VAN Export Filter Process
Description:
VAN categorizes each phone number as 'Verified Cell', 'Likely a Cell', 'Likely Not a Cell', and 'Not a Cell'. Searches to identify lists of voters for text campaigns typically attempt to identify only voters with textable phones and avoid including voters that only have 'Not a Cell' phone numbers. In order to have the greatest likelyhood of reaching the targeted voters, our searches in Lee County export both VAN home phone and cell phone numbers. This creates the need to externally choose which number to use when re-formatting the data into a Spoke compatible format.
Unfortunately, VAN uses a 'preferred' indicator to select a phone number for home or cell phone export. This can result in records in which there are no reasonably textable phones. The four categories also create confusion when attempting to choose which number (home/cell) to include in the campaign file provided to Spoke. (Here in Lee County we made the mistake of assuming that none of the phone numbers exported by VAN were 'Not a Cell' since that was the search criteria. But we were wrong. VAN's prefered phone indicator sometimes selects non-cell phones over likely cell phones.)
In addition, it is not uncommon for multiple voters to share a single cell phone number. The process of selecting an appropriate number to use and then discarding multiple references to the same number is complex and time consuming.
The VAN Export Filter automates those tasks. It will choose the better of two phones to text and then eliminate duplicate occurances of the same number. The resulting list is then reformatted into a Spoke compatible format and made available for download.
Usage:
The VAN Export Filter requires the upload of a VAN export file containing the voter records for a texting campaign. Once uploaded, the program will process the file, display a button to download the formatted Spoke file, and provide recap of total records, records retained for the text campaign, records which contained no valid cell phone, and duplicate phone numbers removed.
There are several fields which must be included in the VAN export files. The following table documents the fields (column titles) required and also the fields included in the generated Spoke file.
| VAN Export | Spoke Input |
|---|---|
| Voter File VANID | external_id |
| LastName | lastName |
| FirstName | firstName |
| PrecinctName | PrecinctName |
| City | City |
| State | State |
| Zip5 | zip |
| Cell Phone | cell |
| CellPhoneIsCell | source |
| CellPhoneSource | |
| Home Phone | |
| HomePhoneSource | |
| HomePhoneIsCell |