Refresh Your Turf

Refresh Your Turf

There might be times that you want to refresh your turf to reflect new information in VAN (e.g. newly registered voters or new contact information). First, you will delete duplicate contacts. Then you will either delete the old call to action and create a new one, or you can copy the original call to action and delete the original.

Delete Duplicates

  1. When you refresh your turf using either of these two methods listed below, your contacts from the original call to action will still exist in Empower, as well as your outreach history. You will create duplicate contacts in Empower where the new list and old list overlap. As long as the contact has a VAN ID, they will still push back canvassing information to the same person in VAN, so you can still track overall progress in VAN. However, you will likely want to reduce the number of duplicate contacts in Empower (to make it easier to track your progress in Empower). This is particularly important if your list is very large (i.e. millions of contacts) since uploading your new list without deleting the duplicate contacts will make it harder for Empower to scale to this many contacts. To do this:
    1. When you pull the new VAN list, exclude any contacts that have already been knocked (this assumes you don’t want to knock on the same door multiple times). Double check that you are pulling the correct list, this will make refreshing your turf much easier.
    2. Manually delete the old contacts in Empower that have not already been knocked, since these are likely duplicates to the new list. To manually delete these people:
      1. Click on the People tab
      2. Click on the Contacts button under People
      3. Click on the Filter button and then choose Has Call to Action Response
      4. Select the name of the old call to action.
      5. Choose the No Attempt Logged button

      1. Select all contacts on the page using the checkbox and then click Select all N people on all pages to select everyone

      1. Click Bulk Action and then click Delete to remove these duplicate users

Clone Call to Action

  1. You can clone your original call to action and add a new list
    1. Get a new list of doors that you are looking to knock on from VAN
    2. Click Calls to Action on the left hand side of the screen
    3. Find the original call to action that you are looking to refresh the list for and click the edit button
    4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the clone button
    5. You have now created a cloned version of the original call to action. The information and content will be the same as the original call to action. Scroll down to the Upload List section and upload your new list
    6. Once you’ve uploaded your new list, you can edit any content on the call to action. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Publish Now to launch the new call to action
    7. Now that you’ve successfully created a new call to action with a refreshed contact list, you want to go back and delete the original call to action (unless you want both active at the same time). On the Call to Action page you should see the original call to action listed under Call to Action. Once you find the original call to action, click delete on the right hand side of the screen. We recommend doing this step soon after creating the call to action with the refreshed list, just to eliminate confusion about which call to action is the accurate one.

Delete the Old Call to Action and Add New

  1. You can delete the old call to action and add a new one
    1. Get a new list of doors that you are looking to knock on from VAN
    2. Click Calls to Action on the left hand side of the screen
    3. Find the call to action that you are looking to update. Click the delete button to the right of the call to action that you are looking to refresh. Delete this old call to action.
    4. Click the New Call to Action button
    5. Select Canvassing Call to Action and then select Door-to-Door Canvassing
    6. Choose how you would like assign contacts to Volunteers. You can select either Manually or Let Volunteers Request Turf
    7. Then upload your new list of doors 
    8. You can use the same information as before to complete the rest of the call to action. Or you can also update the content, the follow up texts, and the automatic messages. Click Publish Now to publish the Call to Action with the refreshed list.


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