November VoteSource Newsletter

Welcome to the November edition of the VoteSource Newsletter

Missed last month’s edition? Catch up by clicking here.

Or click here to browse all previous editions.

VoteSource Upgrade

We are less than a week away from the planned VoteSource outage.

Every active operator of the system has already been emailed about the planned work between 25th November and 30th November. Please remember you will not be able to access the system during this time.

This update is the culmination of months of planning and underlines the Party’s commitment to improving our software and enhancing our data for the future. The upgrade will allow us to accommodate more users, deliver a better service, improve performance, and avoid unplanned outages. Once complete, we will be able to develop and implement new features faster - each one helping us to win.

We ask you to keep planning appropriately for the downtime. For example, membership data and donations data will not be able to be recorded during this period, so we would advise against any membership drives around this period. Take a moment now to consider how the outage might impact other activities in your local schedule.

VoteSource Support - Update

The VoteSource Support team is down to two members for the foreseeable future.

Kumba has left the team to take a master’s degree.

We ask for your patience as the two remaining team members adjust to these new working conditions.

Annual Rollover

We will soon start to receive files for the Annual Electoral Register Rollover. This reflects the annual canvass of electors carried out in the Autumn every year. In addition to adding and deleting electors, it reorders the Electoral Roll number of constituents.

Please note that some Local Authorities may be delaying publication until next year.

You can check the status of your rollover within VoteSource. If you click into the Register tile and then click on the next Register tile, the system will display the loaded registers currently available. This is also where you can check if you monthly update has been applied, but you will be looking for Annual Register in the left-hand column for this year’s rollover. Remember - until Annual Register appears with a date effective of 2020 and with Loaded in the far-right status column, your annual rollover has not been applied.

Once your Annual Register has been loaded into VoteSource:

• Please check your register and report any concerns to the Support team, providing examples.

• Improve the matching of records by using the manual match process in the Drop Off section.

To find the drop off section from the VoteSource homepage click on the Register tile and then Drop Off.

You can then select the Publishing Authority and the Published Register you wish to match to.

You will be able to select constituents who have “dropped off the register” based on a number of criteria – e.g. Membership, has a specific Voting Intention etc.

The system will allow you to manually match these records to potential records in the system.

Once your first monthly update has been applied post your annual rollover you can no longer use drop off for the previous year.

Once the first monthly update has been applied, you should only use the drop off section to match records that have split during the monthly update.

You will only be able to merge drop offs for each monthly update until next year’s annual rollover.

If you have any questions, please contact the Support team.

VoteSource Best Practice

Connect Calling

Campaigning during the winter months is difficult for many reasons. Connect calling allows organisers to set up phone campaigning sessions that volunteers can take part in from the comfort of their own homes.

Setting up Connect calling requires three things:

1. A target audience
2. A digital script/survey
3. Callers

A target audience can be run very easily from the campaigning section, and many readers will be familiar with how to do this. For those who require assistance, the Support team are happy to help or user guides on target audiences can be found in the Help Centre.

Setting up a survey can be a little trickier. That’s why the Connect and Campaigning teams produce many national scripts which can be cloned for local use. These are ready to be used straight away or can be edited by you to include local questions. If you wish to edit or create a script/survey from scratch, user guides are available in the Help Centre or the Support team will be happy to assist you.

To clone a survey simply go to the Contents section on the VoteSource homepage and select Surveys. Once the page has loaded you can browse through the National survey scripts. If you locate one which you wish to use, simply click the clone option in the right-hand column. You will then need to name your cloned survey and select an electoral area for it to cover. Please note that your target audience and script/survey must have the same electoral area. If you wish to edit or create your own script, user guides can be found in the Help Centre or the Support team will be happy to go through with you how to do so.

We would currently recommend that callers focus on the Community Conversations scripts.

Once the script/survey and target audience have both been created, the script/survey can be assigned to the target audience via the enabled activates section of the target audience. Once the Connect session is active, all users with access to the assigned electoral area and that can either make calls with their user accounts, or are set up as connect callers, will be able to see and make calls.

One of the best things about Connect calling is that it enables volunteers to help out with phone campaigning across the United Kingdom. Each connect session automatically generates a pin, which callers can enter to be approved access to connect calling anywhere. If you are not doing any local campaigning at present, why not see if you and your team can assist a neighbouring connect campaign? For more information on how you and your team can do this, please contact the Connect team at:

connect@conservatives.com