Adding and Creating Filters

Adding and Creating Filters


This article will show you how to add and create filters to view your network. Additionally, we will provide some best practices around using filters. Empower is a tool that is meant to make your role as an Organizer easier. We spend a lot of time managing and following up with our volunteers as we simultaneously move forward with actions and informational campaigns. However, instances may come up  in which you may want to communicate or focus on a specific part of your membership, community, or volunteer team, as a way of saving time and energy. Using your discretion as an organizer, you want to be efficient and timely in getting calls to action out to the community as well as make sure the correct information is received by relevant stakeholders. Being able to organize folks within your committee’s membership will benefit you when targeting and prioritizing specific members, especially if you are working with deadlines. Whether that target is based on issue interests, resources needed, or skill sets, we save time by not having to reach out to our entire membership for specific news updates and asks.  Using filters will help you gain insights about your organizing program and will help you think strategically about making change in your community.

Using Filters on the Empower Web App


  1. Sign into your Empower web app. On the homepage, click on either the Home, My Actions or People button on the left hand side of the screen.

  2. Once you’ve arrived, click on Filter.



  1. You will now see a number of options around how you can view your network.



Using Filters on the Empower Mobile App


  1. Sign into your Empower mobile app. On the homepage, click on the Volunteers button on the bottom of the screen.


  1. Click on the Group by button to see the different filters that you can use to organize your volunteers. Choose a filter.




Exploring Different Filters

In this section, we will preview different filters that you can use in Empower to organize your network of users.

Last Active Date

  1. Filtering by Last Active Date will allow you to see who has signed-in to their Empower account within a certain number of days (you can select the number of days) or a date range. Since Contacts do not sign into Empower accounts, this filter cannot be used for them. This filter can be helpful if you are trying to get information on people who signed into their account during a specific time period.




Join Date

  1. Adding the filter Join Date, will allow you to see whose Empower Account was created within a certain number of days (you can select the number of days). You can also add a date and see whose accounts were added within a specific time period. If someone has an Empower account created, and then they get promoted, this filter will continue to show the original date that their account was created. We recommend resetting this filter every time that you use it. If you save a filter showing users who have joined in the last three days, it will continue to show the same users who joined the three days before you set the filter. It ill not update daily to reflect the new people who have joined in the last three days. This filter is helpful if you specifically want information on people that joined your organizing program within a specific time period (maybe after a specific event or training).



Region

  1. Filtering by Region will allow you to view people from specific regions that you’ve assigned them. You can add multiple regions to this filter and see your network across many different regions.



Role

  1. With the Role filter, you can organize information based on the different roles individuals were assigned in Empower. Be careful when you including Contacts in your filter. You don’t want to accidentally delete or edit someone’s personal contact when are using this filter to make changes to people’s accounts. While we use the titles Director, Organizer, Volunteer, and Contact for the purposes of these articles, the titles of Organizer and Volunteer are customizable by organization. You might see different titles for Organizer and Volunteer within your organization. This filter is a great option for breaking down information across different roles in Empower.




Assigned To

  1. Filtering by Assigned To and selecting Assigned to a specific person or people will allow you to see everyone assigned to a specific Director, Organizer, or Volunteer. This filter will also show which Organizers are assigned to a person in Empower. You can add multiple people to this filter and see everyone assigned to the customizable group that you build.
  2. You can also filter to find people who are assigned to anyone by selecting Assigned to someone or to people who aren't assigned to anyone by selecting Unassigned.
  3. To find the list of people that an organizer is responsible for reaching out to, you can select "Organizer or Director responsible for outreach." Only the closest Organizer to a Volunteer is responsible for reaching out to them, so each Volunteer will only appear on one Organizer's outreach list.


Tags

  1. With the Tags filter, you can see the information of people assigned to specific tags. When you select this filter, you will see ANY of these, ALL of these, and NONE of these and then the list of tags in your organizing program. 

    1. Selecting ANY of these will display all people with any of the tags that you select

    2. Selecting ALL of these will display show all people with all of the specific tags that you select (they may also have some additional tags)

    3. Selecting NONE of these will display all of the people who do not have any of the tags that you’ve selected in the filter

    4. Clicking on Manage Tags will take you to a page where you can create a new tag. Once you create a new tag, you can go back and filter by this new tag

    5. It can be helpful to add Tags to groups of people that you want to find or do something with later, since you can filter to those tags later




Custom Profile Fields

  1. If you have custom profile fields enabled for your organization, you can filter to find users that have that field set or not set, or have that field set to a specific value. If you set more than one filter, people will have to match all of the criteria listed in this filter. 

Location

  1. The City, State, and Zip Code filters will allow you to see information for people within a specific geographic location. Fill out at least one field to apply the filter. People will have to match all of the criteria listed in this filter. 



District

  1. For people who have been matched to VAN, you can filter by District. Select the type of district you would like to filter by, then select which districts you want in the filter.
    1. District information is pulled from VAN at the time the person is matched. Note that district information will not update in Empower even if it is updated in VAN unless that person is matched to VAN again. People who were matched before this feature was added do not yet have district information, but this is coming soon.

Current Call to Action

  1. With the Current Call to Action filter, you can select a live call to action and see people who have that as their current call to action. In the Select call to action box, pick the call to action that you are interested in. If you click Apply, you will see everyone who has that call to action as a current call to action.
    1. You can go further and see everyone who has completed a conversation under that call to action. Pick the call to action that you are interested in exploring. Next, you will see a box under Completed Conversations. In this box, you can select a number of completed conversations and see which people have more than that number of completed conversations or less than that number of completed conversations.
    2. You can also select a range and see which people have the number of completed conversations between that range. 
      3. You can see similar information, but for In Progress Conversations. Select the call to action that you are interested in exploring and then enter the range, the maximum, or minimum number of conversations that you are looking to see under In Progress Conversations. Similarly, you can also filter by Completed or in-progress conversations if you are interested in total number of attempts. Note that if someone has conversations logged for a Call to Action, but it is no longer one of their current Calls to Action, they will not appear in the results.



On List for Call to Action

  1. This filter shows all people who are on a list to receive outreach for a particular Call to Action. You can optionally specify an outreach status (not started, in progress, completed) to find people who have already been reached out to or who you still need to reach out to, as well as prioritization labels if the Call to Action has prioritization labels based on tags or VAN Saved Lists. For organizations that are using Organizer Follow Up Calls to Action, this can be useful for organizers to find the people they need to reach out to within their My Outreach List tab.


Size of Contact List

  1. Filter by Size of Contact List will allow you to view people in your organizing program based on the number of contacts that they have assigned to them. With this filter, you can select a number and see who has a contact list greater than that number or less than the number that you select. You can also select a range and see whose contact list sizes fall within that range. This is a helpful filter when you are trying to see and understand trends in contact recruitment among your team.




Has Contacts in State(s)

  1. The Has contacts in State(s) will allow you to see which Directors, Organizers, and Volunteers have contacts in specific states.




Has Contacts with Tag(s)

  1. The Has contacts with Tag(s) will allow you to see which Directors, Organizers, and Volunteers have contact with specific tags.



Has Call to Action Response

  1. With the Has Call to Action Response tag, you can select a live call to action, choose a specific question within that call to action, and then select a particular answer for that question. You can multi select specific questions and answers to view an even more specific group of individuals.  You will then see all of the people that provided that specific answer to the call to action prompt. This filter can be helpful if you are seeking to understand who has gotten responses to a specific prompt on a call to action. You can also use this filter to learn more about people who provided a specific response to a call to action prompt. If you do not fill in the prompt questions, you can use this to see who has responded to a call to action at all, independent of any specific prompt responses.



  1. For Phone Bank, Text Bank, and Door-to-Door Canvassing Calls to Action, you can also use the Has Call to Action Response filter to find contacts based on disposition results. First, navigate to the Contacts tab or use the Role filter to filter just to contacts. Then select the Has Call to Action Response filter, select a Call to Action, then Canvassing results, and then select the relevant dispositions. The three [Blank] options means that the user selected an answer to the first question (Yes, they answered, Someone else answered, or Didn't reach anyone, respectively), but didn't answer the second question to select a disposition. Use No attempt logged to find all contacts for that Call to Action where the volunteer didn't answer the first question (contacts that were not canvassed at all). To find the opposite (all contacts who were canvassed), you can multi-select all of the other dispositions except No attempt logged. Note that this filter will also return Volunteers with contacts with those responses if you do not first use the Role filter or navigate to the Contacts tab. 

Has Used Empower

  1. The Has Used Empower filter will show which Directors, Organizers, and Volunteers have used their Empower Account and which haven’t.




Recruited Volunteers

  1. Filtering by Recruited Volunteers will show you which Directors, Organizers, and Volunteers have recruited a certain number of Volunteers. Use the second dropdown to specify what recruited means, for example, whether they have been invited to Empower, or whether they have actually been converted to the Volunteer role, signed in, or started building their list or having conversations.



Contact Relationship

  1. The Contact Relationship filter will allow you to separate between Personal contacts and canvassing contacts. By default, contacts added through a Canvassing Call to Action are assigned to the person who canvassed them, but they will be shown on a Canvassing list which is separate from someone’s Personal list of contacts. This toggle is shown on both the My Network page and for any future “Relational” Calls to Action, as well as in the Organizer and Director’s views of their list.
    1. While canvassed contacts appear on the Canvassing list by default, this can be changed by setting the contact Relationship field anywhere that a contact can be edited. For example, volunteers can move a contact from Canvassing to Personal contact if they develop a more personal relationship with that person.
    2. Contact Relationship will tell you whether the Relationship field is set to Canvassing or Personal contact. You can use this before doing any bulk reassignment or deletion to be sure you don’t accidentally reassign or delete someone’s friends and family.
    3. If a contact was added through canvassing, but manually changed to personal, they will show up as Personal here - however, the contact source filter will show the source as coming from canvassing.

Contact Source

  1. The Contact Source filter will tell you how a contact was added. For example, you can tell if a contact was added by a Volunteer to their personal list, whether they were assigned to that Volunteer by someone else, or whether they were added from an Open Canvassing Call to Action. This can also help you determine whether a contact should be reassigned or deleted.
    1. Personal contacts are contacts you added yourself
    2. Assigned contacts are contacts that someone else added to that person's list
    3. Canvassing contacts were added through canvassing calls to action, including open canvassing or a list uploaded for a phone bank, text bank, or door-to-door call to action
    4. Within the Canvassing contact option, you can select a specific live call to action, and see which contacts were added on this call to action

Has Contact Information

  1. The Has Contact Information filter will tell you whether someone has a phone number or address in Empower.



Has Matched Their List

  1. The Has Matched Their List filter will tell you how many people on their list have been matched or unmatched. You can specify whether you are looking for people on their list who have been manually matched, auto-matched, a match was attempted but they are still unmatched, or whether they are unmatched and have never been attempted.

  1. You can select more than one option in the dropdown to find people on their list matching any of the criteria. For example, if you want to find people who have tried to match at least one person, you can select number of people on their list who are Unmatched: Manual match attempted or Matched: Manually matched is greater than 1.
  2. You can add more than one filter to add additional criteria. People must match all of the filters you add.


Has Been Matched

  1. The Has Been Matched filter will show whether someone has been matched to the voter file (matched or unmatched) and how (manual matched, auto-matches, or attempts). People can meet any of the selected criteria.



Suggested Outreach Task 

  1. When Tasks are enabled for your organization, the Suggested Outreach Task filter will allow you to filter to Volunteers based on the outreach tasks that are suggested for them. Some sample outreach tasks could include: Coach New Leaders, Scheduled Follow Ups, Celebrate Leaders, and Call to Action Follow-Ups. This filter is helpful for Organizers who are trying to find all Volunteers for a specific outreach task.


Last Outreach

  1. The Last Outreach filter will show you when Volunteers received their last outreach from an organizer. For example, if Last Outreach is never, that means they are a new volunteer and an organizer has not yet reached out to them. You can also specify a date range of when their last outreach from an organizer occurred, or see if outreach occurred within a certain number of days.



Date Matched

  1. The Date Matched filter will tell you when a person was matched to the voter file. For example, you can find new matches or matches that occurred during a particular date range.


Has Earned Payment

  1. For organizations that have payments enabled, the Has Earned Payment filter will tell you which users have or haven't earned a payment. You can also specify that the user needs to have earned a particular type of payment, such as payment on a call to action, referral, or matching.
  1. For a call to action, you can see if someone has earned a payment on a specific call to action by selecting one from the dropdown, or you can leave it blank to find people who have earned a payment on any call to action (which is required for referrals)


Has Completed W-9

  1. For organizations that have payments enabled, the Has Completed W-9 filter can be used to find out which users have or have not completed their W-9.


Customizing Filter Logic

By default, all of your filters must apply to a person for that person to appear in the list. If you want to use filters in a different way, you can customize your filter logic.
  1. Apply at least one filter. 
  2. Click Customize Criteria.

  1. Adjust the logic using the formula bar. Use the letters next to each filter to identify that filter in the formula. You can use 'and', 'or', 'not', and parentheses like ( ), { }, or [ ] to write out your formula. For example, in the image below, this logic would return all volunteers who are tagged as 'Highly engaged' and are tagged with either 'Climate change' or 'Environmental justice' and have started building their contact list. You will need to click off, press enter, or press Show Results to apply the updated formula when you are done editing it.

  1. Note that it is possible to add more than one of the same filter. For example, you can apply the Tag filter multiple times so you can track complex logic for tags beyond all, any, or none.

Saved Filters

You can save a combination of filters to make it easy to apply that set of filters again in the future. To create a saved filter:
  1. Apply all of the filters that you want to be part of the saved filter that you want to create. You can optionally customize the filter logic using a formula (described above) and this logic will be saved along with the filter.
  2. Press the Save Filter button.

  1. Give the saved filter a unique name.

  1. You can save filters just for yourself, or in a way that is available to everyone in your organization. If you are in more than one organization, you can also choose whether you want to save the filter just for your current organization or for all of your organizations. Cross-organization filters can be either public (visible to everyone in the organizations they are shared with) or private (visible only to the person who created it, but available in all of the orgs that you are in). 
    1. Some filters cannot be created across organizations because they include information that exists in one organization but not another. For example, calls to action are specific to a particular organization, so you cannot filter to see the results of a particular call to action and apply that filter in another organization. Some filters may work across organizations sometimes but not other times depending on whether that filter exists for all of your organizations. For example, you can filter by region names across organizations, but only if every organization you are a member of has the exact same region with the exact same name. 
  2. Press OK to save the saved filter.
To apply the saved filter later:
  1. Click the Filters dropdown then select Saved Filters.

  1. Select the filters you want to apply, then press Apply. 

You can choose to delete a saved filter you have created by clicking the Filters dropdown, selecting Saved Filters, then clicking Delete next to the filter you want to remove. Similarly, you can edit a saved filter by clicking the Filters dropdown, selecting Saved Filters, then clicking Edit next to the filter you want to modify. You cannot change the filters that are included in that filter, but you can change the name and the visibility settings. You can only edit and delete filters that you created (though Directors can also delete filters created by users who have been deleted). Editing or deleting a saved filter won't affect any calls to action or mass messages that were created using the saved filter. If you want to create a saved filter with the same name as an existing saved filter you created but with different filters in it, just create the new filter and save it with the same name to replace that saved filter with the new one. However, this still won't affect any calls to action or mass messages that were created using the original saved filter. 

Some Best Practices for Using Filters

  1. Filters are another great feature for managing your volunteers. When you create a filter that you find helpful, you can save and bookmark the URL for that filter and then quickly navigate back to the filtered information.
  2. Filters are a great way to set up a series of calls to action. For example, the first call to action in your series could be a Personal Call to Action where you ask if people are registered to vote. Then using the Has Call to Action Response filter, you could create subsequent Calls to Action for a volunteer, based on their response to the question about being registered to vote.
  3. Filtering based off of Tags will allow you to see everyone who has a specific tag assigned to their page. This can be helpful information - you can see the number of volunteers tagged to a certain neighborhood, or the number of volunteers who are interested in a specific issue.
Using filters will help you gain insights about your organizing program and will help you think strategically about making change in your community.





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