Intro

Why this project?

This project exists to reach two main objectives:

Get more eyes on Vote Smart data before people vote in 2020 (this is the goal you’ll talk about most publically)
Create interest in Vote Smart such that special interest groups, media organizations, and corporations are interested in paying for our data in the future.

What we are offering

Most of this is covered in the "Initial Guidelines" document A few notes:

Of these offerings, the API is the most valuable to them (it’s something other groups pay thousands for) and to us (if they like it; it shows our data to a lot of people and means they may be willing to pay in the future)
That document says that the coordinator will research 40 organizations/week, we reduced this to 20 at Group 2.
There have been discussions about removing the snail mail part of the process due to inefficacy.

Vocabulary

Corporate Outreach: We call it this internally since the plan is to ramp up the project to reach out to corporations. All the current groups on the list are nonprofits or media organizations so “outreach” is a more appropriate term externally.
Groups: Each week a different “group” of twenty is contacted. They are all listed on the Corporate Outreach Contacts spreadsheet.
Partnership: Don’t use this word when referencing what you are doing with these contacts, per Adelaide.
SIGs: short for “Special Interest Groups,” which is a data area for Vote Smart. Groups 1-6 were pulled from our list of Special Interest Groups which we track.

History of Project

In July 2019, we started contacting interest groups that may be interested.
In August, we switched and contacted media organizations (press and membership groups) to pitch the API more explicitly.
In late September, Propublica signed our first API contract for the project
There are plans for a “phase three” which would include contacting corporate groups

Workflow

Here’s an outline of what it looks like from beginning to end with a group to give you an idea of the workflow.

Week 1: research & make list. Before anyone is contacted, spend time researching the groups you want to reach out to. Adelaide will assist you in finding the kind of groups you should be contacting, and go from there to find an appropriate contact at the organization, their information, and possibly some notes you could mention on a phone call or at the beginning of an email with them. Track all of this in the Corporate Outreach Contacts spreadsheet. This should be done by Friday for all 20 contacts in a group to send to Adelaide for approval.
Week 2: snail mail (this may change). On Monday, mail out physical letters and brochures to the groups on the list. More on this in “Doing the Merge”
Week 3, Tuesday: emails. On Tuesday the following week, email the contacts from that list the template email we have, attaching the letter you mailed Monday.
Week 3, Wednesday: phone calls. The following day, call your contacts to check in and make sure they got the email. There’s a script for this call that I follow when leaving a voicemail. In the rare cases they pick up, I make sure to hit all the points in the script, but make it more conversational.
Week 4: follow-up. On Thursday the following week, if you haven’t heard from a contact, reply to the email that you already sent (so it remains a single thread) checking in to make sure they got the email. Don’t send this if they have already contacted you. This used to be a phone call, so some old documents may reference it so. There’s a template for this email as well.

Explanation of Documents

All the documents used for this are kept on Google Drive. Some are saved as “backups” on the network drive, but that should not be the document you are editing and updating, because that may be confusing for other people using the same version of the document.

All of this (except contracts) are in Google Drive, under DevComm>Corporate Outreach.

Contact Sheets

This is a series of spreadsheets to track all the conversations I’ve had with different groups. I don’t make a contact sheet unless the group has responded to one of our contacts. Here’s a breakdown of the info on a contact sheet:

#--this is just for reference, i.e. “contact number 3.”Date--the date of the contact
Type--the medium. phone/email/in person
Your name--the name of the person at Vote Smart who conversed with them. Most of these say “Murphy” but when Adelaide or Annie has conversations with our contacts, I track them on the sheet as well, putting their names under this section.
Description--Sometimes I just copy and paste the full text of an email into this cell. In order to make it all fit, you can copy and paste it into your URL bar first, then copy it from there into the contact sheet (to get rid of line spacings). Sometimes this is a summary of a conversation or phone call. If there are additional notes from the meeting, I link to the google document of those notes.
Follow up needed--I put this in for my own use, but I found it less helpful than tracking these in my to-do list. Use if it works for you!
There’s also another sheet at the bottom labeled “People.” Use this to track all the various people/contacts looped in

VS Merges

This folder has everything used for the merges made for the physical mailing, emails, phone script, and follow-up phone call. The documents that were created are in folders sorted by groups. The documents in “SIG Templates” are the templates that were used for groups 1-6. The documents with names beginning with “Media” were used to reach out to groups 7-9.

Email template--used for first email contact
Follow-up email template--used for second email contact
Letter template--used for physical mailing
Letter attachment template--used for the PDF attachment for first email
Contact SS is the spreadsheet used to make the merges. It is made by copying and pasting from the Corporate Outreach Contacts main spreadsheet. It is not the most up-to-date version, it was only updated the last time a merge was done on a certain group. Make all updates and changes in the Corporate Outreach Contacts sheet, then copy into this one.

Corporate Outreach Contacts

This document. A description of the fields. I color-coded in a way that made sense to me, but it can be changed however you like:

G# is group number
FU is if they would be a good group to try again with--maybe just find another person as “key contact”
Email note is anything you should know when you send the first email--if the email isn’t direct to your contact, if you don’t have a phone number, if there’s a personal connection
Contact notes are notes for me for the phone call
Follow up (column r) was a response from follow up call/email

Project Calendar

Good place to see when things were sent out/calls made, etc.

Contracts

These are on the network drive in outreach>2019 outreach.
There is an ODT file for those working on Linux machines, and a Word document for those working on Windows.
“Template” can be used to make a new contract for a group looking for an API key.
A group does not need to sign a contract for a temporary API key, but it is good to send it for them to look over.
Once you’ve edited the template for a specific group, export as a PDF and send it to them via email.
When it’s been returned to you with their signature, send it to the National Director for their signature. Someone in the Iowa office should scan this signed version.

Digital version saved in the contracts folder
Paper copy is given to the Office Manager to file.

Doing the Merge

In order to make the letters, email pdf attachments (same as mailed letters), emails, and phone scripts, I use a Google plug-in called autocrat. You could also do this merge on Microsoft Office, I simply didn’t since I don’t have Office. Currently, this does not work with @votesmart.org emails, however Jacob is working on making that possible--you can talk with him about that.

In order to work around this, I generate documents using my personal account. To do this, share the “VS merges” folder with this email. When it is time to do a merge:

Open up a Google Chrome incognito window. This allows you to access your @votesmart.org and @gmail.com accounts simultaneously. Log in to your @gmail account on incognito.
Make sure the Google document template is ready to go and says what you want it to say.
Make sure the folder you want the documents to end up in is ready to go. Currently, each group has its own folder.
Copy and paste the most recent version of the group you will be merging from the “corporate outreach contacts” spreadsheet into the “Contact SS” within “VS Merges”

For example, if you are working on group 9 emails, you would copy all group 9 contacts from the Corporate Outreach Contacts spreadsheet into the “Group 9” tap on Contact SS

Select Add-ons from the top tool, Autocrat, then “launch” or “open”
Step one: Name your merge job Create a New Job, name it whatever you are doing (“Group 9 emails”). Note: you can also make general jobs “Emails”/”Phone Scripts”/”Letters” then tweak them each time for a new group. Click next.
Step two: Choose template select to choose your template “From Drive.” Find your template, saved in VS Merges. Click next
Step three: Map source data to template

Merge tab=whatever group you are working on
Header row=1
First data row=2
Make sure all the tags match what column should fill them in

Step four: File settings

If creating phone scripts, emails, envelopes, or letters

File name=”Group X Item”

For example, group 10 emails

Type=Google Docs
Output as=single output mode
Add page breaks between data rows: yes

If creating email attachments:

Name this (tag for organization abbreviation)—Vote Smart Outreach

You can name it anything, but if you want their name in the title just make sure to directly copy the header from the spreadsheet you are merging from.

Type=Google Docs
Output as=Multiple output mode

Step five: Choose destination folder(s)

Select “VS Merges”
Select the relevant group
If doing PDFs, select the “PDF” folder within

Step six: Add dynamic folder reference I skip this step, not really sure what it is
Step seven: set merge condition “add condition” then:

For snail mail letters and envelopes: Column Address equals NOT NULL
For emails: Column Email equals NOT NULL
For attachments: don’t add any condition
For phone scripts: Column Phone equals NOT NULL
For follow up emails: Column Status equals NULL

Step eight: Share docs & send emails

Select “no.” If you are ever interested in sending emails automatically through Autocrat, this is where you would do it.

Step nine: Add/remove job triggers. Leave these on “no”
Save the job, then press the triangle “play” button next to it
The document will be generated and can be found in the destination folder designated in step 10.
If you need to redo the merge for any reason, delete the new columns Autocrat would have created in the Contact SS document and the document it created the first time

Working with groups/answering questions

Phone calls

When you have a scheduled phone call with a group be prepared by knowing:

What the group is/how our data could be used
What do the people you are speaking with do at the organization
Do they have any past affiliation with Vote Smart (the National Director and Adelaide can help with this)
What examples may be relevant

Every phone call is different but be prepared to explain

What Vote Smart is
Where our funding comes from
The six types of data we offer

Specifics on this that can be helpful: PCT data (go to James Wypych, Elections Research Director with questions)

Here are the response rates
Here is the test

To find interesting things relevant to the contact you are speaking with, explore by issue here.

Examples of our offerings

This document tracks all API users.

Some notable examples:

Microsoft (Bing) has used API for their elections platform
NBC/Univision has used our API for elections platform
National Journal uses our API for a tool behind the paywall for subscribers
Activote is an app that uses our data
Action Button is a tool integrated into news articles. Articles with our data at work are tracked and categorized on the Media Mentions Tracking Sheet in the “API Integration” tab

Who to go to at Vote Smart with questions

Here’s a brief outline on the issues each person handles for when you need help with a problem. You can find contact info for all of them at http://wiki.votesmart.org/PhoneList

Board Member Adelaide Kimball

Good for questions about:

Institutional history
Corporate outreach procedures
Potential contacts
All other--a good “first contact” if you aren’t sure

National Director Walker McKusick

Good for questions about:

API specifics
Contracts

DevComm Director Jacob Petterson

Good for questions about:

API administration
Documents/technical issues
Autocrat/Word merges
General research

Officials Research Director Annie Peterson

Good for questions about:

API specifics
Votes data, Statements data, SIGs/ratings data

Elections Research Director James Wypych

Good for questions about:

Political Courage Test administration/results
Elections (dates, who is running, etc)
Bios information

Setting Up API

Anyone can sign up for the Vote Smart API at https://votesmart.org/share/api. For this project, ask your contacts to register then fill out our survey and select “$0” for payment.
When they submit this registration, an email will be sent to membership@votesmart.org. Click the link and you will activate their key.
All back-end administration is done through http://skittles.votesmart.org/admin/. The Devcomm Director is your point of contact for questions about APIAdministration.
Any group you give a key, temporary or permanent, should be recorded on Partnerships and Large API users contact notes--this is a document the National Director and others use to track all major API users, including paying subscribers. At the bottom of the document you will see a few examples of corporate outreach entries.

PVSWiki : CorporateOutreach