First of all, a "Campaigning for Dummies" reference would be a great idea. I imagine this dealing as much with how to run a simple campaign as it does with how to use Advokit. Is that what you picture?

Some concepts:

First, the "campaign > operation > team > sub-team > ..." organizational structure in Advokit produces a hierarchical kind of organizational chart that may be familiar to anyone in a corporation or large organization, or at least one not difficult to imagine. Since a campaign organization involves a lot of top-down and bottom-up kinds of flows, of dispersion-down and aggregation-up of information, of responsibility, authority, etc, it seemed to make sense to design Advokit to model a campaign organization this way.

Beyond that, we looked at what kinds of activities a campaign actually does, and how to design functionality that would support those activities on top of the organizational model. One of the most central campaign activities is managing contacts with voters - to identify supporters and then to get them to vote - and that is what we concentrated on in designing Advokit. Since we want to approach our voter pool systematically to avoid wasted effort, we needed a way to divide up the work, while preventing duplication.

An "operation" is intended as the level of a campaign that has access to the entire voter pool. But within an operation, there can be no duplication of voter contact work. Once a voter has been put onto a contact list anywhere in an operation, that voter cannot be put onto another contact list within that operation.

A couple pointers for now...

So, if you want to have two different kinds of activities, possibly contacting the same voters at the same time, you would probably decide to create two operations to do that. For example, you might want to have a door to door precinct-walking operation and a completely separate phone-banking operation.

You can also set up an operation purely for organizational purposes. For example, if you are using the task creation and handling functions, I would recommend that you set up an operation that serves only for holding the team(s) and jobs that handle those tasks. That way, you (as a campaign leader or operation leader) can easily manage this aspect of your campaign from one place.

n/t