Depending on where your candidate or organization is located, you may be looking to follow up with voters after November 3rd to ensure that they can fix, or “cure” their ballots in the case of a mistake, such as a mismatched signature. This is an overview of some resources, tactics, and tools that you can incorporate from Impactive into your ballot curing efforts.
Next, consider if you’ll be doing relational outreach, or peer-to-peer outreach to have conversations with voters who need to correct mistakes on their ballots. We recommend utilizing both tactics as relational outreach has been shown to have better message penetration but your users may not know everyone who needs to cure their ballots. Peer-to-peer allows you to contact all voters in your target universe.
Please find below an overview of the Impactive tactics that align with both contact options.
Relational Outreach Ballot Curing
Suggested contact actions and dynamic script variables can be a key part of your ballot curing program. Utilizing the suggested contacts feature is the equivalent of creating a target universe for your volunteer’s personal contact list. To utilize this for ballot curing, you can upload a list of all the voters whose ballots need to be cured, and your volunteers can see which of their friends have outstanding ballots.
Dynamic script variables in friend to friend texts allows you to have content within a friend to friend response script dynamically populate for different contacts. Importantly, you can only include dynamic variables in follow up scripts for a friend-to-friend text. The information comes from an uploaded list so is a great way to create additional information for your suggested contact action. In the case of ballot curing, you can upload a column with who to contact to fix their ballot (if it varies by location), to ensure that volunteers can more easily share that information with their friends.
Peer-to-Peer Outreach Ballot Curing
As with relational outreach, for peer-to-peer ballot curing, you’ll need to upload the universe of people who you want to get in touch with as a Contact List. For peer-to-peer texting, you do not need a Suggested Contacts action. We do recommend that you utilize dynamic variables to upload specifics about who to contact to cure if it varies by location. Please review our best practices for dynamic variables overview here.
Usage Instructions and Guidelines
You can review instructions on how to create a suggested contact action and what the user experience resembles here. Current Impactive admin has been tested to execute this action with a list of up to 1.75 million. When uploading for a suggested contact action the list should be uploaded as a CSV into Contact List and it is important that relevant column headers are formatted according to the upload guidelines of first_name, last_name, van_id, and phone.
UPLOAD WARNING: In order to not have uploads negatively effect volunteer’s DCVC experience, any list over 250,000 can only have an upload initiated between the hours of 11:30 PM EST and 10:00 AM EST. If you need to upload a list of larger than 1.75 million e-mail [email protected].
You can review instructions on how to build a custom dynamic script variable here. The order of operations is important. First, a Custom Field must be created as a TextField, then the relevant data column header needs to be renamed using the Slug from the relevant Custom Field, then the list can be uploaded as a Contact List.