What is CiviEngage?

CiviEngage is a drupal module that enhances CiviCRM's core functions for non-profits focused on community organizing and civic engagement work.

Purpose

CiviEngage was built to aid community organizing, base-building and civic engagement, specifically with regards to managing walk lists for door-to-door campaigns and caller lists for phone banks.

CiviEngage provides:

• A package of custom fields, reports and features to track the history of engagement, involvement, and activities of constituents over time
• A model of how to conceptualize and best organize information about individual constituents, organizations and methods of tracking their history of interaction.

Scenarios

Community organizing groups that do base-building and civic engagement work have taken advantage of the features in CiviEngage in various ways. The following are scenarios in which CiviEngage can help organizations further their ongoing community organizing.

Mobilizing Constituents for a Direct Action

An organization needs to mobilize several hundred people for a direct action at the state capitol in less than two weeks.  The organizers know that the best way to contact their particular constituency is by phone.  Organizers want to know who is coming to the direct action, so they can track that individual's involvement with the organization over time.

1. Organizers will identify who they want to mobilize for direct action based on specific criteria and information they know about their constituency, such as geographic location, issue interests, volunteer interests, leadership level, etc.
2. A staff member will create a Direct Action event in CiviCRM and add groups of individuals to the event.
3. Organizers will call the list of possible participants from a Phonebank List report or through a participant listing and enter each call's results; such as whether they will attend, or if it's a wrong number, or if the organizer left a message.
   
4. An organizer may contact the participants several times to ensure that they will attend the direct action, so the organizer will record the responses each time they attempt to contact the participant.  Most organizers attempt to contact up to 3 times to ensure that the participant commits to attending.
5. After the Direct Action event, staff can analyze how many people attended or didn't who said they would attend, as well as if their method of outreach was effective.
   

Door Knock Canvassing

An organization wants to engage constituents based on what they learn from individual responses during a door knock canvass around a particular issue, such as workers' rights.  To find out more about how their constituencies feel about the issue and to see if they would like to help, the organization decides to do a door knock canvass in several neighborhoods.

1. Staff will define the target audience based on specific districts in a city and use CiviCRM's Smart Groups to build the list of people to canvass.
2. Staff will set up a Campaign Event to record the questions that will be asked during the door knock canvass.
3. Staff will identify the volunteers who will do the door knocking and then add them as participants to the event. This way they can track who is door knocking and what group or list of individuals they will be visiting.
   
4. Staff will print the Walk List Report based on the Smart Group, and will also export the walk list information to a spreadsheet to collect the responses and identify the volunteer canvasser.
   
5. Each volunteer canvasser will door knock the locations on the Walk List and gather responses on their report. At the end of the night, other volunteers will gather the Walk List reports, and enter the responses on the spreadsheet. Staff can then import the spreadsheet information back into CiviCRM.
6. After the canvass campaign, staff can use the Activity Report to analyze campaign responses to determine their next step to engage their constituency in the issue.