This is a test site for two new pieces of Open Source Software:
- CiviVoter is a new sub-system for CiviCRM. Its purpose is to manage a voter file for you (the kind you get from the your county registrar of voters, or your national elections authority). Since CiviCRM is a rich and rapidly improving system for managing contacts, a lot of what you'd want to do with a voter file is already a part of CiviCRM. CiviVoter adds tools for running phone banks (for calling voters) or foot canvasses (going door to door and meeting voters face to face).
- Canvasser is a Drupal module for running phone banks and foot canvasses. It uses CiviVoter to manage the voter file, but uses Drupal modules like Evnets, CCK or Location to help manage volunteers.
We'd like to get some feedback on our "first generation" interface and work flow, and we've created some test accounts to help you do that. We've set up an imaginary political campaign for the Canadian House Of Commons (the Green Party of Canada sponsored this work, so why not?), and we've imported 100 "voter records". The work-flow goes something like this:
For campaign works who organize and supervise volunteers,
- An Organizer (Drupal user Organizer, password demo) uses CiviCRM to take the voter list and create groups of voters he or she wants to reach, splitting by voting place (in Canadian, a polling division, which Yanks call a precinct), or by postal code, or demographics, or whatever the campaign needs.
- The Organizer goes go "Create Content" and creates a canvass object. In the course of a campaign, many canvasses will get created, run by different organizers over different groups of voters. A canvass can be done by phone or by foot, and a phone canvass can be done on-line (your volunteers go to the web site and get guided through their calls), or you can create a list of voters for a volunteer to call.
- The newly created canvass page has a place to make Drupal users into volunteers. Once you add a volunteer, or canvasser to the canvasser list, you can assign them blocks of voters for them to print out, or for phone banks you can just have start immediately, and phone numbers will get fed to them one by one. The software does sanity checking to make sure that no one is contacted twice in the same canvass, and does a bit more checking to make sure that even the same phone number is not called twice.
- The Organizer uses the canvass page to track how many calls or contacts have taken place, and what volunteers have done.
For people who volunteer to help, or canvassers (Drupal user Volunteer, password demo),
- They sign up for a Drupal account, and ask the organizer to sign them up a canvass. A little screening helps here, since you are letting a volunteer represent your campaign and contact voters.
- When a volunteer gets signed up, he or she will see a "my campaign activities" link in their main navigator block. This goes to a list of canvasses they are signed up for.
- The volunteer goes to the "my campaign activities page and clicks on a canvass link.
- Depending upon the kind of canvass, they will find links to start calling or print out a list.
- If they are calling on line, each call will give them the chance to tell what happened on a call. If they are calling from a list, there is a "Tell us what happened" link that lets them easily enter what happened on each call or contact.
- After calling or entereing their data, they are taken to a "Thank you for helping" link.
We'll have more info quickly, but that's the short version.
