NM Democrats Votebuilder Portal

VoteBuilder 102 Trainings

What’s Covered: This training is designed specifically for campaign staffers who will be using Votebuilder on a regular basis. The training is designed to cover some of the most important components of Votebuilder, including creating lists, virtual phonebanks, and other tools!

August 4th -11:00 AM

Sign-Up for this training: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtdumrrTsuGdYDJfD8kg8s2UVYRMJdDHdc

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

August 18th – 3:30 PM

Sign-Up for this training: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtcu-sqj0uHd1Jv13Xc0UT-iklLw4DCIcY

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Making Calls with Open VPB

August 5th – 11:00 AM

Sign-Up for this training: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kd-2pqzItG9wH7pGShrRxf7TfrLP00qJP

August 19th – 3:30 PM

Sign-Up for this training: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYuceGuqz0tE9wag5PWqo6pBlVX6sCOkpIE

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Online Security Essentials Training

8/10/2020 – 11:00 AM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEqcuCgqjsqGtEp-HOpsiGAB4kyc4Ujc-N0

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

ThruText Training

8/13/ 2020 – 11:00 AM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtc-mhqj4oHNEmkiGj4yknjA3sEI-il5L4

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

ThruTalk Training

8/27/2020 – 11:00 AM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpf-CtpzkqHtHbjSvIEUeH6TfjOcF-Ncbs

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Good afternoon!

We hope everyone had an exciting, socially-distant weekend! There's a lot to cover in this update so we'll move quick.

What's Covered Below

Votebuilder Updates

Upcoming Trainings

Texting & Dialing Services w/ GetThru

Votebuilder Updates

2020 Primary Voting History Upload: Voting histories for the 2020 Primary can now be found under the Voting History section in Create a List! You can now use this criteria to create lists of 2020 Primary voters. It's best to use this criteria to create these lists going forward for two reasons:

1) The information in the Voting History section is an official roster from the SOS, and;

2) The Early Voting data will soon be cleared in preparation for the general.

Voter File Update: Our voter file was updated on July 14th, and is up-to-date as of June 28th. We plan on the next voter file to be completed the week of August 19th. Our voter file had 1,405 records added and 1,850 records suppressed

Wards Updated: After the precinct splits that happened earlier this year, many of our counties with wards needed to have their wards re-mapped in Votebuilder. If the county you are creating a list for has wards, you'll see a Ward field under Home Districts. We have updated most counties, though we have some counties outstanding. If you run into any issues with using wards in Votebuilder, please contact us.

Precinct Census Tract Dropped: After having discussions many users, we determined that precinct census tracts (the digits after the decimal point, IE Mora 001.1) were difficult to work with and weren't used for any practical purposes. For that reason, we have removed census tracts from precincts in our latest voter file. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Upcoming Trainings

In anticipation of the many staff and volunteers that will be brought on-board campaigns in the coming weeks, we want to be offer to as many on-boarding resources as possible. In addition to our Votebuilder Training Center, we've put together a schedule of trainings designed for both campaign staffers (such as field directors and organizers) and volunteers (how to make OpenVPB calls, ThruText, etc). Sign-up for any of these trainings at our Tech Trainings webpage, and let us know if there are any other topics you'd like to have covered!

Texting and Dialing Services Partnership w/ GetThru

DPNM is now a reseller of GetThru, who produce the P2P texting and dialing services ThruText and ThruTalk. This means and campaigns that sign up for either ThruText or ThruTalk get a 25% discount off both messaging and dialing services. For a full run-down of all the information you'll need about GetThru, their pricing, and how to get started, check out out GetThru One-Pager on our Votebuilder Training Center.

Please let us know if you have any questions and we look forward to an exciting few months of strong campaigning!

-DPNM Data Team

Good afternoon!

We're very excited to announce that that the data for Primary Election Day voters is now uploaded into Votebuilder! You can create a list of these voters by selecting to Include Anyone who Voted on Election Day under the Early Voting section.

Over the next week, we will be validating the official rosters we have received from the Secretary of State's office. Once this has been completed, the data will be moved out of the Early Voting section and under the Voting History section as a new option to select. We're hoping to have this completed by the first week of July.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

- DPNM Data Team

Good morning!

We hope everyone has recovered after our primary election! Unfortunately, we are experiencing a very substantial delay in receiving the voting roster from the Secretary of State's office. There is an issue in the export process that is used to create that file that the Secretary's office is working to fix. This issue is causing the export to be incorrectly generated. We do not yet have a timeline for when this will be fixed but we will be working diligently with the Secretary's office to get a complete voting roster as soon as possible.

We'd also like to take a moment to applaud the work of all of our campaigns throughout this primary election cycle. It's been a great pleasure for us to support your work during this challenging time and we're excited to navigate the next few months as we innovate our way to victory!

As always, please let us know if you have any questions!

- DPNM Data Team

Good morning all and happy Primary Day!

We've been informed today by the Secretary of State's office that we will not be receiving our mid-day voting register updates as we expected. We received an absentee ballot register this morning which has been uploaded into Votebuilder. While we're working to get a manually generated update this afternoon, this morning's update will be the last automated update today.

If we are able to get an update from the Secretary of State's office, we will upload it into Votebuilder promptly and send out an email as soon as possible.

Please let us know if you have any questions,

-Team Data

Good morning!

We hope everyone is staying healthy and sane with a little over two weeks left in this primary! We've got quite a few updates for you today so let's jump right in.

A quick note on early/absentee data uploads and these update emails:

We receive the absentee ballot register every morning from the Secretary of State's office. After some pre-processing, we usually begin the upload process by 8:30 AM and finish by around 9:30. Our policy is that if we do not expect data to be completely uploaded by 10 AM, we send out an email to let everyone know. If we do not send out an email in the mornings, please assume everything is business as usual! We know how busy you all are so we try to only send out updates when necessary to keep you in the loop.

FYI: Datatype issue in 5/13 Upload

This issue was discovered late yesterday evening. In our 5/13 upload, it appears that some of the timestamps were incorrectly formatted for "ballot requested" and "ballot sent", which caused a blank upload for those records. It appears this issue affected voters primarily in Socorro and Valencia Counties, with a small amount of voters being affected in other areas of the state. These timestamps were corrected and re-uploaded last night, and today's upload should have resolved any outstanding issues. Please let us know if you have any questions!

FIXED ISSUE: File Transfer delays with Secretary of State's office

Last week, we experienced very significant delays in the absentee register file transfer process between the Secretary of State's office and ours which required us to manually export the file each day. We're happy to let you know this issue has been fixed as of Tuesday and seems to be working flawlessly, so we do not anticipate any further delays in receiving data. Thank you to the team at the Secretary of State's office for working with us to get this issue resolved!

NEW ISSUE: Apartment numbers stripped from voter file after format change

Many of you have reported this issue over the past couple of weeks. We initially believed this to be an issue in Votebuilder that was removing those apartment numbers. However, after working with the DNC Tech team, we've determined the issue is due to a format change in the voter file itself which has mistranslated the data on upload. We are hoping to have this issue resolved by early next week as we receive a correctly formatted file and upload it into Votebuilder.

TRAINING: Using Early Vote and Absentee Data in Votebuilder, 5/14 @ 4:30 PM!

We hope you'll all join us for our virtual training tonight in which we'll discuss how to get the most out of absentee and early vote data in Votebuilder. This will be a short half hour training with plenty of time for questions. No registration required, join us at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86160948697

Please let us know if you have any questions!

Good afternoon!

The absentee ballot register was just a couple hours late today, but the upload has been completed and Votebuilder is updated with data current as of May 10th. As usual, please let us know if you have any questions.

We would also like to invite you to join our upcoming training called "Working with Absentee and Early Vote Data in Votebuilder". During this training, we'll dive into using absentee and early vote data in your field programs and analysis. The training will be:

Thursday, May 14th

4:30 - 5:30 PM

Zoom link for the meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86160948697

Have a great day!

-Adam

We hope everyone has been staying safe and healthy! While social distancing is keeping everyone indoors, there's still an election this year and it's never been more important for us to turn out voters. We hope that we can provide all the tools you need to keep your organizing efforts strong.

What's below:

Introduction: Adam Gammill, Deputy Data Director

Virtual Phone Banking Walk-Through

Virtual Votebuilder Training Sign-Up

Votebuilder Training Portal

Texting with ThruText

2020 Scores

March Voter File Update

Introduction: Adam Gammill, Deputy Data Director

We're so excited to welcome our new Deputy Data Director, Adam Gammill, to our team! Adam is originally from Albuquerque, is a student at UNM and is set to graduate this year with his degree in Political Science. He's done a fantastic job in his first few weeks, helping to build out our newest training resources and administering Votebuilder for our campaigns statewide! From Adam:

"Good data is crucial to our success in November and beyond I'm excited to be able to work with New Mexicans to help keep this state blue!"

Virtual Phone Banking Walk-through

Due to the social distancing policies in place, many campaigns have reached out regarding Virtual Phone Banking. VPB's are a great way to reach voters remotely and are simple to set up. We've created a start-to-finish walk-through for creating a Virtual Phone Bank:

Check out our Virtual Phone Banking walk-through!

If you have any questions about phonebanking and using the VPB's, send us an email at data@nmdemocrats.org!

Virtual Votebuilder Trainings

Over the month of April, we will be hosting our Votebuilder 102 trainings virtually! These trainings are designed for campaign managers, field directors, and other campaign leaders. We have 6 trainings scheduled for this month. To register, click the link and sign up:

April 6th: 6 pm - 7:30 pm

April 8th: 3 pm - 4:30 pm

April 13th: 3 pm - 4:30 pm

April 15th: 6 pm - 7:30 pm

April 20th: 6 pm - 7:30 pm

April 22nd: 3 pm - 4:30 pm

Topics covered in these trainings include: Basic Votebuilder Administration, Create a List, Virtual Phone Banking

Votebuilder Training Portal

We're excited to rollout our brand new Votebuilder Training Portal. We created this website to be an easy to use repository for training resources, articles, and information about Votebuilder. Through the course of the election, we'll continue to add walkthroughs and other trainings as well as data updates in Votebuilder. You can check out the new website at: https://sites.google.com/nmdemocrats.org/votebuilderportal/home

Texting with ThruText (formerly Relay)

For the 2020 cycle, the Democratic Party of New Mexico has contracted ThruText for our texting services.

All Democratic campaigns in the state will receive a 15% discount per message when signing up with ThruText using this account sign-up form. Contracts with ThruText are month-to-month and managed by the campaign.

For more information about ThruText, check out their website at: https://www.getthru.io/

2020 Scores

As of April 1st, 2020 scores have been added to all campaigns. You can see these scores while creating a list under the header Scores. Scores should be taken with a grain of salt. While very useful, don't solely rely on scores for your voter targeting. Scores tend to be best when used to narrow an existing search, rather than as the base criteria. These are the last scores that will be uploaded into Votebuilder this cycle, so please let us know if you have any questions.

Voter File Update

The voter file is up to date as of March 31st, 2020, the date of our last import. Generally, we try to have a voter file update in Votebuilder by the 15th of every month. However, due to the present circumstances, the update was delayed this month by a couple of weeks. We are working with the Secretary of State's office to get this back on track for April!