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Tutorial: How to Use the Citizen Democracy Project System
Signature Collectors
If you're a volunteer signature collector, we hope this site will be self-explanatory, but this is a new site, so we probably don't know what its confusing aspects are yet because we're too familiar with it. So, let us know when you happen across anything that isn't user-friendly by sending and email to Questions@CitizenDemocracy.net. Our goal is to make this site as easy to understand and convenient as possible, so we welcome your suggestions for improvement.
Campaign Organizers and Staff
First, create an account on CitizenDemocracy.net for each of your campaign workers who will want to access CDP and contact our staff to make arrangements for:
1. Adding your campaign's ballot measure to our database so regular users can start making pledges to collect signatures.
2. Getting your account upgraded to "Organizer" status so that additional features are available to you when you log in.
Although you will need to designate one person as your campaign's CDP administrator, that person can grant access to other members of your staff to help spread the work around. This page is under construction and won't be complete until we're underway and have received more feedback, but we'll start by describing the available features in two groups: core features and optional features.
Core Features
The core features are the most basic features that allow you to track volunteer signature collectors and get information and materials to them on a timely basis.
When you log in, you'll see at least three services available to you:
1. The regular Initiative Signature Gatherer service.
2. The Initiative Organizer service, and
3. The Address Book service.
Click on the Initiative Organizer icon to get to the Organizer menu.
The menu lists available programs down the left and data tables you can access on the last line:
| Initiative Petition Organizers Application Users' Jump Page | |
| EmailSQLMergeForm.pl | This form allows you to use SQL statements from the SQL Library table to drive data (typically names and e-mail addresses) into personalized form letters. A test mode is provided to preview letters. Currently only the system administrator can cause e-mails to be generated. |
| InitiativeManager.pl | Displays a list of all Initiative petitions currently being tracked by this system and gives links to take action. |
| NewSigGatherLabels.pl | This page provides mailing labels for all Signature Gatherers who have pledged, but have not yet been sent petitions or other campaign materials. IMPORTANT: After sending materials to these people, it is imperative that you update their status in the SigGather table (using the SigGatherList.pl report as a starting point) to "" or they will show up in the next batch of mailing labels and might get sent materials twice! |
| SigGatherList.pl | This program lists all of your campaign's signature collectors, their contact information, and their current commitments. |
Most of the time, you'll just use NewSigGatherLabels.pl to get mailing labels for volunteers (to send out petitions) and SigGatherList.pl to track the status of the pledges.
InitiativeManager.pl is useful for monitoring totals.
Although you'll have the ability to send e-mail to ALL of your signature collectors using features in the Address Book service, there is also the EmailSQLMergeForm.pl that lets you e-mail more personalized and precisely targeted e-mails using any and all data fields in the database for your volunteers. Ask the CDP staff for assistance with this feature.
The CDP site will automatically send you e-mail periodically letting you know if there are people who've signed up and are ready to receive signature gathering kits. Likewise, the system will remind the signature collectors as their pledge dates for completing their signatures approaches.
The two most important things for an organizer to do (at least within the CDP system) are:
1. Send out signature collector kits as soon as possible after pledges come in to help keep momentum going.
2. Mark the pledges as COMPLETED when the collectors send in their petition sheets so that the system will not keep sending them reminders after they've fulfilled their commitments.
Optional Features
If you want the totals seen by CDP visitors to reflect the total of all signatures pledged and collected so far, you'll need to either make sure that all your signature collectors are using the the CDP system or enter other collectors' commitments by hand in the SigGather table. Use the Bot Works tutorial on "ReFORM" for more information about that.
If you're the designated administrator for your campaign, you'll have two lists of people in your Address Book application-- one for campaign staff (whom you'd trust to share the administration duties and authorities) and one for your signature collectors. You can send e-mail to the members of these lists or view their contact information in the "Bolodex" program for phone work. You can also print out mailing labels and downloadable files for MS Word merging. All of these features are available from within the Address Book application which you can enter by clicking on the Address Book icon from the main menu after you've first logged into your account.
Please contact us with your questions and we'll update this page.
