Topics allows you to set and organize topics for all your advocacy actions and then easily utilize those topics to target specific audiences.
What are Topics?
Topics are essentially a way to automatically (or manually) categorize all your advocacy efforts: Campaigns, Petitions, Surveys, and Events. On the Promote page of the editor for each action, you will see a list of automatically assigned topics that should apply to that action. You can edit them if you would like to do so.
The topics are associated with each action and also with the supporters who complete each action. That means that you will be able to easily find the contacts who took action on an advocacy campaign focused on education, healthcare, licensing fees, etc...
Why are Topics useful?
In the past, many clients created a series of custom fields they would display on the user profile in order to collect information about what sort of issues each of their contacts found interesting. They would then send certain advocacy actions to just the contacts who self-identified as caring about a particular issue. That was a useful, but manual, process that is no longer strictly necessary and could be replaced by Topics or even used in conjunction with Topics.
VoterVoice has used top-of-the-line algorithms to automatically identify the appropriate topics for all your existing actions and apply those same topics to the contacts who participated in those efforts. You can benefit from that categorization without any extra work on your part.
How are Topics assigned?
We programmatically scoured the text of your existing advocacy actions to determine which of the 1,800 topics best applied. For new actions, we will suggest topics that we think will apply. You can see these on the Promote page (the last page of the editor) for each action.
You can click the "Manage Topics" button to see the currently assigned / suggested topics and change them if you wish. You can choose from any of FiscalNote's 1,800 options (shown in teal) and any custom topics you've added (shown in purple).
Please do note that that any changes to an action's topics are dynamic. If you change a campaign from "healthcare" to "medicare," for instance, that change is immediately applied to the contacts who participated in that campaign as well.
How do I create custom Topics?
Click on the profile icon (the teal circle with your initials in the top-right corner of the admin site) and navigate to Settings > Topics.
You will see a page with the existing custom topics. To create a new option, click the "Create Custom Topic" button at the top of the page.
You will come to a pop-up with the ability to add whatever you'd like, up to 100 characters. The new option will be fully functional the moment you click the teal button to create it.
How do I search for contacts by Topic?
You will see a new option for Topics at the end of the list of search fields whenever you perform an advanced search in our system. Whether you are in Search Contacts or the Broadcast tool, you will be able to search for contacts who have participated in any action that contains one or multiple topics. You can even save the search to segment your list by that topic!
FAQs
What kinds of action in VoterVoice get Topics?
Advocacy campaigns, petitions, surveys, and events.
What happens when topics change?
Any changes you make will be applied retroactively, so contacts who were listed as taking action in an education campaign will no longer be if you set that campaign so that it is no longer categorized as education.
I already use custom fields to collect areas of interest. Will that still work?
Yes! Your custom fields and Topics are independent of one another. You can add the relevant topics to your search for contacts interested in a particular field or not, as you wish.
How do you know what topics to assign?
Our industry-leading algorithms make a best effort guess, but nothing is going to be as accurate as you. Any time you change the topics associated with an action, our system gets better at suggesting new topics in the future!
I don't use segmentation like this already. Do I have to start using Topics?
No. If you aren't interested in categorizing your actions and contacts with this tool, you can simply ignore it. There is nothing you would have to set or disable. If you change your mind later, they will be there ready to use.
What happens if I Ignore topic suggestions on new actions?
Topics have been programmatically assigned to existing actions, but moving forward, we will only suggest topics without assigning them. When you go through the Promote page of each new action, you will see the options we suggest, and you will have the opportunity to accept those suggestions or choose other topics. If you do neither, the new action will NOT have assigned topics until you come back and assign them.
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