendor extracts sometimes flag households with children, county files do not. Build that universe from the lists you already have (booster clubs, PTA rosters, youth sports) and from your public volunteer sign-up form, then tag those voters so the tag follows them into every walk list and text list.

Most school board campaigns are a candidate, a treasurer, and a few friends. This is what that team can finish in two weeks, in the order that keeps the later steps from stalling.

• Request access and take the onboarding call. The workspace is set up for you with the office, district, and election date, and you have dashboard access on day one.
• Get the voter file from the county or state and import it. Confirm the vote history columns mapped before building any list.
• Set the jurisdiction and voter universe in settings so counts and walk generation stay inside the district.
• Build the habitual-voter list and a supporters list. Write the door script and a survey with the two or three questions you will act on: support level, top issue, yard sign.
• Invite your team by email or share link. Volunteers get the iOS and Android app links in the invite.
• Start 10DLC registration now, even if you will not text for a month. Nothing sends until it is approved.
• Drop your first yard-sign pins on the map and assign an installer.

Walk generation is a four-step wizard: pick a saved list, configure, preview, create. Split by proximity to carve the list into walkable blocks of a size you choose (the default is about 150 doors; the range is 30 to 500), or split by voter precinct to get one walk per precinct, the natural unit when you hand turf to a captain. Choose knock-and-talk, where the walker runs the script and survey at each door, or door-hanger-only, where the app just records the drop.

Each walk moves through a lifecycle (draft, ready, assigned, in progress, completed), and you decide who can walk it: hand-assigned, open for any volunteer to claim, or restricted to a named list. Walkers use the iOS or Android app, or a browser link if they have not installed it. Visits are GPS-verified, survey answers sync as they are captured, the live map shows every walker, and two walkers on one walk split the doors.

One honest detail: assigning a walker fires a push notification to the app and nothing else. A volunteer who has not installed the app will not know they were assigned until you tell them.

Results land on the voter record as campaign-scoped annotations, so the supporter you found on Tuesday is in Wednesday's yard-sign list and October's turnout list without anyone retyping a clipboard. The voters-reached report shows every touch by channel and day. Technique is at /learn/door-knocking-guide-for-local-campaigns.

Political texting is regulated twice over. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, autodialed or prerecorded texts to a cell phone require prior express consent, with statutory damages of $500 per violation and up to $1,500 when willful. And the carriers require anyone texting from 10-digit numbers to register a brand and a campaign through The Campaign Registry before a message is delivered.

Political senders are also vetted by Campaign Verify, a nonpartisan nonprofit that verifies candidates and committees registered with the FEC or a state, local, or tribal election authority; a school board candidate on the ballot qualifies. It says it decides submissions within minutes to two business days; a mailed PIN takes 5 to 10 business days. The registration wizard in Culper walks you through it, and nothing sends until the carriers approve.

Once registered, outreach texts a saved list with templates and delivery tracking and requires documented consent for every number, and peer-to-peer texting lets volunteers work a queue one voter and one button press at a time, with no send-to-all button. Every STOP is honored instantly and lands on a global suppression list shared by every campaign on the platform, which no campaign can override. The full rules are at /learn/political-texting-rules-tcpa-10dlc.

Yard signs are the one form of paid visibility most school board campaigns can afford, and they are a logistics problem. The Outdoor page is a map: search an address or click to drop a sign, record its size and a note, and assign who installs it and who removes it after the election; the removal deadline defaults to the Sunday after election day.

Signs move through pending, placed, collected, and repair, so a knocked-down 4x8 at the busy intersection is a status change, not a text thread. Volunteers photograph placements from the phone; managers group signs into named sign-drop routes with a Google Maps link and an SMS-ready message. Volunteers can also log opposition signs and yards flying a flag, and staff can turn the flag list into a voter list to walk.

Sign placements count on the volunteer leaderboard alongside doors, surveys, and events. A parent who will never knock a door will often put up forty signs.

A school board race is won by doing three things well, not nine things badly. Leave these alone until the basics are running.

• Skip buying a commercial voter extract for the whole county when your trustee area is a fraction of it. The county file with vote history is usually enough for a first cycle.
• Skip email blasts to the roll. County files rarely carry usable email addresses, and cold email does not move school board votes. Email the people who gave you their address.
• Skip polls by text in a small trustee area. The opt-in sample will be too small to tell you anything a dozen door conversations will not.
• Skip phone banking until 10DLC and voice setup are done and you have run out of doors.
• Skip the plain-English query layer if your file has no vote history; there is nothing for it to find. Fix the file first.

Every claim on this page is true of the product today. These are the things it does not do, so you can budget for them elsewhere.

• It does not come with a voter file for your district. You obtain the file from your county or state and upload it; the state guides at /run-for-office explain how.
• It does not file your campaign finance reports or candidate paperwork. See /learn/campaign-finance-basics-for-local-candidates for what those involve.
• It does not design your mail or plan a mail program. It can print and mail a piece you design to a saved list, with a quote first, and it logs mail you produced elsewhere so the touch counts.
• It does not build your website. It gives you a public campaign page and a volunteer sign-up form.
• It does not text anyone until 10DLC registration is approved. There is no shortcut.
• It does not process online donations yet. Stripe Connect payouts and embeddable donation widgets are in development; confirm timing on the onboarding call, and use Anedot, ActBlue, or WinRed for online contributions in the meantime.
• Pricing is not on the website. There are three tiers (Challenger for a first-time candidate with up to three volunteers, Campaign for a race with a real team, and Committee for organizations running several campaigns), and the number is set after a short onboarding call.

1. 1.NCES Digest of Education Statistics, Table 214.10: number of public school districts (13,318 regular districts, 2022-23)
2. 2.NCES Fast Facts: educational institutions (98,577 public schools, 2020-21)
3. 3.Texas Secretary of State: turnout and voter registration figures, 1970-current (Nov 2024 61.15%, Nov 2023 14.43%)
4. 4.47 U.S.C. § 227, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (consent requirement and statutory damages), Legal Information Institute
5. 5.Campaign Verify: political sender vetting for 10DLC (eligibility and approval timelines)
6. 6.The Campaign Registry: 10DLC brand and campaign registration