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Digital Field: creating your ideal campaign organizing workflow

Aj Carrillo By 
September 17, 2013

Whether you're running for your local school board or working on a campaign for state governor, direct and ongoing dialogue and engagement with your supporters is key to success. We created followups to make communicating with supporters an integrated part of the workflow of everyone on the campaign - from staffers to interns and even volunteers. 

Having customization is extremely valuable for organizing. For example, you can match your campaign’s fundraising program to specific contact types. It allows for each member of your staff to know when and why they need to follow up with each of their assigned contacts in your nation.

Follow-up view
Follow-up view
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Where to set a follow-up on a user profile
Another great reason to customize followups in NationBuilder: the campaign manager or finance director can track by category or staffer the specific followups being done. Logged followups can be viewed by day, week, month, etc. For example the field director might see that week over week initial voter contact is down, and make adjustments to the organizers' work for the following week.
Contact view
Contact view
When creating your campaign’s followups, think about what department they fall into. Labeling a followup type something generic, such as ‘initial contact’ doesn’t show what specific type of activity by department was done. Was this voter or donor contact? Your followup should state department name first, followed by the activity (e.g.: Organizing – ACTIVITY). 

Campaigns of all sizes use NationBuilder, so I structured the following example to be used by the broadest set of campaigns possible. The one required followup type is an ‘In Box’ to mark in-bound communications, such as an email or a phone call, received by a specific point person. You can also use the ‘In Box’ follow up to flag a note on a profile for the point person to review.

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To create your custom follow-up types, sign in to your nation's control panel and click Settings > Contact Types. 
  • Organizing – Voter Initial ID Contact
  • Organizing – Voter Undec Persuasion
  • Organizing – Volunteer Initial
  • Organizing – Volunteer RSVP Reminder
  • Organizing – Volunteer Recruitment
  • Organizing – In Box
  • Finance – Initial Prospecting
  • Finance – Pledge Follow-Up
  • Finance – Donor Resolicit
  • Finance – Raisers: Pledge to Raise
  • Finance – EOQ / End of Quarter
  • Finance – In Box

Pro-Tip: Once you have set up your specific followup types, bookmark each specific one and save in a folder. Then open each bookmarked followup as a tab in your browser. This will show what specific followups by category you have do that day (and ones that may have gone overdue). 

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