Table of Contents
Overview
Canvassing actions help your campaign collect reports and complete outreach to a list of contacts shared or assigned to your campaign’s users, using a contact list similar to peer-to-peer, and outreach methods like friend-to-friend.
There are two types of lists in Canvassing Actions: 'Shared' and 'Assigned.' In this article, we walkthrough creating and managing an assigned list canvassing action via the admin dashboard. To learn more about Shared List Canvassing check out our article - Shared List Canvassing - Admin Walkthrough.
Within Assigned Canvassing actions, you could ask your campaign’s users to just add reports on the contact list or to add reports and reach out to the list through texts, email, calling, or social media. So this means your Assigned List Canvassing action could be:
Assigned List Canvassing: Reports Only
Assigned List Canvassing: Reports and Outreach
Assigned List Canvassing actions include a list of contacts that are assigned only to you - possibly across multiple actions so that you can maintain a relationship by sharing information with them over time and adding reports based on your interaction.
Uses Cases for Assigned List Canvassing
In an Assigned List Canvassing action, instead of looking through a list of people you may know and claiming specific people to outreach, you are assigned to a list of specific people to outreach and are expected to outreach everyone on the list. One example of how an Assigned List Canvassing action could be used: A volunteer is assigned a list of super voters in their precinct to reach out. They message, call, or email each voter, and invite all of them to attend a house party to meet a candidate running for office.
Creating an Assigned List Canvassing Action
To create an Assigned List Canvassing action navigate to Actions > Canvassing > + New Action, then choose Assigned List Canvassing from the dropdown.
Basic Information Section
In the BASIC INFORMATION section, you will need to:
Upload a photo to accompany your action (optional but recommended). This image will display to volunteers in the app only.
Choose the Folder (optional) you'd like to save your action inside of. This is highly recommended so that you can easily find your action later.
Give your action a Title and Description so your volunteers have context on the purpose of the action.
Choose a Start Button Label that corresponds to your action using the drop-down menu. In this case, we recommended the label “Start”.
Assignment Options Section
In the Assignment Options section, select a contact list that your users will file reports and outreach to.
In Assigned Canvassing actions you can choose to:
Upload a list of contacts with the column: assigned_user_email, to assign contacts to specific users
OR
Upload a list of contacts without the column assigned_user_email so that the contacts are randomly assigned to a group of users in buckets of 10
To learn more about creating and managing contacts, check out our Help Center article, How to Create and Manage Contacts.
Whether you upload a contact list that does or does not include the column “assigned_user_email” you can choose to also choose to toggle “Keep Assignments” on or off.
When Keep Assignments is enabled, the same users are connected to the contacts they outreached in every canvassing action moving forward. This is a great feature for relationship building as each contact essentially has a single direct contact to your campaign.
Manage Scripts Section
In this section, you will choose the script options for the action:
No Outreach - Users will only be asked to submit reports on contacts
With Outreach - Users will be asked to message and submit reports on contacts
If you have selected “No Outreach” you can skip ahead to customizing report settings.
If you have selected “With Outreach” you will be prompted to create scripts.
Initial Scripts
The initial script is the script that shows up when your supporters are sending their first messages for the action. You can have as many scripts as you would like. We recommended utilizing a couple different ones to see what works best for your campaign, union, or cause.
Similarly to friend-to-friend actions, you can write scripts for different outreach methods, text, email, phone calls, and social messages. To add an additional initial script click “Add Initial Script” and select the type of script you would like to write from the dropdown.
You can insert personal contact info (i.e. the recipient) and user info (i.e. the sender) such as First Name, Last Name or State into the message. For example: “Hi [Lisa], this is [Jose]. Can you join us on Sunday?” This makes the message more familiar to the recipient and will yield your campaign higher open rates. Read more about dynamic variables here.
By toggling on Attach Action Image to all initial scripts, the action’s image will be included in any initial scripts volunteers send out during outreach.
After you’ve written initial messages, make sure to write corresponding replies. This will allow your volunteers to follow up with your contacts easily and have meaningful one-on-one conversations.
Response Scripts
Responses will come through to a user's native messaging app like Imessages for example. Once a user has received a reply they will navigate back to their Impactive inbox to follow-up with the contact. It is important to note that users will only be able to view the replies they have sent via the Impactive inbox.
Response scripts are designed to help handle the different kinds of conversations you anticipate volunteers having. For example, it's helpful to have a response script that explains what your campaign or organization is about in case your volunteers get asked! To learn more about Initial and Response Scripts check out our Scripts Overview support article.
You can easily create response scripts that will make following up to messages easy and efficient. By creating a response script, your volunteers won't have to write a reply to a common question on their own: instead, they can just choose a reply you've already written and click send!
This screenshot shows how initial and response scripts appear within a user’s mobile app.
Like initial scripts, you can create as many replies as needed. In addition, you can tag and sort responses by integrating tags and custom fields into your script. In “Advanced Options,” you can set up a tag to be automatically applied when a volunteer sends a specific response message, or you can ask volunteers to fill out a report after each conversation. Learn more below.
Auto-Tagging Responses
If you'd like a voter to be automatically tagged with an activist code or result code, you can set up an auto tag such that any contact who receives a specific script will automatically be tagged. Impactive has auto-tagging functionality built into response scripts so that your volunteers don't have to manually file a report after every response message they send.
Here's how to set it up:
Click on “Add another response script”.
Enter a Name for the response, and a Script Message. For example, for an affirmative response to an initial text recruiting for an event, you might write: "Attending: Yes" as the Script Name and "Great - so glad you can attend! The event starts at 7:30pm on Saturday" as the Script Message.
To include a tag or custom field that will automatically be applied when your volunteer sends this response, click the “Advanced Options” drop-down menu.
Check either “Tag the contact” and/or “Update custom field of the contact” depending on which you'd like to use.
Within the box that appears, select the appropriate tag(s) and/or custom field(s) you'd like to be automatically applied.
Once you've applied these settings to your action, your contacts will automatically have a tag or custom field value applied to them each time the corresponding response is sent. If the VAN Integration is set up, that data will be sent to VAN. This will save you and your volunteers a ton of time - no need to fill out manual reports!
Report Settings Section
In order to gather the best data possible for your campaign, union, or organization, we recommend setting up tags and custom fields on a per-action basis. This will allow your volunteers to have conversations with friends and contacts, and then easily report back relevant information to your campaign on volunteer prospects, supporters, and more.
Volunteers will be able to fill a report in all Assigned List Canvassing actions - those with and without outreach.
Once you have created all of your preferred a tags and custom fields in the CAMPAIGN > Settings page, you can select which you'd like to show up in the report page on the app for volunteers to manually file during a conversation with a contact in the “REPORT SETTINGS” section of your action. If you choose none, then the default tags will show up for your volunteers. Keep in mind that if you create a brand new tag or custom field in Settings, sometimes it will take a few minutes before that new tag is displayed as an option under a specific action. Don’t forget to set-up sync instructions for each tag and custom field if you would like the data to sync back with an integration like VAN.
Publishing Section
Campaigns can choose whether they want actions to be public or private. There are three action status types: published (public), published (private), and draft. Private actions allow you to invite a specific set of volunteers to complete the action and ensure the action is visible only to those invited by you. This is helpful if you or admins on your campaign want to test an action before sending it out.
Public
In the “READY TO PUBLISH?” section of your action settings, if a date and time to "Publish this action at" is selected, it will become a published AND public action, visible for any of your volunteers to see.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Once you've scheduled an action to be published at a certain time in the future, you can edit that time as long as it hasn’t gone live yet. Any scheduled posts will become published and public for any user in your following to see.
Private
To make sure your actions are sent only to a private group of users, either:
Save the action as a draft, and then click the “Send To User List” button
Save the action as a draft, and then go to the USERS > All Users tab to hand-select (checkbox) the volunteers and send the action to them.
Limits
In this section, you can choose to limit publishing to specific districts. This means that only volunteers in a chosen geographical area will be able to send texts. This is based on the zip code they inputted when they first signed up with Impactive.
You can also choose to limit publishing to specific languages: English or Spanish. With this feature, you have the option to make the action only available to volunteers who speak that language. This comes in handy when, for example, you want only your Spanish-language volunteers to be sending and replying to text messages. Like districts, this is based on the language your users selected when they first signed up with Impactive.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Be aware that when you set a language or location for an action, you will not be able to change it after it’s been published.
Results and Reporting
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: The number of volunteers the action was sent to
Seen: The number of users that have seen the action
Started: The number of users that started the action
Completed: Users that completed the action
Performs: Number of times that a user completed an action
Reports: How many reports were filed
Users Section
Use the User Engagement section to track your volunteers’ work in sending initial and follow up messages, filing reports, and the number of contacts assigned to them.
Filters
Use filtering to narrow your campaign's users down to a custom list. You can use this feature to track users' work based on whatever filters you've chosen.
Click on "Filters" dropdown. Note: "Activities Received" filter will automatically have the P2P action filtered
Click on any of the toggle filters to turn those fields "on".
Click on any of the dropdown or text filters.
Select the "Apply Filters" button to see the users who match the selected filters in the table below. The number of users matching the filters is displayed at the top of the filter menu.
You can contact your filtered user list in the following ways:
Send Push Notification: You can send a push notification to anyone on the filtered list.
Send Email: You can send an email to anyone on the filtered list. NOTE: The reply-to address is [email protected]. This means that you will not be able to see any responses that users are attempting to email you in response. We recommend including the email address folks should reply to in your message so that they can continue the conversation if needed.
Send Message: You can send a Direct Message to your users' Impactive inbox.
Send Action: You can send a new action to your users.
