First Steps: Job-Types

Before any activist jobs can be created on teams and before any users can be plugged into activist jobs, the campaign leader must define one or more activist job types. By defining job types, a campaign leader determines what different kinds of activists will be expected to do and what functions they will have available when they log on to Advokit. (A job type is not the same thing as a job. A job can be thought of as an instance of a job type on a particular team.)

Job types are critical to determining how your campaign uses Advokit, and creating them in such a way as to accurately describe what is expected and to provide the tools for the work you want your activists to be doing is one of the most important steps in setting up a campaign in Advokit. Defining your job types should be part-and-parcel with your overall campaign strategy. If you are unsure how to set up your job types, and even if you think you are sure, you may want to consider an early "testing phase", where you unleash a limited number of activists in order to guage the way you have things set up, prior to a wider rollout. This period would also give you a chance to tune other things like your questionnaires, your voter filters, etc.

Note that what we are discussing here are activist job types. There is also such a thing as a leader job type, which is what applies when you are given a job as a leader of a team, operation or the campaign. Leader job types do not have any configuration options and are not listed among these configurable job types - they are already "built-in".

There are two classes of activist job types: voter-contact and task-handling.

  • Voter-contact jobs initiate contact with voters, typically to obtain information and/or pursuade them to do something (e.g. go vote). There are many options for configuring how voter-contact jobs work: how they get the names of voters to contact; and what kinds of information they can see or record on their contact sheet when they contact a voter.
  • Task-handling jobs respond to requests for some kind of action that are generated through voter-contacts. A typical example would be when a voter-contact activist talks to a voter and determines that the voter should be sent some campaign literature. The voter-contact activist could create a task that instructs someone in the campaign to send the literature to the voter. A task-handling activist would then handle that request. Task handling jobs do not have lists of voters to contact. Rather, all instances of a particular task-handling job type, regardless of where they are in the team structure of the campaign, share responsibility for a list of pending tasks.
Voter-contact job types

Voter-contact jobs initiate contact with voters and are the campaign's primary way to interact with voters. Voter-contact job type definitions control basically three things:

  1. How an activist gets the names of voters to contact
  2. What options an activist has for managing his/her "portfolio" of voters to contact (contact lists)
  3. What information is visible and what privileges an activist may have when he or she pulls up a contact sheet for a given voter.

Advokit supports three scenarios for how activists get the names of voters to contact:

  1. one-click get-next-voter or household which automatically selects one name from the voter pool and immediately brings up a contact sheet for that voter or household (no contact list)
  2. one-click addition of a set number of automatically selected names from the voter pool to an existing or new contact list
  3. searching by name, address or other attributes of voters and then browsing the search results to manually add names to a contact list

Which scenario(s) or variations on them you choose for your campaign will depend upon a number of considerations, some having to do with campaign strategy, some having to do with how to utilize your campaign's human resources most effectively. Advokit provides three preset activist job types that provide a good starting point, and correlate with the three scenarios just listed. They are shown as "online phone banker", "offline phone banker" and "friends and neighbors" in a drop down menu on the add and edit job type screens.

A menu on the add/edit job type page shows three preset voter contact job types - "online phone banker", "offline phone banker" and "friends and neighbors" - in addition to task handler job types corresponding to the task types currently defined.

Online phone banker:

A phone banker is an activist who calls voters that have been assigned to him/her by the campaign. An online phone banker is one who works at computer that is connected to the internet while making phone calls. An online phone banker has no need to manage contact lists, and is simply presented with one voter or household at a time to call (if you have multiple voters at the same phone number, we strongly recommend that you enable the "Select all voters in household" option, otherwise you can have different activists trying to call different voters at the same number at the same time or in rapid succession). To get a new voter or new household, the activist clicks a "Get next voter" (or "Get next household") link. Since there are no contact lists to manage, the "online phone banker" job type presents the simplest interface to the user.

Offline phone banker:

An offline phone banker is an activist who is given a list of voters to call - a contact list. Though he or she could work through her list of voters while working on a computer, there is no requirement to do so, and could just as readily work from a printed copy of the list. Also, since he or she is not tethered to a computer, there is no real reason he or she should be tethered to the phone either. So notwithstanding the "phone banker" name we gave this preset job type, this activist could take the printed contact list and use it to walk door to door. In either case, anyone who works offline will need to have the results of their voter contact work entered into Advokit in a reasonably timely fashion. There is no requirement that contact results need to be recorded by the activist. You could decide to have the team leader or another activist stand-in for the activist, when creating the list of voters to contact, and/or when entering the results afterwards. In this way, you can effectively utilize volunteers without requiring them to be technologically-abled.

Friends and neighbors:

A friends and neighbors activist is instructed to create a contact list of people he or she knows personally or with whom he or she otherwise has some kind of affinity (e.g. neighbors, co-workers, etc). Since there is no practical way that an automatic system can be devised to create such a list for each activist, Advokit provides search capabilities to enable activists to find individuals by name, address, or other attributes. The activist browses the search results and either manually selects individual names (or households), or chooses a selected number of the voters found by the search, to add to a contact list. Because of the need for friends and neighbors activists to use the search tools in Advokit to find particular voters, this is not a role that is performed performed by persons who are not technology-abled. At the very least, the activist needs to have their contact list creation directly facilitated by someone, e.g. a team leader. The activist could meet with that person who has an internet-connected computer, and together perform the searches to build a contact list and, later, enter the results of their contacts.

Comment: One of the most important questions a campaign leader faces with respect to conducting voter contact is one of quantity vs. quality. Voters contacted by personal friends are at least an order of magnitude more likely to be identified as a supporter than those contacted by someone they don't know. If you could have every voter in your target population contacted by a close personal friend, clearly that would be preferable to each voter receiving a call from a rank stranger. If your activists come from the same community as the voters that are your target population, and if your objective is to identify the maximum number of supporters for your cause as possible, then a strong case can be made for using a "friend to friend" approach, where your activists are instructed to search out their friends and neighbors to contact. Though they probably will not contact nearly as many voters as compared with a phone banking or precinct walking style operation, it is quite likely that each activist will identify at least as many supporters. Obviously this approach depends upon there being a pool of voters who have some kind of social connection with your pool of activists. But it does not to be an either-or proposition. You could start your campaign with a "cherry-picking" phase where your activists are told to build contact lists of people they know, perhaps also instructing them to recruit friends to become activists in the campaign at the same time. Later, you can tell them to use automated methods to create new contact lists in order to achieve more systematic coverage of the voter pool.

The three presets I have just described provide a starting point for defining your job types based on general functional requirements. Once you have selected one of those preset configurations, you will need to carefully adjust all the individual options in light of your own requirements. Some options have to do with how activists get the names of voters to contact and how they manage their contact lists. Other options have to do with what privileges they have with voter information, whether they can recruit a voter to become an activist. Choosing different presets will cause the add/edit job types screen to show different sets of options, as is explained below.

Task-handler job types

Task-handling jobs respond to requests for some kind of action that are generated through voter-contacts. A typical example would be when a voter-contact activist talks to a voter and determines that the voter should be sent some campaign literature. The voter-contact activist could create a task that instructs someone in the campaign to send the literature to the voter. A task-handling activist would then handle that request. Task handling jobs do not have lists of voters to contact. Rather, all instances of a particular task-handling job type, regardless of where they are in the team structure of the campaign, share responsibility for a list of pending tasks.

There is no configuration available for task-handler job types. You just select the task that this job type will handle from the list in the available presets menu (you need to have first created the task types by clicking Configure > Task Types).

Creating a new job type

To create a new job type, first, click on Configure > Job Types

This brings up a browse job definitions screen, which displays any job types that you have already created. Click on the "Add a new type of job" link.

Here is what the add job type screen looks like before you have entered anything.

The only required elements in this form are a title for the job type and a selection from one of the available presets. The description that you provide, which will appear on the activist's job details page, should clearly explain the expectations for activists who have this type of job.

If your campaign utilizes Advokit's self-registration feature, you will probably want to enter information into the Ad Title and Ad Body fields. This information will appear when the prospective registrant views the list of available jobs. The Description and the Ad Body are both composed as WYSIWYG HTML, using the TinyMCE Editor forms.

When you select one of the available presets, options that are appropriate for that job type will appear. Here are four examples.

 

A task handler job has no configuration options.
   
Because the "online phone banker" type of job does not have contact lists, options relating to contact lists do not appear.
Select all voters in household - When the job is of the "online phone banker" type, enabling this setting causes the available cohabitants of the current voter to be listed on the contact sheet for that voter. Enabling this option is highly recommended for online phone banker jobs for a couple reasons. 1) If someone else in the household answers the phone, the activist can quickly switch to the contact sheet for that person by clicking on their name on the contact sheet. 2) It prevents another activist from getting another member of the household to call at the same time.
Default voter recontact interval (days) - When an activist clicks on the link on the contact list to "record unsuccessful or incomplete contact attempt", a "recontact in __ days" form is displayed. This option sets the default value that appears in that form.
Enable basic voter editing - If this option is checked, the activist will be permitted to edit name, address, and a few other fields for the voter. A pencil button appears on the contact sheet.
Enable advanced voter editing - If this option is checked, the activist will be allowed to edit all information about the voter, as well as mark the voter as deceased or moved away. A pencil button appears on the contact sheet.
Enable adding new voters - If checked, Actions > Add Voters is enabled for the activist.
Enable recruiting of voters to be activists - If checked, the activist can give the voter an account on the system by clicking the key button (). Note that the voter is not given a job, and will be unable to log in until a leader does put him or her into a job.
Enable phone number editing - If checked, voter phone numbers and email are editable directly on the contact sheet.
Enable creating and viewing followups - Followups are another way of recording comments and information about a voter. They do not work very well and are not very useful, so unless you have a specific need to use followups, it's probably best to leave this option unchecked.
Enable creating and viewing tasks - If your campaign wants activists in this job type to be able to create tasks that are followed up by other activists in a task-handling role, check this option.
Optional Display - You may select up to two optional fields that will be displayed on the contact sheet. For example you could display a voter's occupation and party affiliation.
   
Offline phone banker and friends and neighbors jobs have contact lists. There are several options for configuring settings for contact lists in addition to the options described above. Offline phone bankers, by default, have a single contact list, use the one-click method for adding voters to the contact list, and do not use voter searching.
Enable multiple contact lists - If checked, the activist can create and delete contact lists. Otherwise, they have exactly one list and cannot delete it.
Enable one-click adding new voters to contact list (with option to set the number to be added with each click) - This provides a quick way for activists to get a batch of voters to call from the voter pool.
Enable searching voters to add to contact list - When this option is enabled, a search field appears in the activist's sidebar where a voter name or street may be entered. There is also an "advanced search" link that connects to more powerful searching tools.
Auto populate contact list when filling this job (with option to set the number of voters that are automatically populated) - When an activist is added to this job for the first time, if this option is enabled, the selected number of voters will be added to a contact list on that job. This is particularly useful if you wish to have activists getting started making calls with little or no intervention by leaders. When they log on for the first time, they will already find a contact list of voters to call.
Days of inactivity before voters are removed from contact list - This option does not work and may be ignored.
Max number of voters that can be on contact lists for this job - When a voter is on a contact list, they are unavailble to be contacted by activist elsewhere in the operation. It is probably wise to set this at a fairly high number, but not astronomical, in case you have an activist who intentionally or inadvertantly tries to grab your entire voter pool.
   
Friends and neighbors jobs are identical to offline phone banker jobs except that they have different options enabled by default. Multiple contact lists and voter searching are enabled by default.