Contents
Article Description: In this article, we will walk you through how to create and manage a Friend-to-Friend action, and how to view and export the results of a Friend-to-Friend action via the Admin Dashboard.
Overview Friend to Friend Actions
Friend to Friend actions are where your users and volunteers can outreach to their friends and family on behalf of the campaign through multiple contact methods including phone, email, text, and social media.
With Impactive, volunteers can easily sync their phone contacts with the National Voter File. The National Voter File is a public national database of voter registration information, including party affiliation and voting history. Impactive matches your volunteers' personal contacts’ name, age, and location with their voter file data with a 30% match rate. This matching process gives volunteers context on the voting history of their contacts, including:
Registered to vote
Affiliated with a political party
Live in a swing district, and/or in-district
Showing up for elections
If you do not want party affiliation to appear for users' contacts reach out to us at [email protected]
Important Note: The biggest difference between friend-to-friend texting and peer-to-peer texting: with friend to friend messaging, volunteers text from their own phone numbers! Unlike Peer-to-Peer texting, all Friend to Friend messages are sent to existing personal contacts from the user's own phone number, email or social media accounts - leading to higher response rates at no additional cost to the campaign.
The Data on Friend to Friend Messaging
Friend to friend messaging amplifies the impact of each volunteer. In fact, the results of the largest relational organizing study we conducted with Columbia University’s Data Science Institute found individuals messaged by friends were 8.3% more likely to cast a vote. By comparison, mass peer to peer text campaigns to lists of voters conducted by field organizers increases turnout by only 0.29%. That’s a BIG difference!
Creating and Managing a Friend-to-Friend Action
In this section we will walk you through how to create and manage a Friend-to-Friend action via the Admin Dashboard:
Navigate to your admin dashboard, click on ‘+ Create New,’ and select Friend to Friend from the drop down menu.
Pro-Tip: Select a folder to save your action into to help keep all of your actions organized.
Uploading a contact list is optional within Friend to Friend actions. If you want to upload a contact list for your users and volunteers to outreach, select a list from the dropdown menu titled ‘Select a list to target.’
If you choose to upload a contact list you will be using Impactive’s Suggested Contacts feature, which allows your campaign to target outreach to contacts in your volunteer's networks who are on a specific voter target list.
Note: Your volunteers must first sync their personal contacts to the app. Once they do any suggested contacts from your uploaded contact list will show up with a star next to their name for your volunteers to outreach.
Alternatively, you can skip uploading a contact list, allowing your volunteers to freely outreach with their synced contacts without suggestions. In this case, leave this box empty.
Add a title to your action and write a description that will tell your users what the action is about. Then select the start button you’d like to use.
You can choose multiple filters to apply to your volunteers' contacts to show them who is most important to reach out to. These filters include: District (including city, county, and electoral districts), Party, and Voter Frequency.
When Contact AutoFilters are set, any contacts that are matched to the voter file can be filtered by District, Party or Voter Frequency.
Add Initial and Response Scripts.
Campaigns can now extend specific scripts to their volunteers based on the selected contact method. This functionality enables campaigns to extend templated phone, email, phone call, and social message copy so that volunteers are on-brand with the campaign’s messaging across contact method. In the app, volunteers will be asked to choose their preferred contact method for reaching out to their contacts. The app will filter a user's contacts depending on what contact type is chosen, allowing them to email their contacts that have email addresses, or text their contacts that have phone numbers.
In the “Initial Scripts” section, click the dropdown to enable a channel-specific script. To learn more about Initial Scripts check out our Scripts Overview support article.
If an admin wants to use an identical script across contact methods, they do not need to add an initial script for each method type. By default, each contact method will inherit the initial texting script and will use it as the default script for phone calls, emails, and social messages.
If an admin wants different scripts for each contact method, they can create a unique script by selecting a contact method from the “Add Initial Script” dropdown.
Initial scripts can also include an action image. To attach an image to the initial script, drag and drop the image under the “Basic Information” section at the top of the page. To attach the image to the initial script, enable the toggle below "Attach action image to all initial scripts." If an admin wants to disable the image in the script, they can keep the toggle off. This means that for each contact method, admins can choose to include or exclude the image within the initial script.
After you’ve written initial messages, make sure to write corresponding replies for each contact type. This will allow your volunteers to follow up with your contacts easily and have meaningful one-on-one conversations. Remember: these are conversations with people they know. Keep the replies informal and make sure that users know they’re able to edit them and put them in their own voices when using the friend-to-friend action.
Pro-Tip: Click “Advanced Options” to automatically apply a tag or custom field to a contact if they receive a certain reply. This is helpful in tracking how conversations go and for updating reports your volunteers may have otherwise forgotten to file. (More on reports below).
6. Add Report Settings
After your users have a conversation, you'll want a record of what happened. In report settings, you'll choose which tags and custom fields you'd like users to fill out about the conversation.
Make sure you ask and remind your volunteers to fill out a report for every conversation so that you get the complete picture of how each conversation went.
Pro-Tip: Instruct your volunteers to submit reports frequently. Assure them that there is no need to wait until a conversation is “over.” As soon as they learn something new about the contact they should fill out and submit a report so that the campaign has the context of the conversation too.
You can track the performance of your Friend to Friend action by selecting an action and clicking “View Results.” Learn more about your results and how to export them in the next section.
Viewing and Exporting Friend-to-Friend Results
After you’ve asked your users to begin taking action, it’s time to start monitoring your results!
Accessing the View Results Page
To access the “View Results” page for your action, first navigate to the admin dashboard. Click on Actions > Friend to Friend. Find your action, then click on “View Results” under the Results column. Note that you can see summary user engagement information under the “User Engagement” column.
Accessing the Overview Section
At the top of the results page is the Overview section. This section is a summary of user actions taken, not conversation metrics. Here's what each box means:
Sent to: Number of volunteers the action was sent to
Seen: Number of volunteers that have seen the action
Started: Number of volunteers that have started the action
Completed: Number of unique volunteers that have completed the action
Performs: Number of times that the action has been completed
Reports: How many reports were filled
Just below the Overview section is “Messages Performance.” This section is a summary of the messages sent. Here’s what each box means:
Initial Messages Sent: Total number of initial messages sent to personal contacts
Unique Phones Reached: Total numbers of unique phone numbers that an initial message was going to
# Contacts Followed Up With: Total number of replies or follow-up messages sent after a contact replies to an initial message
Link Clicks: Total number of clicks to a trackable link that was sent to personal contacts
View Reports
To view the reports that were filled, go to the Overview section and click on the "View Reports" link within the “Report” box. A “Reports Summary” pop-up box will appear where you can see summary statistics for the action's tags, custom fields, and response scripts.
DataSync Summary
Use this section to see which of your tags and custom fields have successfully synced into your database of choice, such as VAN or PDI.
By Tag
See which tags were applied and successfully synced in the action
By Custom Field
See which custom fields were used and successfully synced during the action
Users
Use the User Tab, to track your volunteers’ work in sending initial messages, filing reports, and following up with their personal contacts.
Note: If you used the Suggested Contacts feature, the Users Tab will also include the following columns:
Suggested Known: The number of contacts suggested by the campaign that appeared in the user's synced contacts
Suggested Reached: The number of contacts suggested by the campaign that the user outreached
Receivers
Use the receivers tab to track user performance, you can drilling down their message activity using:
The name of the volunteer who sent the initial message
The name of the contact
The time the contact was last messaged
Whether a report was filled
If the contact lived in the district (based on action settings)
Or, if the recipient was a suggested contact. The receivers table is also filterable by contacts who live in the campaign’s target district or are a suggested contact.
Tags & Custom Fields
Use the tags and custom fields sections to monitor overall results from your campaign. Here you can view the total number of tags and custom field responses applied by users taking part in your action.
Response Scripts
Here you can see how many times each response script was sent to personal contacts. You can use this to monitor which responses your users are using most frequently.
Exporting
After your action has been completed, you can export all of the data into a spreadsheet. At the bottom of the View Results page is a list of export formats that you can choose from.
