People and imports

The people file is the campaign's own record of everybody it talks to. This page covers finding somebody, changing a record, bringing a list in from a spreadsheet, deciding the rows the import could not, and putting doors on the map.

Finding somebody

People lists the campaign's records. You can search a name, an e-mail or a misspelling; tick Forgive misspellings and the search tolerates a wrong letter. You can narrow by the start of a postal code and by tag, and page through the result. Click a row to open the person.

A volunteer is not shown this screen at all: a volunteer's reach is their mission, and a list of everybody the campaign holds is not part of it. A captain's account finds nobody here — a captain works from their team's missions. A candidate reads the records, and changes and merges them only once an administrator has given them the Edit people grant; an observer reads them and changes nothing. Whoever may not change a record is told so once, rather than offered buttons that would be refused.

A person's record

The record opens with the name, the address (which links to the household), the tags, and a chip if the door is marked do not knock or if a support code has been recorded.

Three tabs sit beside it. Sources and changes says where each fact came from and who last changed it. Timeline is what has happened with this person — every conversation, in order. Follow-ups is what the campaign still owes them and what it has already done — a lawn sign, a call back — each opening the follow-up itself.

Restricted details — a full date of birth, sex or gender — are not sent to your screen until you ask for them. On a computer, if the record holds some and your account holds the Restricted Data grant, one line says how many are held back and Show restricted details brings them up, marked as restricted; Hide restricted details puts them away again, and so does editing the record or narrowing the window. Every time somebody shows them, the organization's audit trail records who looked at whose — never what they saw. An account without the grant is told what would change that and offered no button.

On a phone, restricted details are not shown at all, whatever your account may see, and a phone held on its side is still a phone; one line says they are held back, and the record shows them on a computer. What the software guesses is shown on any screen to an account that may read it.

Follow-ups also lists anything owed to a record that has since been merged into this one, so a merge never hides what the campaign promised somebody.

Changing a record

Press Edit record if your account may. Three panels:

Edit the record — names, honorific, suffix, language, birth year. Every change asks How you know: my own observation, the person told us, or checked against a document. Only the fields you changed are written, each with that receipt attached. Save changes.
E-mails and phones — add one with a kind, a value and a label, mark one primary, or remove one. Removing asks once more before it happens. A value is never edited in place: you remove it and add the corrected one, so the old value's history stays intact.
Tags — add from the list, or remove with the ✕. The list is the organization's own: an administrator makes a new tag under Admin → Tags (a name, and a category to group it by in the People filter), and everybody who edits people can then put it on.

Nothing is overwritten quietly. Every change to a person's own facts writes a receipt in the same moment the change lands, and the whole of it is readable under Sources and changes and in the audit log.

The household behind the door

The household page is the door itself: the address, whether it is marked do not knock, and whether it has been placed on the map. Who lives here shows current residents first and former ones after, each linking to their record — somebody who has moved out keeps their place in the history rather than vanishing. Where the address is in a building, the units, resident counts, way in and access notes are there too.

If your account may change people's records, you can place the door: Try to place this door asks the geocoder, and Place it by hand lets you click the map and Save this position. A pin placed by hand is never overwritten by a later geocode.

Bringing a list in

Admin → Import. Four steps, and a person decides each one. A Data Steward runs an import, and nobody else does — not a campaign manager, and not an administrator; anybody else can read every import and its rows. An administrator who has to load a file makes somebody, themselves included, a Data Steward of a campaign on its roster first.

Upload. Pick the source the list came from, then a CSV or .xlsx up to 25 MiB and 200,000 rows. If a workbook has several sheets you are asked which one holds the list. If the source is new, New source asks for its name, kind and classification — and, for a restricted voters' list, how long it may be kept and the date it must be destroyed. Those two are written once and cannot be edited afterwards.
Confirm the mapping. Every column in your file is shown with sample cells and a proposal for what it becomes. Change any of them, or choose Leave this column alone. Restricted headers are shown but cannot be mapped. Once the mapping is confirmed the import is settled: the way to change it is a fresh upload, not an edit.
Validate. Every row is classified and a preview is written. Nothing is created yet. If the file names a tag the organization does not have, the preview says which: an import puts on people only the tags that already exist, so ask an administrator to make the missing ones under Admin → Tags before you process. A row whose tag was left off says so.
Process. The button says exactly what it will do — create so many, update so many — and the whole run lands in one transaction, all or nothing.

A restricted voters' list adds one more step before processing: Read the acknowledgement, then tick that you acknowledge custody of that list in your own name. Nothing is processed until somebody has signed for it.

All of this works on a phone too — in the app and in the console at a phone's width — except that a phone never shows an import's restricted columns: Imports, custody and exports on a phone.

The rows the import could not decide

The Rows view is the whole file, paged, and filterable by classification. Each row carries what the import made of it and a button for each decision you can take; where a whole class of rows needs the same answer, there is a bulk control that acts on every undecided row of that classification. You can download the rows that were not processed as a CSV.

An import that was processed in part offers Process the rows that are left. Nobody is created twice — the run knows what it already did.

Doors with no place on the map

An address the geocoder could not place is not lost; it is listed under Doors with no place on the map on the import screen. Place the doors runs a batch, and after a pass that missed some, Try the missed ones again has another go. Anything left over is placed by hand from the household page.

A door has to be placed before it can be walked: turf is a shape on a map, and a door with no position is not inside any shape.

Duplicates

Admin → Duplicate review. Find candidates now runs a scan and fills a queue of pairs, each with the matcher's verdict and the signals behind it, side by side. You choose Merge into… in either direction, or Keep separate.

Choosing a direction does not merge yet. It shows you what the merge will do first: whose name and birth year survive; that both records' e-mail addresses and telephone numbers end up on the survivor rather than one replacing the other; that the retired record's tags move onto the survivor, and a tag both records wear is kept once — the survivor's own stands, and the retired record's is set aside on the retired record; what happens to the door of the record being retired; and that the retired record is not deleted — it is marked as merged, points at the survivor, and the merge can be undone exactly. Merge into… on that page is the act. Either decision is final for that pair. An accuracy report for the matcher sits beside the queue.

On a phone the queue and the comparison take turns: choose a pair, read it at the full width of the screen, decide, and Back to the queue.

What the data still needs

Admin → Data quality is one page of counts, each with a link to the screen where it is fixed: duplicate pairs waiting for a decision, when the scan last ran and what it found, how often the matcher turns out to be right, doors with no place on the map, import rows still waiting for somebody, and people with neither an e-mail address nor a telephone number.

Two of the tiles are careful about what they do not claim. Doors nothing has looked for yet are never counted as doors the platform failed to find — you are told how many are waiting instead of a miss rate that would read as "your addresses are fine". And when the scan last ran is kept in the audit trail, which only a tenant administrator may read; if you are not one, that tile says so rather than telling you no scan has ever run.

These are counts about the records themselves. They are not the measures behind Insights, which are versioned definitions about field work, so do not read one against the other.

People on the phone

Staff accounts find the same things in the Field OP app, under More → People:

People — search by name, e-mail or number (with or without forgiving misspellings), by the start of a postal code, or by a tag grouped by category with how many people wear each. Pages load with Show more. What you type travels inside the request and never in an address, so it is not written into anybody's logs or history.
A person's record — the same parts as the console, one at a time: details (each fact with how it is known, each e-mail address and number with whether it is verified), sources and changes as cards, the timeline, and follow-ups — including any owed to a record that was merged into this one. Coming back from Edit this record shows the record as it now is. Edit this record changes the facts (with How you know), the e-mail addresses and numbers (the phone keyboard opens for a number; write it with + and the country code), and the tags. Do-not-contact instructions can be recorded with a reason of at least ten characters, and lifted with a reason; a legal hold, a safety suppression and a record of a death are never offered a lift. Administrators can join an account to the person, or unlink it.
The household — who lives here, the building's units by count (never by name), Try to place this door, and placing it by hand on the map.
Duplicate review — the queue, then each pair one record at a time (swipe between them), then Merge these two: choose which record is kept, read what the merge will do, and only then merge. Keep them separate asks once. Find candidates now queues a scan, or runs it there and then and says what it found where the campaign has no background worker. What the matcher said about a restricted detail — that two records' full dates of birth agree or differ — is said on a phone as "a restricted detail agrees" or "differs", never naming it; when one differs, compare the pair on a computer before merging.
Two records that wear the same tag merge like any other pair. The record you keep wears the tag once, as it did; the other record's is set aside on the retired record and comes back if the merge is undone.
Data quality — the same counts as the console's page.

Nothing a staff screen reads is kept on the phone: it is read while the screen is open and dropped when it closes, and every answer tells the phone's own web cache not to keep it either. Restricted details are never sent to the app or shown in it, and the console on a phone — held upright or on its side — does the same. The guesses panel is shown only to an account that may read guesses — never to a volunteer, a captain, a candidate or an observer — is read afresh each time the record is opened, and is not drawn while the app is not in front.

If you look through more people in an hour than the campaign allows without an export, the list stops and says so; it opens again within the hour.

Taking data out

Admin → Export needs the export grant, and it asks for a written purpose that is kept for ever. You name the columns one at a time — there is deliberately no "all columns" — and may filter by tag and postal prefix, and the rows are capped.

You can also aim a file at one campaign. Choose the campaign and the rest opens up: only the people a canvass reached, only the people at a turf's doors, only the people on a list (its newest snapshot), only those who gave certain answers, only those owed a follow-up of a particular kind, and only those last spoken to between two dates. Three extra columns come with the campaign — what they said, when they said it, and the last conversation. They need a campaign because a person can be in several, and each campaign has its own answer. If something in the filter is not that campaign's — a canvass from elsewhere, a support code the campaign does not use, a list nobody has frozen yet — you are told which one, rather than handed an empty file.

The file can be downloaded once, only by the person who asked, and only within 24 hours. Restricted details and anything the software guessed are never in an export. A file drawn from a restricted voters' list — an export, or the rows an import did not process — asks you to sign the undertaking for that list before it is fetched, in your own name, unless you already have.

Every copy the campaign has made — an export, a printed walk sheet, a mission bundle on a phone — is listed under Admin → Custody, with who holds it and what for. If you hold a copy of a voters' list you have not signed for, Custody says so, and Sign for this list opens the undertaking for you to sign — only you can. Settings → Undertakings you have signed lists every one you have signed, in any role: which list, when, under which wording, and the words again. Close out is offered to the roles that may change the campaign's records, and an observer reads the register without it.

Next: Field · Labels and what they mean · Privacy, do-not-contact and rights requests