Advokit is a web application that helps small to medium-sized grassroots campaigns conduct carefully managed yet completely decentralized voter contact, supporter identification and get-out-the-vote activities. Your volunteer activists and leaders can work from any internet connected computer, whether it be at campaign headquarters, in their home or office or school, or anywhere else. They can get names of voters to contact one at a time, or create contact lists that can be printed out and used away from any computer., After speaking to each voter, they can record information from that conversation (typically by filling out a questionnaire). Leaders can recruit and organize their activists into teams, give them jobs and monitor their efforts in real-time.

Advokit is free, open source software that anyone can download and deploy in support of their political efforts. It is licensed under the Affero General Public License. The requirements to install and run Advokit for a small to medium-sized campaign are reasonable: a web server with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. In addition, a unix shell-account and Perl are required for running the voter data import utility (see the online documentation at advokit.net, or the read me documentation included with the advokit installer for detailed system requirements). Finally, Advokit is not very useful without a database of voters - you will need to obtain voter data for your target population. Countless web hosting companies offer hosting packages adequate to run a modest Advokit campaign of, say, 50,000 voters and 50 users, often costing as little as a few dollars per month.

There are almost as many kinds of campaigns as there are campaigns. Advokit supports a wealth of organizing and voter outreach scenarios, which means that it is extremely important to set up Advokit for the way you want to conduct your campaign. It also means that there will never be a perfect fit to your expectations. If you are expecting Advokit to be a functional equivalent to to some commercial software system that you have used before, you will quickly lose that misaprehension as you start to work with it! Advokit is what it is, and while it is quite powerful and adaptable, and while it's open source code can be freely tinkered with, it will definitely pay to understand how Advokit is designed to work before you sprint out of the starting blocks. In this guide we will not only try to describe in detail how Advokit can be made to work for you, but we will also describe some typical campaign scenarios and detail some best-practices for organizing with Advokit for each of those scenarios. Take the time to read this guide carefully so that you understand how Advokit can best be used to suit your campaign!

How long will it take to get Advokit set up before you can start handing out user accounts and making phone calls? There is not a simple answer to this question since every campaign is different; much depends upon your familiarity with the options that you will need to choose among when configuring your campaign in Advokit; and of course a lot depends upon how well you understand what you need to do politically and organizationally to have a successful campaign. There is no substitute for experience in this regard! But in all cases there are several boiler-plate configuration steps that need to be performed, such as configuring job types, defining tasks and tags, setting up a few top-level teams, creating questionnaires, adding filters to teams, etc. These things can easily be done in well under an hour if you know exactly what you need to do. However, since you're reading this guide we can probably assume that you are still learning! In that case, it's probably a good idea to allot yourself at least several days to work out your configuration, perhaps starting with a small number of core volunteers using the system, before you promise a high number of phone calls being made!

In the first part of this guide, we will introduce you to how Advokit can work in a simple campaign. In the second part we will methodically survey the functionality of Advokit. Finally, we will consider a few campaign scenarios, and suggest some best practices with Advokit that can be used to support them. In appendix A, we provide a checklist of decisions to make and configurations to perform that any campaign leader will need to go through when setting up Advokit to run a campaign.

This guide is intended for prospective campaign organizers who would like to use Advokit, or are actively preparing to do so. However...

• This is not a guide to installing and trouble-shooting Advokit installations. We assume that you already have a clean, working installation of Advokit. For information on installing Advokit, performance considerations, etc, consult documentation, user forums and email listservs found at www.advokit.net.
• This is not a guide to finding, preparing, and loading voter data (though we do discuss some kinds of voter data you may want for different campaign scenarios). We recommend that you familiarize yourself with public and private sources of voter data in your area of interest. In many places, public voter data is available to political campaigns for free or at low cost.