November VoteSource Newsletter

Welcome to the November edition of the VoteSource Newsletter.

Missed our last edition? Catch up by clicking here.

Or click here to browse all previous editions.

Rollover

We will start to receive files for the Annual Electoral Register Rollover from December 1st. 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 not all Local Authorities provide their annual rollover files promptly on the 1st of December. We do chase stragglers, but this can delay your rollover locally.

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 your monthly updates have 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 2023 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 and the merge ability.

Every effort is made to ensure that all records are matched together successfully via our automated process, however, inevitably there will be some the process cannot automatically match.

This could be because the individuals have moved address, provided data to the local authority which does not match what is stored on VoteSource, like a date of birth. In some cases, it can even be where parents share the same first name as their children. With examples like these we need your local knowledge to merge these records back together.

We strongly recommend that when you come to match your records together you go to the Drop Off section of VoteSource, found by clicking on the Register tile, select your publishing authority and the criteria you wish to search for, I.E. Voting Intention of Conservative and then export the responses to a spreadsheet.

You can then look up each record via Constituent search and merge the record if they are still at the same address using the Merge ability.

The advantage of using this method is that you can merge records at any time – there is no time constraint like with Drop Offs. Also by using the Merge ability it greatly reduces the chance of records splitting in the future.

Instructions on how to merge records can be found in the Help Centre:

“How to merge a constituent record that’s not matched to an electoral record to a constituent record” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/331

“Drop off – How to extract a list of Drop Offs to merge post annual rollover” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/337

If you would rather use the Drop Off section – which will provide you with possible matches for the dropped off record, please follow the instructions below. Please be aware that the drop off procedure is time sensitive, once your first monthly update on the new year has been applied you should no longer continue matching drop off records. You can of course then start using the merge ability at that time.

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.

The following user guide can be found in the Help Centre on VoteSource to assist with Drop Offs:

“Drop Off – Annual Roll Over” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/336

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 use drop offs for each monthly update until next year’s annual rollover. However, you can continue to merge records at any time regardless of monthly update files or annual rollover.

If you have any questions, please contact the Support team on 020 7984 8000 or votesourcesupport@conservatives.com

New releases and bug fixes to VoteSource

Our development team have been working extremely hard to bring you our latest release which was deployed on Wednesday 22/11/23.

It incorporates major updates to the survey section as well as improvements throughout the system and represents an enormous amount of hard work undertaken by our developers to improve your overall VoteSource experience.

The following release have been deployed to live

• a sweep to fully support friendly codes for electoral entities.

Campaigning 10.111.17.1

• New Survey question setup has been adjusted to allow;

  • Adding a new blank question is now one click rather than going via the question bank.

  • You can now add a question you have recently created in another survey, speeding up the creation of surveys across areas.

  • You can now add a question anyone has created for a survey in an area where you have permission, which is useful when helping an area.

• Updated The maps that you can have on Canvass Cards and Delivery Rounds to help you to find the areas you want to campaign have been updated filling in the roads on the new estates.

• Enhancement to the voting trend report to allow dynamic date range.

• Enhanced the notes that can be collected as part of a survey.

There have also been 46 other fixes and improvements around survey creation, editing and other fixes and improvements through campaigning.

Details:

• Bug        Campaigning - App Displays 2 different Pages moving from Data Entry to Data Entry management Page and then back to a data entry

• Bug        Campaigning -LIVE- Survey- App Fails to display question numbers in an order in a survey

• Bug        Campaigning - Surveys - If logic tab is selected, and the question type changes to a type without any logic (e.g. text), the tab persists and allows you to save the logic

• Bug        Campaigning - Surveys - Incorrect warnings are displayed regarding a matrix VI score type of question

• Task       Surveys - User is unable to select and upload a ‘jfif’ format image to image choice type of question

• Bug        Medium Priority - Unable to publish survey

• Bug        Expected end of string, but instead reached end of data. LineNumber: 0 | BytePositionInLine: 2033. when saving survey

• Bug        It seems it no cloning SurveyAnswerTaskRequestStateId from the question bank

• Bug        RE: Med/Low Priority - Unable to load candidates section correctly

• Bug        Campaigning - target audience remove a group issue

• Feature Campaigning - Voting Intention Trends

• Bug        TI: Target Audience does not cancel

• Feature Survey Data Obtained Reports

• Bug        Campaigning - Up and Down arrow keys doesn’t seem to respond in an Email mail merge

• Bug        Campaigning - Target Audiences wizard

• Bug        Campaigning - while creating a control room App Goes ahead without selecting an election without giving a warning message 

• Bug        Campaigning - while creating a control room to be ran in a future Date there is No date picker

• Bug        Truncated notes added from campaigning

• Bug        Campaigning - Electors with Postal votes column shows empty when exported to spreadsheet in the Voting intention dashboard in reports section

• Bug        Campaigning - Walkroutes

• Bug        Campaigning - Frontend Survey Validation

• Bug        Campaigning - one control room shown on the GTV menu but when selected  there are two control rooms

• Bug        Telephones with only SMS consent are not being inserted into the Constituent contacts

• Task       Survey responses section. ranking question type should be updated to display the data collected based on the weight

• Bug        Campaigning - Survey goes ahead without checking the boxes under the phone number and emails with No warning message .

• Bug        Campaigning - Surveys - Question bank - DataStatement not saving

• Bug        Campaigning - In All Mail merges within Campaigns section exported spreadsheet when generated is not in a export same order  as its displayed on the Application

• Bug        Survey - Tips not saving correctly

• Bug        Campaigning - Email activity - No fields could be seen in the email mail merge

• Bug        Campaigning - Mail activity - Selecting a Start Mailing Data entry tab results in a Type error

• Bug        Priority - Incident ID: 238292: Error message: This polling district could not be downloaded. Please try again later

• Bug        Campaigning - Issue positions not being copied when question added to survey from question bank

• Bug        Delivery Rounds Area/Progress issues

Survey Microsite / letstalk 2.011.03.1

Some validation improvements

Details:

• Bug: Campaigning - Survey Validation. maxlength attribute in the frontend (for input type text: 10000, numeric: 19, comment:10000) would prevent the user from entering more than the specified number of characters. Applied to VS10 and survey microsite.

Party Organisation 10.111.21.1

This release adds the following

• New The RP3 report can now be downloaded as a Excel file as well as PDF

• New A party position can now be against a proposed electoral entity or current electoral entity. Allowing constituency roles against the new proposed parliamentary geography’s

18 fixes and improvements across the section, including some enhancements relating to the roles defined by electoral geography, now available for proposed boundaries.

Details;

• Bug        Party Organisation - When renewing an appointment with term end date in the past, throws a 404 error

• Bug        Part Organisation - Design bug with the Former candidate’s section with Custom Date option

• Bug        Party Organisation-Directory- Renewing an Appointment with a New Term End date does not show any results

• Bug        Part Organisation - After No activity whilst working on Positions section of application the page signs out within the Summary Page

• Bug        Party Organisation - Renew appointment doesn’t renew correct constituent position when constituent has multiple constituent positions for same position in same organisation/geography

• Bug        Part Organisation - Design ug with the Former candidate’s section with Custom Date option

• Bug        Constituent - Positions - Selecting a history tile within the position section results in a error 404

• Bug        Constituent - selecting Positions tab or positions history of a constituent record results in error 404

• Feat.      Party Organisation - RP3 Report

• Feat.      Party Organisation - Proposed EE for a role and current party organisation

• Bug        Party Organisation - Adding a New Phone number to a local party organisation results in an Error

• Bug        Party Organisation - Design issue with Party Organisation

• Bug        Party Organisation - Custom Date Option for All Former Appointees in National positions section accepts a future date when Applied

• Bug        Party organisation - RP3 report displays incorrect current draft reports when redirected back from all reports page

• Bug        Party Organisation - Website url added to a Party organisation redirects to a new local party organisation with an HTML code

• Bug        Party Organisation - Removing a position results in a error 404

• Bug        Party Organisation - File Report - No ‘Copy password ' Tab in File report section

• Task       Enhance resiliency during file upload operations by implementing session validation across all instances where ng-upload is used in the application

Our development team will continue to work to provide exciting new features and ensure those that are already available work as they should. If you do not find something that you have previously raised in the above release note it does not mean our team are not working on it but that it could not potentially be included in this release.

As ever, if you have questions on the release please contact us on 020 7984 8000 or votesourcesupport@conservatives.com

Fundamentals – How to export survey response from a target audience

Did you know that you can generate an export file from VoteSource which will provide you the questions and answers for data you have entered against a target audience?

This questions has become more common recently as people are learning of the greater flexibility and power of the upgraded surveys section as part of VS10. But it also applies for canvassing and connect calling data entered as well.

The good news is that it is very easy to extract an excel spreadsheet with the names and contact details of people who have had responses entered against their record from either a target audience or an online survey.

We will start by going through the target audience method for a survey.

As many readers will be aware, to enter survey data into VoteSource manually, you will need to have set up your survey with the appropriate questions and logic assigned to those questions and you will also need to have run a target audience so that you have people to enter the data against.

Once you have enabled your Survey Data Entry against the target audience and entered data against constituents you are able to produce what is called a “Generate new export” from the Dashboard of the target audience.

The Dashboard is the first page that loads when you click into your target audience and contains information about how many electors are in the target audience, who created the target audience and when it was created, amongst other information. To generate the export you simply need to scroll to the bottom of the page and you will find the Export Responses section.

More information on the dashboard and the export responses section can be found in the following user guide.

VS10 – Target Audience – Dashboard https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/258

It is then simply a matter of scrolling to the bottom of the Dashboard page and clicking Generate new export. This will produce a downloaded excel spreadsheet with the names, contact details, all the questions as headers on the sheet and indication of how they answered.

Please be aware that it will of course only show information for those that have already responded, you will either need to generate subsequent files to ascertain further information recorded against other electors, or delete the file you have generated to generate a new one incorporating old and new data.

If you are using an Online survey, the process is very similar.

You will of course have needed to set up a survey template with questions and answer logic and published the survey via the online survey section.

Once the survey has gone live, and you have allowed for people to respond to it, simply scroll to the bottom of your online surveys setup page and you will find the Export responses section which works exactly like the target audience version of generating an export.

If you need more information or help on how to generate an export, please do contact us on 020 7984 8000 or at votesourcesupport@conservatives.com