Contact and Survey allows your supporters to contact and survey people via text, call, email, or door knock. This flexible action has a number of powerful use cases, from voter registration to chasing leads, and more.
In Contact and Survey for Friends, this feature allows supporters canvass curated lists of their personal contacts.
To Contact and Survey Friends:
1. Create your action. Click into “Actions” in the left-hand menu, then choose “Create New Action” in the upper right of the page. There, you’ll see options for the different types of actions you can create. Select Contact and Survey Friends.
2. Name your action. Give your action an internal-facing name. It may be helpful to include the date here. Next, give it an external-facing headline. The headline is what appears within the app for your supporters. We suggest action-oriented headlines that will draw supporters in, such as, “Help your friends get ready to vote”.
3. Write an action description. Create a one or two sentence call-to-action that lets supporters know what you need them to do. As two best practices, we recommend:
-
- Keeping copy short and to the point, and
- Adding deadlines or important dates to increase urgency. Example: “It’s almost time to vote! Reach out to your friends and family before early voting begins on September 2 to make sure they’ve got a rock-solid plan to vote.”
4. Upload an image. Actions with images hook supporters and get more engagement. Choose an image to appear with your action in your supporters’ feeds.
5. Enable list/voter file matching (optional). If you would like to enable your supporters to match their contacts to a list, or voter file, enable list matching, and select the corresponding file. To give supporters the opportunity to match their contacts, select, “make matching required.” We sometimes recommend using this feature to encourage supporters to contact friends who don’t match.
Read the Import a List/Voter File and Using Lists/Voter Files FAQs to learn how to add your lists to your OutreachCircle. If you are using lists from PDI or VAN, our system can pull questions in, and sync a contact’s answers back to the databases. If you want to import lists from Salesforce, please read the OutreachCircle Salesforce Integration FAQ for instructions
6. Build your survey. When your supporters are canvassing contacts, they will fill out this survey according to the contact’s responses. You can either build the survey in our setup wizard, or skip it for now, and set it up later from the Action Landing Page.
In your survey, you can create any number of multiple choice, contact information validation, and text response (open-ended) questions.
7. Choose your modes of contact. Decide the methods for supporters to contact their friends and family – text, call, email, visit, social media, or all the above. If you select in-person contact, your supporters will be taken to Google Maps or Apple maps, and get directions to the contact’s address within that application.
For this action, we recommend enabling text, call, and email; and disabling “visit.” (The “visit” option routes a supporter to a contact’s address. In this case, supporters usually import their phone or email contacts, and those contact lists typically don’t have home addresses in them).
8. Write scripts for each mode of contact you enable. If you are asking folks to complete an action (such as requesting a mail ballot), make sure your script includes an actionable way to take the next step. If you are linking to a form to which you have backend access, use the Sourced Link functionality in our script editor to make your link trackable.
Remember: this action asks supporters to reach out to people they already know, so we recommend not over-prescribing how supporters do so. A basic script with key info (or even a bullet-point list) that supporters can use as a reference is a great resource for distribution.
9. Assign Users. Use the yes/no toggle in the assignment section to choose whether to assign your action to specific supporters or groups, or make it available to everyone. If you do not assign the action to individual groups or people, your action will be available to all supporters.
We’ve created a handy guide about Contact and Survey to share with your supporters. It walks them through exactly how to use this action. You can share it directly with your volunteers, or use it as a script to walk volunteers through exactly what they need to do. Feel free to make a copy and edit it to fit your particular campaign or organization.
10. Activate. You’re ready to go! Choose a time for your action to automatically go live, or leave that section blank and click “Activate Action” to make it live right now.