Advokit's primary mechanism for gathering information from voter contacts is through questionnaires. Questionnaires appear on contact sheets as a series of questions that you define (usually). Voter contact status is a function of questionnaire completion status - when all questionnaires are completed, then the voter contact status is considered completed.

-- a typical questionnaire as it appears on the voter's contact sheet

Some things to know about questionnaires:

• A questionnaire can have zero, or one or more questions (a questionnaire without questions is considered a "checkbox questionnaire", which means that the only information you are interested in is whether it is completed - more information is provided below).
• A questionnaire is created on a team, where it applies to that team and any teams below it. Typically, a questionnaire would be created on an operation, and would apply to all teams in that operation. A questionnaire can only be edited on the team were it was created, and only by a leader with rights for that team.
• There can be more than one questionnaire applicable on a team, either because there is more than one questionnaire defined on the team, or because questionnaires from above that team "trickle down".
• When questionnaires are created, they are disabled by default. A questionnaire must be enabled in order to appear on contact sheets and in order to figure into voter contact status.
• Questionnaires may be made to apply to only certain voters by creating a voter filter for the questionnaire. For example you might want a 'GOTV' questionnaire to only appear if you have determined through another questionnaire that the voter supports your cause.
• Scripts can be attached to questionnaires - these are files that the activist can view or download and are typically used for things like call-scripts.

Some things to know about questions:

• There are a number of question types depending upon the type of information you want to collect. They are described in detail in the question formats section below.
• The question text is edited in a WYSIWYG HTML editor panel.
• It is possible to link individual responses to a multiple choice question to another question on the questionnaire, or to the next or previous questionnaire. When the choice is selected, the window will scroll to the "jump to" question. One type of question - a navigation question - does not record any response. It is just used to jump to the appropriate next question. Tip: It is best to keep the number of questions to a minimum
• Multiple choice questions can be configured accept just one response (the default) or to accept multiple responses. In the first case (single response), radio buttons are used; in the second case (multiple responses), check boxes are used.
• A question may have a goal number, which is used on the Progress Summary > Voter Responses page to provide a benchmark against which to display voter response performance. For example, if your objective on a question is 2,000 yes responses, then you could set the goal number as 2000.
• Each possible response on a multiple choice question can be given a defined score, which is used to count performance on that question. Numeric response questions use the value of the response for their score. Other questions simply score one (1) for any response.
• You may set completion of a question for a voter as required in order for the questionnaire to be counted as completed for that voter.

A few tips about questions - keep it simple:

• It is best to keep your questions short and to the point to avoid unecessary verbiage and space on the contact sheet. Use a separate script instead of lengthy question text to instruct your activists on what to say on the phone. Once an activist has made half a dozen calls, they will tire of scrolling through the same screen content over and over just to get to the places where they record the voter's answers.
• Keep the number of questions as small as possible. Questions should be used to collect campaign-critical information. It's OK to have just one question! It may be tempting to collect a lot of information as long as you have the voter on the phone but it will slow down your calls, frustrate your callers, and perhaps most importantly, antagonize the voter on the other end.
• Though Advokit supports navigation questions and jump-to links from multiple-choice questions to create branching lines of questioning (and even loops!), unless the core purpose of your contact with voters really is to perform extensive gathering of information, it is best to avoid using branching in your questionnaire as it will at the very least require more training and oversight of activists and will substantially increase the amount of time and work needed per voter.

1. Click the Questionnaires tab on the team where you want to create the questionnaire
   
   
2. Click 'ADD QUESTIONNAIRE' and give the new questionnaire a name (e.g. "Supporter Identification").
   
   
3. Click the 'ADD QUESTION' link if you want to add questions
   
   

When you are ready to have the questionnaire appear on contact sheets, be sure to activate it by clicking on the ACTIVATE link!

 

This is what the add question form looks like:

You will need to select the question format, type in the text of your question, and change any options as appropriate.

Question formats:

Multiple choice questions can have two or more possible answers. Yes/No, True/False, Support, Comparative, and Frequency are simply preset kinds of multiple choice questions. In any case, you can add, remove and edit answers after creating the question. Short Text questions accept text responses up to around 50 characters in a one-line text field. Long Text questions accept longer responses in a multi-line text box. Integer, Decimal Number, and Currency questions take numbers as responses in a text field. Date questions utilize a date-picker popup window. Voter Data questions allow an activist to edit intrinsic voter data from a question on a contact sheet instead of requiring that he or she have voter editing privileges and use the edit voter screen. When this question type is selected, the Voter Data Field menu to the right will become enabled, allowing you to select from a dozen or so voter data fields. Navigation questions can be used to jump to another question on the questionnaire, depending upon which "answer" is chosen. No response is recorded to a navigation question - it is just used to move around in a questionnaire.

Question options:

• Possible answers - For multiple choice questions, indicate the number of answer choices you will be defining in the next step.
• Additional answers - If you want to add answers to an already existing multiple choice question, enter the number of answers you want to add here. When you click "apply changes", you will be taken to a screen where you can define those answers.
• Goal Number - Used when graphically displaying the campaign's performance on this question.
• Accept multiple responses - If this option is checked, then instead of a multiple-choice question appearing as a set of radio buttons where only one answer may be selected, it will appear as several check-boxes, any number of which may be checked and recorded as the voter's response.
• Require a response - When this option is checked, the questionnaire will be considered unfinished and the contact status of the voter will not be displayed as completed until a response is recorded for this question (note that this is not retroactive unless the reset contact status option is checked).
• Display progress - If checked, this option causes reporting on this question to appear on the Progress Summary > Voter Responses page.
• Reset voter contact status - If this is checked, when you apply these changes, all voters that this questionnaire applies to and who may have been regarded as "contacted" will have their contact status reset to be "not contacted".

In this example, we're creating a simple yes/no question: "Do you support our cause?"

After clicking "Add New Question" the Edit question form appears, which looks very much like the screen we just saw, except that now we see our answers in a form at the bottom of the page.

Here we can

• Modify the answer text
• Set the score that will be counted each time this response is recorded for a voter
• Change the order of the answers (clicking on the small up and down indicators)
• Select a jump-to question
• Delete an answer

We can also add answers by entering a number in the additional answers field near the top of the form

In all cases, click the "Apply Changes" button to save your changes.

After you have added a question or two, your team's Questionnaires tab might look something like this...

There are a number of links and buttons. For questions, you can...

• Change the order of questions on the questionnaire by clicking on the up and down indicators (small greenish triangles).
• Click on the question to edit it
• Click on the 'x' to the right of a question to delete it.

For questionnaires, you can...

• Click on 'EDIT' to modify its properties, voter filters and scripts.
• Click on 'ACTIVATE' to make the questionnaire active and able to appear on contact sheets.
• Click on 'DELETE' to remove the questionnaire and all its questions.

If you click 'EDIT', you will see a screen like this

On this screen you can

• Edit the name or description of the questionnaire.
• Turn on reporting of the number of questionnaires completed, and also, optionally, provide a goal number for the number of questionnaires you want to complete.
• Add/edit/delete voter filters.
• Add/edit/delete questionnaire scripts.

If you would like a questionnaire to appear on contact sheets for only certain voters, you can create and apply a voter filter to that questionnaire. You can make a voter filter as simple or as sophisticated as you like. For example, you could have a filter that displays questionnaires only for voters registered in a particular party. Or you can have a filter that only allows a questionnaire to appear for voters who have answered a particular way on another questionnaire!

To add a voter filter to a questionnaire, click on the 'ADD' link for voter filters. This will bring up the same "filter builder" interface that is used for creating voter filters for teams and jobs.

For detailed information on building a voter filter, see the help topic on Voter Filters.

Once a questionnaire voter filter has been created, there will be links on the questionnaire properties page to edit (using the filter builder interface), edit sql (where you directly edit the database query), and to delete it.

A questionnaire script is perhaps not clearly named since it is simply a way to make a link appear on a questionnaire that lets the activist view or download a file that you have uploaded to the server. The "script" idea comes from the fact that campaigns typically have a need to provide the activist with a call script which they follow when they call a voter. However, any kind of file may be attached to a questionnaire. If it is a type of file that is viewable in the user's browser, it will be displayed. Otherwise the user will be asked if he or she wishes to download it.

Note: It is usually best to create a script file in a format that any user's browser can display, rather than requiring that they download the file and open it in a particular application. Avoid using MS Word (*.doc) files, for example. The safest choices are plain text (*.txt) and html (*.htm, *.html). PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) files are also very good, though there are some rare users who do can not read them.

As can be seen above, a "script" link appears on the questionnaire when there are one or more files attached to it. To attach a file to a questionnaire, go to the team where the questionnaire was created; click the Questionnaires tab; click on the EDIT link for the questionnaire; then click "ADD A SCRIPT" on the edit-questionnaire page. You will now see a form that looks like this...

Give the script a name, an (optional) description, and click the "Browse..." button. This brings up a file selection window which you can use to find the file that you want to attach. Finally, click "Add New Script". The script attachment will be created and the file will be uploaded to the server.

Now when the activist opens up the questionnaire for a voter, the "script" link will appear. Clicking on it will bring up a popup window that lists the attachments to the questionnaire, like this...

When the activist clicks on the link for the attachment, if the file is displayable by his or her browser, it will display in a new popup window. Otherwise, a dialog box will appear asking if the user would like to download the file.

 

Sometimes. the only thing you want to know is whether contact was made with the voter. A common example is the get out the vote call on election day. You're not gathering any information, so there are no questions to ask. A way to approach this in Advokit is to create a questionnaire that has no questions! When you do so, it will appear on contact sheets like this...

Furthermore, if this is the only questionnaire remaining to do for this voter, then a checkbox will appear at the top of the contact sheet next to the voter's name. Clicking it will immediately mark the voter as "done".

Also, again if this is the only remaining incomplete questionnaire for the voter, there will be a checkbox next to the voter's name on the contact list which likewise works to mark the voter as "done" when it is clicked.

With this feature, it is possible to rapidly work through a contact list without needing to pull up contact sheets for each voter that is called.