CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're using CiviCRM for a very small parcel tax election (local school district about 1200 voters).  We have imported the voter list, and have spent considerable time adding tags and notes to the voters (a.k.a. contacts), and adding those community member who are not voters.

The way we'll run most of the campaign is to assign the voters to about 40-70 volunteers, initially mostly by geography (street address, or proximity); typically the volunteer is a close neighbor.  Fundamentally, we want every voter to be contacted a few times by their assigned volunteer.  Some of the volunteers are computer-savvy and have internet access, and can be CiviCRM users; some will work only using printed or e-mailed lists, and the database updates are then done by other volunteers (who are CiviCRM users).  Obviously, all the volunteers are also in the database as contacts.  Given that the campaign will last for many months, we expect that we'll have to change volunteers occasionally, and reassign voters to new volunteers.

The volunteers will keep track of which voters have been contacted when.  We have tags to classify the voters by expected voting behavior (that is, their opinion on the parcel tax), and to distinguish guesses versus actual information gathered from a conversation in tags.  We also have tags to flag active opposition to our campaign, people who should not be contacted at all, and a variety of other roles such as current or former school board members, school alumni and parents, and so on.  After a volunteer speaks to a voter, they will record the information, and someone will update the tags on the voters, maybe entering notes if the voter's opinion can't be captured in a simple yes-no tag.  For important cases (like voters who want to donate to the campaign, or who want to volunteer themselves), we'll have more senior campaign volunteers (that means: me!) contact them, which can be tracked through CiviCRM activities.

What is the most efficient way to record the assignment of the contact to the volunteers?  One way is to manually schedule activities for the volunteers to contact each voter.  This is a very large amount of work, but it has the advantage that we can use the activity mechanism to track each time the volunteer speaks to the voter.  We have also considered using groups or tags.  But those are quite inflexible, and we would end up with many dozens of groups or tags, which seems overwhelming.  There is a mechanism of creating relationships between voters and their assigned volunteers.

Is there a way to do whatever assignment mechanism we choose in a quick fashion (not automated, but in bulk)?  Let me give an example of a user interface: Say I want to assign two blocks worth of a street to volunteer Adam.  I start a search on street address (like "100-299 main street").  Take the search result, which is presented as a list, and remove entries that shouldn't be there (like Bob at 169 Main Street happens to be our volunteers arch-enemy, or all even addresses are on the wrong side of the road and have to be removed, since they will later be assigned to Eve).  Then take the resulting list, and for all entries on it, set a tag "Assigned to Adam" or put them into the Adam group, and so on.  Even more useful would be a way to do this using a map (our school district is in a rural and mountainous area, where there are no city blocks): Show all contacts who have not been assigned to a volunteer on a map.  Then zoom in on Main Street, until you can see individual residences.  Select the ones that should be assigned to volunteer Adam (for example by zooming in sufficiently, or by clicking them individually), then assign them to his tag or group.

While we are at it: Is there a simple way to select other contacts that share the same address?  Say for example our volunteer Adam has spoken to his neighbor Bob, and found that Bob, his wife Bella, and their college-age son Billie all are in favor of the parcel tax.  It would be very convenient if there were a way with a few keystrokes to go from finding Bob via full-text search to select all contacts with the same address, or with the same last name, and then apply a tag like "Definite in favor" to all contacts selected from a list of those search results.

Obviously, if this is the wrong subforum to ask such elementary user interface questions, let me know.  Similarly, the answer might be just "download this manual and don't bug us".  Thank you!

Thanks.  We installed the telephone interview module from Will's site.  We have manually grouped all our voters (contacts) into neighborhoods, which we defined as groups (we have about 30 neighborhoods).  And we're about to add household information to all contacts automatically.

This leaves one more problem.  Say we have a group, called "Neighborhood Main Street".  We know that Alice is the volunteer assigned to contact all voters on Main Street.  We know need to assign all the members of that group (all voters in the Main St. neighborhood) to Alice.  We don't want to go create 50 or 60 activities for Alice, because for most volunteers using activity tracking is way too heavyweight.  We know how to assign one contact to a volunteer, by creating a relationship.  Any idea of how to automate that, so we can create the "assigned volunteer" relationship for all contacts in a group?