How a 2019 presidential campaign used Zelos to coordinate a thousand volunteers

How Ingrida Šimonytė uses Zelos

In 2019, Ingrida Šimonytė ran for president of Lithuania as an independent. Independent candidacies start at a structural disadvantage: no party machine, no inherited volunteer base, no established outreach infrastructure. The campaign had to build all of that from scratch.

The volunteer side of the operation ran on Zelos. Over the course of the race, hundreds volunteers signed up on the app, with a core roster of around 600 active on tasks at any time. They used Zelos to find work, complete their training, and stay in sync with the campaign team. Šimonytė won the primaries and finished second in the final election, with no party backing to draw on.

Tasks ran from nationwide nomination-signature collection through door-to-door canvassing and leaflet delivery to organising town halls with local figures. Training materials were attached directly to task descriptions, removing the need for separate training events. Volunteers used Zelos on Android, iOS, or web to find work that fit their skills and schedule.

The challenge

Independent presidential campaigns operate without the infrastructure that party-backed campaigns inherit. There is no existing volunteer base to call on, no established phone tree, no party-issued training programme, no permanent regional staff. The campaign manager has to build all of it inside the race window.

Šimonytė’s campaign needed to coordinate a thousand volunteers across the country on a presidential timeline. The work was a mix of physical and digital: collecting nomination signatures, canvassing door-to-door, delivering leaflets, organising town halls with local figures, and running digital outreach. Volunteers needed to know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it well.

Training is normally a heavy logistical lift. Arranging events, booking spaces, sending invitations, and re-explaining details by email runs a small admin team into the ground. A core campaign team cannot scale that approach to 800 people in the months an election cycle allows.

Communication had to flow in three directions. Campaign team to the volunteer base for tasks and instructions. Segmented announcements to specific volunteer groups by region or task type. Feedback from volunteers back to the campaign team.

The solution

The campaign used Zelos as the central coordination app for political campaign volunteer management. The campaign team posted tasks with full descriptions. Training materials, instructions, and context all lived inside the task itself, so volunteers could read what to do and how to do it without attending a separate training event or sifting through email threads.

Zelos’s segmentation feature let the team target different groups of volunteers with different tasks. Canvassers in one region got their work. Signature collectors in another got theirs. Digital outreach volunteers got a separate task list entirely. Group-targeted notifications kept the noise down for individual volunteers, so each person saw only the tasks relevant to them.

Volunteers used Zelos on Android, iOS, or web. They could browse tasks, claim the ones that fit their skills and availability, and complete them in the field. Activity proofs (photos of completed leaflet drops, signature counts, event sign-in sheets) could be uploaded directly into the task without changing apps.

Feedback flowed back to the campaign team through the same interface. When something was unclear, or a tactic was not working, the campaign manager heard about it inside Zelos rather than across a dozen separate channels.

The results

Tasks completed spanned the full mix of campaign work: nationwide signature collection, regional canvassing, leaflet distribution, town hall organisation, and digital outreach. The same app handled all of it without separate tools for each task type.

Šimonytė won the primaries on the back of that volunteer infrastructure. She placed second in the final round of the election, with no party backing.

The coordination model is portable. Post tasks once. Attach the training. Segment by region or skill. Let volunteers find their own work. Any independent or grassroots campaign with a small core team and a motivated volunteer base can run the same playbook.