First steps: Tasks

Frequently, when a voter has been contacted by an activist in a campaign, there may arise as a result of that contact some followup task that needs to be completed by someone else in the campaign. A common example is when a voter needs to be sent some materials by the campaign: literature or registration forms, perhaps, where it makes sense to keep inventory and expense tracking in one place. Other common examples include: a follow up phone call from someone better equipped to respond to a voter's question; distributing lawn signs; arranging rides to the polls or child care; etc. In Advokit, these cases are best handled through Tasks.

The process of creating and handling tasks goes like this:

1. Activist contacts voter and determines need for some kind of task..
2. From the voter's contact sheet, the activist creates a task of the appropriate type, sets parameters like desired completion date and importance.
3. Another activist who has a task-handling job of a type corresponding to the type of task that was created, sees the task listed in their pending tasks list.
4. The task-handling activist performs whatever action is requested, and marks the task as completed.

To enable this to happen, there are a small number of configuration steps that must be completed first.

1. Task types must be defined
2. Corresponding task-handling job types must be defined (see documentation on job types).
3. Voter-contact activist job-types must be given the ability to create tasks (ditto).
4. Instances of task handling jobs must be created for each task type and either populated with activists, and/or performed by a team leader as assumed jobs.

Where you put your task handling jobs in your team hierarchy is entirely up to you. Tasks are not sensitive to organizational structure - they will appear on the pending tasks list for any job of that task-handler job type, regardless of where the task handler job is located, or where the voter-contact job was that created the task. One good practice is to create a separate operation just for task-handling jobs. That way, the supervisory relationships for task handlers are consistent and clear, and they do not get lost in the rest of your organizational structure.