Product Outline
Table of Contents
Problem
There is a new user type that formed post-election that is eager to engage in activism but are receiving mixed information on what is and isn’t effect, are being sent to various disparate tools which don’t cover the full workflow, and are likely to burn out over time without a feedback loop to provide a sense of productivity.
Audience
- 18–32, use Messenger
- Recently civic-minded person with a non-civic background who is not consistent in activism, doesn’t know how to be effective over time and doesn't always keep up with the outcomes
- Seeing issues on Facebook that their friends are sharing and that concern them. They want to do something about it and currently feel engaged with making calls
Solution
A natural path to activism that starts and ends with understanding the value of a person’s act, and reduces the cost of taking action.
> I care about something that needs my action
> I know who I need to talk to to take action
> I know how to talk to my staff members
> I know when and how often I need to call
> I know the outcome of my action
Product
An open source bot that can be manually triggered to send targeted call sheets to users through messenger, capture completion of call and follow up on outcomes of issues.
Implementation
An open source codebase with an Ansible recipe for deploying a Web App which interacts with the messenger API and can be controlled through an admin portal.
The web app will provide:
- Functionality to talk to Messenger API and Congress API
- An admin panel for admins to create bot scripts
- A database for storing user issue receipt and responses
- Functionality to respond to messages and periodically send out new calls to action to existing users
- Analytics to report what actions were of interest to users and to help refine how often to send users actions, and whether segmenting users (giving users different actions or some users more/less frequent actions) would be useful
- Public analytics -- numbers that can be shared with the world
V1
Bot
- User Sign Up script
- Capture full address
- Look up user’s federal congressional district (eg. NY-03) (delete address)
- Explain and introduce bot
- Call to Action script
- Provide information about issue
- Why they’re taking action
- How they’re taking action
- Instruction in taking the action (e.g. talking points and “Be nice!”)
- Provide representative info:
- Phone number ⇢
- Link to website ⇢
- A link to further information on the issue (on callparty.org) ⇢
- Asks user to tell the bot when they’ve done it (e.g. “Tell us ‘I did it’ when you’ve finished the call.”)
- Ask how it went
- Talked to staff
- Left a voicemail
- Congrats! Show total number of calls complete for that issue. Let them know what happens next
- Share the issue with friends ⇢
- Update of an issue script
- Provide information about issue
- Unsubscribe script
Admin
- Calls to Action
- Target selection (i.e. who is the user going to call, also determines which users will receive the action):
- Selector for Senator vs Representative
- Selector for Committee
- Selector for Party
- Text field for issue messaging
- Text field for link to additional information about the issue
- Update
- Select Call to Action the update is referencing (or) Target selection
- Text field for issue messaging
Open Source
- CC0 license
- Organizations should be able to take our code and write their own deployment to launch the bot on their servers and FB page
- We’ll need to provide guidance around how to add to Facebook (there are lots of resources to pull from but it is easy)
Website
- What CallParty is, how it works
- Why it’s effective: Highlights and links to research
- Recent actions and data on them
- Privacy policy etc.
V1.5
Bot
- Sign Up
- Giving the user their first action to take
- Call to Action
- Provide deadline inline
- Provide link to share on Facebook
- Update
- Provide new action based on update
- Provide link to share on Facebook
- Check my reps script
- Provide all reps based on District ID
- Phone number ⇢
- Link to website ⇢
- Change of Address
Admin
- Call deadline field
- Text field for facebook post link to action
- Tag for internal filtering
- Preview how many users match the target selection
- Create new action off of an update
Extra Future
- Frequency of contact
- Increase / decrease prompts to users based on their engagement
- Provide reminders or scheduling opportunities for users e.g.:
- Not ready to call right now? We’ll remind you in an hour
- Want to call again tomorrow? We’ll send another prompt
- Representative information
- Knowing things like committee makes for a more productive, informed and strategic conversation
- Providing district contact information
- Segmenting for State & District (if Representative) -- in the future, won’t be relevant initially
- Relationship with staff
- Keep track of staff members that users talk to to assist in relationship building
- Other areas of civic engagement
- Elections
- Calling someone other than a rep
- In-person communication / events (town halls)
Research
Office/staff research in progress
Contact
Questions? Wanna help? Comment right in here or get in touch through hi@callparty.org or kelsey.a.hunter@gmail.com
Contributors
Kelsey Hunter (lead)
Max Fowler
James Ayres
Oren Shoham
Josh Blum
Adrian M. Ryan
Erica Gorochow