CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,
It's my first post here so I will thank the community for this great software. I have a lengthy post below detailing one of my requirements. I appreciate anyone who can take the time to look and comment:

Our situation: We are migrating to CiviCRM on short notice from a software called e-activist. We don't have time for a lengthy selection process so we are going with CiviCRM and will have to customize if we need anything outside the core features.

The "missing feature": E-activist has a feature where users can build campaigns encouraging constituents to email their elected representatives on various topics. The e-activist team keeps the lists of elected representatives updated for various regions and the user just has to choose a group to target. We are in Canada so for example we might target Provincial or Federal representatives. The workflow is as follows:

• The user builds a selection set of contacts
• The user selects an email template and sends a broadcast email with a link to the "Email your MP" webform.
• If the contact opens the email it will be tracked
• If the contact clicks the link it will be tracked
• While processing the webform the user's postal code is matched to their elected representative
• If the contact fills out the webform it will be tracked as an activity by that contact
• The contents of the letter text edit field will be sent to the MP and the user who started the campaign

This is my plan of action. Am I on the right track or is there a better way?
Steps 1-4: Should be handled nicely by the broadcast component.
Step 5: I am not sure about but I have some sources for the data.
Step 6: Could be handled by drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm (add activity after submitting web form). Can regular profile forms add activities or only the webform module?
Step 7: Hooks for extra email sends? Can I build a relationship between the contact and their MP and send to related party?

Thanks for reading and looking forward to your input.

Hi,

Two ways I can think of
1) create a webform & use the webform_civicrm module
2) create a petition (using civicampaign)

The second deals with validating the signatories, that might be something you want.

Then I'd write a hook on the post of the activity to lookup your target, and pretty much do whatever you want (create relationship...), send and email...

I'm not sure what's the goal of the relationship, but you might want to create a custom field contact reference on the citizen that contains the id of their representative.

I didn't understand what you want to track, if the target clicks/open?

As an aside, I haven't quite understood why NGOs think it's a good campaign strategy to spam (elected) people, but if you have any data proving it's efficiency, please share with me (on this side, it seems that their assistants know how to set up a filter -> trash it).


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Hi xavier,

Thanks for your helpful response. You are right, the petition part of Civicampaign is very close to what I need. I will be 85% of the way there. I am not sure if I need a relationship to the representative stored or not - probably not, it can just be a field in the petition form.

On the effectiveness question: I am not responsible for communications, I am just the implementor but since you mention it I guess my thinking is this:

The email letter writing campaign is the modern version of the letter writing campaign. It happens to easier for both the contacts to fill in and for the representatives to ignore. I think the key thing is to encourage supporters to customize their letter and subject heading. Maybe a post form validation check using Levenshtein distance comparing the posted letter content to the letter starter template? Maybe the organization could print and mail the best letters(using a report) to increase the campaign effectiveness.

Being able to email signatures of a petition as individual emails can sometimes be an efficient campaign strategy because some government bodies (the British MFA, for instance) are required to address every email they receive.

When campaigning for the release for political prisoners from jail, I've actually been told by Brit diplomats that they received questions from the MFA on the issue we've campaigned about after such a letter writing campaign we launched.

Thanks for sharing that use case (and for what your org does

we are in the process of upgrading our site (popularstruggle.org) from drupal 6 to 7, in drupal 6 we've used email campaign module and semi integrated it with civicrm, I would like to know if civicrm's campaign/petition are directed to such a functionality and if I work on such code do you think it will be integrated in civicrm

I think that would be a nice addition. However, I think we need to consolidate into one common campaigning plateform instead of having a bunch of ad-hoc solutions.

We should add a type at the survey level, so it can be:
- offline survey (what is now survey)
- petition (what is now petition)
- online survey (basically, like a petition but with different label eg "submit" instead of "sign") Ken has worked on it already
- email your support (what you want to do)

It should be fairly easy to do and would allow greater flexibility to create new type of campaigns (eg. phone canvassing/integration with FB/twitter)

Could you work on it this week? Most of the dev are going to be at a code sprint, that would be quite a nice time to join on IRC and get it started.

Otherwise, we are launching a make it happen to improve civicampaign. It's about better reporting on the actions and improving vastly the usability to create the forms to sign. If your org could contribute in kind of fund part of it, it would be absolutely brilliant

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