Planning with CiviEngage
CiviEngage packages a set of custom data groups and fields, reports, and other features for use in civic engagement and community organizing work. This chapter will describe the general concepts and planning needed to use CiviEngage effectively.
What You Need to Know
The following are concepts, custom fields and values to keep in mind when preparing to use CiviEngage.
Campaign Source Code
Campaign Source Codes are descriptive values used to identify related activities, events, contributions, and memberships and map how these activities and transactions are linked together. Campaign Source Codes are also useful for identifying these sets of activities or transactions as part of a larger campaign, project, or program.
For example, an organization is conducting a door knock canvass around a particular issue during a specific range of dates. The organization may want to use campaign source codes to link together the activities (where responses to door knock canvass questions are captured), the event (the door knock canvass campaign itself), and any contributions made during the canvass to be able to analyze the effectiveness of the campaign.
Activity, Event, Contribution, Participant, and Membership records each contain a custom field to store a Campaign Source Code, that all share a common option list where Campaign Source Code values can be added and edited.
Your organization can establish a standard method for creating new Campaign Source Codes so that the codes are consistent and easy to sort and understand at a glance. For example, you can specify that annual campaigns always include the year at the either the beginning or the end of the Campaign Source Code, not both, so that you don't wind up with "2009 Annual Campaign" and "Annual Campaign 2010."
Issue Interests
Issue Interests are issues that your organization works on or tracks. They are included in CiviEngage as a single option list shared across multiple contexts:
- Grassroots Info: Issue Interests for individuals
- Media Issue Interests for media contacts
- Funder Issue Interests for funders
- Grant Info: Funding Areas for organizations
It is important to remember that despite appearing with different labels in these different contexts, you are still dealing with just one shared list of options.
In planning to use CiviEngage you should come up with a list of distinct issues that are important to your organization and that you will want to utilize when tracking individuals' interest in your organization's work, the issues that your media contacts may be interested in covering, funders' general interests and the specific areas of work included in particular grants.
Volunteer Interest
Volunteer interests are activities that your organization's volunteers can take on and participate in; you can indicate each individual's interest in participating in these ways. They are included in CiviEngage as an option list. In planning to use CiviEngage you should establish a list of your organization's current volunteer activities as well as any activities that you are planning to launch in the future. Some examples of volunteer interests are canvassing, phone banking, and tabling.
Cleaning your Address Data
Cleaning your address data means standardizing addresses to conform to the conventions defined by the United States Postal Service's Standards for Addresses. Standardizing how addresses are entered into CiviCRM will allow for more accurate search results when searching by address and is essential to generate accurate Walk List reports. CiviCRM will parse addresses based on the USPS standards. To find out more about how Address Parsing is handled and used in CiviCRM, refer to the Address Parsing chapter of this book. When adding or editing contacts you will be entering or editing address elements including street number, street name, and Apt/Unit/Suite number according to these standards.
When planning to import pre-existing data into CiviCRM for use in CiviEngage it is essential that you plan to clean up address data before importing.
To find out more details about the USPS' Standards for addresses, refer to their Publication 28 at http://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/welcome.htm.
Tracking Civic Engagement and Campaigns
CiviEngage is designed to manage interactions with constituents around an organization's civic engagement and base-building work, such as door knock canvassing and phone banking. There are several concepts and details to consider when preparing for these types of campaigns.
Working with Your Universe of Contacts
In preparing for your campaign, you will need to identify the audiences you will be targeting for your door knock canvass or phone bank in CiviCRM. CiviCRM uses Smart Groups and regular Groups as the mechanisms to target specific groups of contacts. Here are a couple of examples of how you can use Smart Groups and regular Groups for targeting during your campaign:
- You can use Smart Groups to identify contacts you want to target based on specific criteria, such as voter demographics, issue interests, primary language spoken, etc.
- You can track voter demographics about your contacts using the custom data group called Voter Info
- You can use Groups to identify contacts who subscribe to a particular newsletter or issue to do an email blast about your campaign.
- You can then use these Smart Groups and regular Groups to generate your walk list or phone bank list.
Learn more about working with Smart Groups and regular Groups in the "Tags and Groups" chapter of this book.
Preparing a Campaign Event
To prepare a campaign event in CiviCRM, there are several setup items you may want to consider:
- Define a specific Campaign Source Code for your event. This Campaign Source Code will be used for the event and the activity which holds the individual responses gathered during the door knock canvass or phone bank campaign.
- When you set up your event with the Event Type set to "Campaign" you can record the questions being asked during the campaign in the Event Campaign Details area.
- Decide how you want to identify participants in the campaign event. Maybe you only want to identify the staff and volunteers who will be involved in conducting the door knock canvass or phone bank. Maybe you'll want to add the targeted contacts as participants. Activities will be used to record the responses of each individual contacted during the campaign as well as the campaign source code related to the campaign, so it may not be necessary to add these contacts to the event. In either case, it is recommended to also record the Campaign Source Code in the participant's record in the Participant Info area.
- When capturing responses from each individual during the campaign, consider how you plan on getting the data back into CiviCRM. If the plan is to enter data one contact at a time, which may make sense for phone banking, you will need to record the response in the individual's activity record, with the Activity Type of "Door Knock" or "Phone" in the Walk List Responses or Call List Responses area. But if you plan on entering batches of data at a time, then you will need to plan to import the responses using the Import Activities function.
Working with Voter History
When using CiviEngage, plan how you will manage voter history and other voter information collected during a voter engagement or electoral cycle. Many organizations have access to a voter file from which they manage all their voter engagement work outside of CiviCRM. Once the voter engagement or electoral campaign is over and voter information is updated with who voted and other demographics, organizations most often will only want to keep information on the actual contacts they made during the campaign. In this case, only those selected records from the voter file and additional voter information, such as responses to specific electoral campaign questions, will be imported and maintained in CiviCRM. These voter records then become contacts that organizers will continue to engage and target with base-building efforts.
If you wish to collect voter contacts with their demographics, history, and additional information, first import voter contacts (with their contact information and demographics) into the Voter Info custom group. Then import additional information as Activities, such as responses to electoral campaign canvass questions.
Mobilizing Individuals to Attend an Event
The Participant Info custom data group that comes with CiviEngage contains fields that hold information about prospective event participants, including a history of interactions between your organization and prospective participants. Use this information (such as needs for childcare or rides) to bring these individuals to your events. Tracking the history of your organization's contact with individuals around events such as an annual membership meeting, a direct action, or leadership training can help you to understand the effectiveness of your outreach methods and determine how committed or engaged an individual is based on if the individual actually attends events after multiple contacts.
This feature is mostly useful for organizers or staff who have a list of individuals they are recruiting to attend an event through multiple phone calls or face-to-face meetings. The following CiviCRM tasks could be used to mobilize individuals:
- Conduct a basic or advanced search or use Groups and Smart Groups to create a list of the contacts you want to mobilize or invite to the event.
- From the search results or Group Contacts screen, you can add the list of contacts to the event by selecting Add Contacts to Events from the Actions list. To find out more about how to add contacts to events, refer to the Managing Participants chapter in the Events section in this book.
- Once you add the contacts to the event, you can enter participant information or responses from multiple interactions in the Participant Info area in a contact's participant record. You can either enter information for one participant by editing the participant record itself, or you can add information for a list of participants at one time. For example, if you plan to call through your list by viewing the participant list from the event listing, you could use Batch Update Participants Via Profile and select one of the following custom profiles provided by CiviEngage:
- Update Event Invite Responses - to record responses from multiple contacts with the participant.
- Update Participant Info - to record general information about participants, such as if they need childcare or rides to the event.
Tracking Funders and Foundations
You can track information about and due dates for grant proposals, letters of inquiries, and reports for funders by adding an activity related to the funder's contact record and choosing from the Proposal, Letter of Inquiry, or Report activity types.
You can also tailor information about an individual funder, such as their funding areas and issue interests, using the Funder Info custom group. In order to view the Funder Info tab, you will need to use the Individual sub-contact type, Funder, when you create a new contact that is identified as a funder.
You can tailor information about a foundation (organization record), such as their program areas for funding, using the Grant Info custom group.
Tracking Media Contacts
As part of civic engagement and community organizing work, it can be useful to track information about your media contacts in CiviCRM, especially if you want to know which media contacts or outlets are interested in your organization's issues, or have written articles about your work, or for identifying who to contact when you want to publicize the work the organization is undertaking.
You can tailor information about an individual media contact, such as their media type (e.g., TV, Newspaper, Photographer, etc.), issue interests and beat using the Media Info - Ind custom group. Use the Individual sub-contact type, Media Contact, when you create a new contact for a media contact. You can then view and edit the Media Info - Ind tab.
You can also tailor information about a media outlet (organization) such as their media type (e.g., TV, Newspaper, Magazine, etc.) using the Media Info - Org custom group. As with the individual media person, use the Organization sub-contact type, Media Outlet, when you create a new contact for a media outlet. You can then view and edit the Media Info - Org tab.
Tracking Elected Officials
Identifying and collecting information about your elected officials could be useful for your community organizing and civic engagement work. You may want to know who is an elected official in a specific district, or who to contact on their staff, such as the scheduler, or spokesperson.
You can tailor information about an individual elected official, such as their elected position (e.g., city council, Senate, etc.) and their role using the Elected Info custom group. Use the Individual sub-contact type, Elected Official, when you create a new contact for an elected official. You can then view and edit the Elected Info tab. Remember that staffers, schedulers, or spokespeople for an elected official can be entered as the Elected Official subtype.
Reporting and Analysis
There are two reports packaged with CiviEngage: Walk List and Phonebank List. In addition, the Activity Report is enhanced to filter custom activity fields such as those associated with the custom group Call List Responses and Walk List Responses.
The Walk List report allows you to view, print, or export an individual's contact information and demographics such as Member Type, Sex, Age, Party Registration, Voter history, along with response codes and notes where a volunteer can collect responses during a door knock canvass.
The Phonebank List report is similar to the Walk List report except that this report is used exclusively during a phonebank and contain response codes pertaining to phone responses.
The Walk List and Phonebank List reports are used to collect information during a campaign to later be imported or batch entered back into CiviCRM.
The Activity Report is enhanced to allow you to search, view, print, or export for specific responses from a door knock canvass or phonebank campaign. Use this report not only to analyze the effectiveness of your campaign (e.g., how many people you contacted and collected responses from) but also to analyze responses from your constituency around an issue, or to determine whether individuals may become more involved with your organization.