Looking to fine tune New/Mode's targeting capabilities?

This blog post will teach you how to use New/Mode’s advanced filtering system. Using filters, you can ensure your supporters are always able to connect through to the right target, regardless of thier location. No more failed calls or email bounce backs - just frustration free engagement to maximize your campaigns success. 

Locating the Filtering Options 

It’s worth noting that this post doesn’t apply to the “Letter to the Editor” tool.  It does, however, pertain to all other New/Mode tools including “Letter to Representative”, “Call” “Fax” and “Tweet” tools.  The filtering options that we’ll be focusing on in this post can be found if you edit one of these tools, click on the “Advanced” tab and then edit any “Elected” components that come up in the components list (typically there is only one component of this type, but we’ll get to cascading and why you might want more than one “Elected” component towards the end of this post). See Image below. 

Filtering for Valid Contact Information and Using Fallbacks

Filter for Valid Contact Information

In some cases, representatives in our databases may not have valid contact invormation. A representative may not have a twitter account, or a seat may be vacant. This can be frustratating for supporters in those representative jurisdictions.  You can still provide them with an engagement opportunity by setting up automatic filters to identify invalid data and fallback to a specific target, like the head of a committee or the President.

When the “Phone Number” filter is checked, only targets (representatives) with valid phone numbers will be returned.  The same premise holds true with Fax and Twitter filters.  We automatically enable the “Phone” filter on all new “Call” tools, “Fax” filtering on all new “Fax” tools and “Twitter” filtering on all new “Tweet” tools.

In almost all circumstances, these basic filters will be setup for you automatically when you create or edit New/Mode tools. However, you know best who the fallback target should be.  Click here for specific instructions on how to set up a Fallback target for Elected officials. 

Advanced Filtering

For you power users who really want to fine-tune your targeting strategies, New/Mode also enables more advanced filters.

Filtering for “Elected Office” will ensure that you only return targets that have particular titles of “positions”. For example, if you are working with Municipal data that returns Mayors, Councillors and Committee members but you only want to present Mayors and Councillors to your supporters you can use this filter to accomplish that. By adding each position title to a unique line in the “Filter for Position” text area you can ensure that only Mayors and Councillors are displayed to supporters.

Filtering for “Party” follows a similar concept. If for instance, you want to only point your supporters at representatives from a specific party you can add the name of each party to a unique line in the “Filter for Party” text area. You can then add fallbacks for cases where a person's address is represented by someone who doesn't match your filter. For example, you may have a campaign to demand Republicans back down on overturning the Affordable Care Act. In this case you could filter for Republican representatives, and add a fallback to the House Leader for supporters not in a Republican district.

Defer to Components: Advanced Logic for Setting Up Automatic Fallbacks

Defer to filtering is likely the most complicated filtering option that New/Mode has available. If you are thinking of using “Defer to components” in your tools and you haven’t used them before it might be a good idea to reach out to the New/Mode support team for assistance. 

In a nutshell, whereas fallbacks allow you to set up one specific target, defer to target allows you to programmatically fallback to other representatives in the New/Mode databases. Let’s say for example, that you are running a campaign where you want to connect people with their local City Councillor. If a councillor isn’t found, you’d like to connect them with their Mayor and if a Mayor isn’t found, you’d like to connect them with their State/Provincial/Regional representative. We can accomplish this in the New/Mode toolset by using ‘Defer to Components’.

What this means in practice is that you set up an elected component on a tool that searches for a supporter’s State/Provincial/Regional rep. You do the same thing for “Mayor” and “Councillor” elected components using the position filter to ensure that each component only returns targets with one particular role. Having done this you end up with one component that only returns Mayors, one that only returns City Councillors and another that only returns State/Provincial/regional officials.

Once this is accomplished you set the “Defer to Components” values on your State/Provincial/Regional component to defer to both the Mayor and City Councillor components. You then set the “Defer to Components” value on your Mayor component to defer to the City Councillor component. The result of this is a cascade wherein once a user has typed in a postal/zip code or address your tool tries to return a City Councillor result. Failing that it tries to return a Mayor result and failing that it attempts to return a result with State/Provincial/Regional representative.

Clearly, this can be a very powerful tool when you’re aiming to ensure that each action taken by a supporter has maximum impact.

Summing It All Up

Sooooo…..filtering?!?  If we’ve accomplished anything with this blog post I hope it’s that we’ve demonstrated how New/Mode’s Filtering  configurations can enhance how your supporters engage with the tools, and how the “Advanced” tab offers rich and dynamic features that can help you achieve important strategic goals.

If you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the New/Mode team