Managing the Special Interest Groups(SIGs) Program

SIGs staff is responsible for overseeing the timeliness of regular CEC and ensuring accurate and quality data.

Index

Management of the SIGs department entails overseeing the process of collecting, entering into admin, and webchecking ratings and endorsements. Interns' work sometimes needs to be checked and interns might need a reminder to follow all the necessary small steps (updating correct cells in tracking sheets, saving files to the correct places, etc.) Additionally, the supervisor is responsible for keeping the department organized, efficient, and accurate.

CEC Responsiblities

Collection

Make sure we are making a good faith effort to find ratings for existing SIGs in a timely manner. Confirm with your supervisor, but typically, a good faith effort means searching for their ratings on the web at least twice a year, and then attempting to contact the group up to 3 times for a response
Make sure we're actively looking for new ratings, from new groups. Spend extra time trying to find ratings for offices, issue categories, and jurisdictions in which we are lacking. Be creative when looking for ratings, and consider how we may convert various forms of judgment into our rating standards.
Make sure we have the original scorecards for every rating in our database saved and organized.
Monitor and respond to notes and comments left in schedules

Entry/Checks

Ensure that rating methodologies are being interpreted accurately and consistently, and are converted to percents when at all possible. Focus on all ratings in our database that are strings or anything other than a percent. Make sure "Our Rating" is selected as appropriate

SIGs Information

Don't forget updating the special interest groups' contact info and mission statements yearly, as well as ensuring the categories are correct in accordance with our current category definitions
Monitor for duplicate groups and ratings
Actively monitor what other groups are doing with ratings and interest groups for inspiration on collection, analysis, and display
Address comments and notes left in tracking sheets

Organization of the Special Interest Group Sub-Department

Busy times: Late winter early spring, end of summer, and just before an election

Scheduling

Ratings and endorsements are released on a rolling basis and are entirely dependent on the groups. Ratings are more likely to be released in the months proceeding a state's legislative session. Endorsements are more likely to be released in the weeks immediately preceding an election. As a result, it is best to schedule rating collection based on each legislature's legislative calendar (NCSL will typically publish a 50-state legislative calendar each year). New endorsements should be collected based on each state's primary calendar (this information is tracked by our Elections Monitoring department).

Collection Priority
Generally speaking, national SIGs take precedence over state SIGs. Ratings take priority over endorsements unless it is a major election year. Current data should be completed before starting on earlier years.
Ratings
1. Start with Major SIGs
Endorsements
1. Close Races
2. Swing States
3. User views (Google Analytics)
4. State Population

Endorsements

Released in the weeks preceding election.

SIGs frequently release endorsements last minute

Even Years it's best to collect based on primary elections

-Coordinate with the Elections Monitoring sub-department

Endorsements cannot be entered until filing deadlines are past and candidates have an election in our database

Ratings

Released in the months following a state legislature's adjournment date

Give the SIGs sometime to publish their scorecards

Odd Years are a good time to focus on adjournment schedules

National Groups release more ratings at the end of full sessions

2017-2018 would expect more ratings in 2019

Congressional ratings will usually start to be made available in January/February, with about 1/3 of the federal groups releasing them at that time. Late spring also sees a surge in Congressional ratings.

Collecting based on elections and adjournments will limit the number of rounds that can be accomplished in a year, but it is the most efficient way of getting data.

Tools

Network Drive

The Network Drive is where we house the electronic archives and historical, not frequently accessed information.
Key folders

National and State SIGs folders: These are the digital archives. Make sure that there are not duplicate folders. Occasionally a group will change its name or a person can’t find the original folder due to misspelling or a “The”. Spot check that file names are entered correctly. Group folders should have an endorsement sub-folder and a rating sub-folder. This is a correct as you go, time-willing project
Tracking Sheets: All old CEC tracking sheets are stored here. There are also tracking sheets for inactive and deleted SIGs. Inactive and deleted SIGs are only used when SIGs are removed from the active schedules and should be maintained by experienced staff only.
Queries: All SIGs queries should be saved into the SIGs query folder - this cuts down on work for future staff and interns when everybody has access to the same information.

Google Drive

The Google Drive is where all active/working spreadsheets and documents are stored. This mostly includes tracking sheets and work schedules.

Collection Priority:

The Collection Priority Tracking sheet is updated at the beginning of each year with legislative adjournment dates and primary election dates.
Staff then assign states to collected based on need

CEC Tracking Sheet

- The CEC tracking sheet is where all of the SIGs work-tracking is stored. Anything found during collections is added to the CEC tracking sheet. Any work done to a rating or endorsement is recorded in the CEC Tracking Sheet.

It is the responsibility of the SIGs staff to create a new CEC every year, transfer over incomplete data from the previous year, archive old CEC's and to ensure everybody is properly filling out the tracking sheet. The tracking sheet is critical to guaranteeing all work is recognized and completed.

Schedules

Staff and interns should be assigned states based on priority (see above).
SIGs staff is responsible for monitoring status changes as well as reviewing notes and comments resolving any issues noted.

Ratings@ Forward

Vote Smart has a specific email account in place for questions about ratings, endorsements, and special interest groups. The account is set up as a forward. Someone in the SIGs department should have their work email set up to receive ratings@ emails. See mantis ticket #6780 and #7681

Weekly Reports

Every week, each member of the research department is responsible for writing a weekly report. The purpose is to reflect on short-term and long-term goals and to let your supervisors know what your team has been doing all week and how well your keeping pace. In the SIGs drive, there is a folder called weekly reports with helpful queries. In general, you want to include the status of interns, progress in terms of organization of subdepartment (tracking sheets, wiki pages, cleanup projects, etc.), and a comparison of your weekly productivity with overall goals. Feel free to change, add, or exclude any information on your weekly report from the template in the drive.

Managing People

Training New Staff/Interns

One of the most crucial elements of the continuity of success at Vote Smart is our training programs. Training is vital because it is how we pass along learned information that we have gained from experience. Vote Smart's process is particularly unique, as they are not used anywhere else, and are not especially intuitive. When training interns there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Interns know very little (1%) of what you do about Vote Smart.
2. Interns will have a different perspective than you about Vote Smart (intern vs. staff).
3. Interns may need more attention than you would give a new staff member, per se.
4. It is vital to develop a strong, communication based, working relationship with your interns. This will ensure that they feel comfortable asking you questions and that they have respect and appreciation for you.

Head to the Training Interns page

also see: ManagingPeople

Managing Volunteers

Volunteers tend to require a more specialized version of supervision than do interns. They are usually older and might have trouble navigating computers and/or the internet. Also, they are in the office for a shorter period of time so there isn't much time to learn a whole lot. For these reasons, it's a good idea to have prepared different or compartmentalized tasks for volunteers.

For example, staff members could give volunteers that have a hard time with computers second webchecks. This way, the volunteers only need to visit the SIG's profile on VoteSmart.org and compare the information on our website to the physical scorecard or set of endorsements. You could give them a notebook and pen and instruct the volunteers to write any discrepancies and/or mistakes on a piece of paper to attach to the hard copy before returning it to you.

Another idea for volunteers that might find working with computers difficult is to set them up to file away hard copies in the archives. This allows them to work away from the computer screen, get a feel for how different scorecards and endorsements look and learn what kind of SIGs we cover. Because this is a primarily solitary task and the archives are cold, it might be a good idea to mix this assignment with others.

Other Projects for Staff

Quality Control

Data standards have been inconsistently applied throughout the years and some errors fall through the cracks during webcheck. It is best to do a QC scan every week using the pre-written queries in the network drive to catch new errors. Otherwise, If time allows and resources allow, there is a lot of work that can be done to clean the SIGs portion of the database with bigger QC projects.

For more information see SIGs Clean-Up Guide

Script Management

The SIGs department has made inroads automating a few of our processes and different SIGs and scorecards have varying levels of automation. SIGs staff should closely monitor actively running scripts for errors and functionality. Ideally, a person familiar with computer programs such as R and Python will be in charge of monitoring and creating new scripts.

See ResearchScraping and NRARatings

Backlog

SIGs frequently has a backlog of scorecards and endorsements. There are two tiers of backlog: New and Old. SIGs staff should do their best to avoid accumulating unentered and checked ratings that have been collected in the course of a year. If SIGs is unable to get through all the data found in a year, transfer the unfinished data to the new year's CEC (this way data isn't forgotten). The old backlog is from our paper archives days and is a project for when time and resources allow. The backlog has been roughly organized into labeled bankers boxes in the archives with a rough description in the Google Drive.

Vote Easy and VSDM

You may be asked to help with collecting and aggregate data for Vote Easy and the VSDM. For more information see VoteEasy and VotersSelfDefenseManual.

CategoryManagement

PVSWiki : ManagingRatings