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Voter Registration

Overview

We partner with Rock The Vote to register young people to vote on behalf of DoSomething.org, by redirecting to them to the Rock The Vote (RTV) registration website and appending our partner ID:

register.rockthevote.com/registrants/new?partner=37187

We can pre-populate the voter registration email address and zip via email_address and home_zip_code query parameters, which we often include when redirecting an authenticated user on the web:

rockthevote.com/registrants/new?partner=37187&source=user:58e68d5da0bfad4c3b4cd722,source:web,source_details:onlinedrivereferral,referral=true&email_address=puppet.sloth@dosomething.org&home_zip_code=94116

Import

Our importer app, Chompy downloads all voter registrations created with our partner ID, and imports them as voter-reg posts by posting to the Rogue API. See import docs for details.

Tracking Source

When we redirect to the RTV registration form, we include a source query parameter. Per the RTV docs, a source parameter is used to:

track the success of various campaigns, affiliates, social media posts, and more using just one tool.

When we download the RTV reports, each registration contains the source query parameter that was present when the user began their registration. The expected values to pass for the source are comma-separated key:value substrings:

user:5547be89469c64ec7d8b518d,source:web,source_details:VoterRegQuiz_completed_notsure

This tracking source value is saved within the serialized details field of the voter-reg post, and is utilized by both the Chompy import and Looker:

  • user - This is the Northstar user ID of either the authenticated user registering to vote, or the referring alpha user for a beta registration, when the referral key is present.

  • group_id - This is the Rogue group ID stored on the campaign signup, if user is sharing their link from a groups OVRD campaign.

  • source - This is similar to a utm_source.

    • Examples: web, sms, email

  • source_detail - This is similar to a utm_campaign.

    • Examples: hellobar, broadcastID_4YOiqwTVOOVklZFARAFd4h, VoterRegQuiz_completed_votebymail, onlinedrivereferral

  • referral - If this is set, the user parameter should be used as the referrer_user_id on the voter-reg post.

Notes

  • Some older voter registration URLs may contain campaignID and campaignRunID keys within their tracking source. These have long been deprecated by the import: when we first started on voter registration, we used multiple campaigns. The import would update the campaignID and campaignRunID values on the voter-reg post if present within the tracking source. See #171090116 for details.

Voting Portal

We host our voting portal, vote.dosomething.org on Instapage. It displays a form that prompts for email and zip, and redirects them to the Rock The Vote registration URL with our partner ID, pre-populating the email and zip submitted from the form.

When constructing a URL for the voting portal, we include the tracking source via a r query parameter, which is then added as a source parameter when redirecting the user to the RTV registration site after they enter their email and zip (handled via JS on Instapage).

Example:

vote.dosomething.org/covid19?r=campaignID:8017,campaignRunID:8022,source:web,source_details:VoterRegQuiz_completed_notsure

We've started the process of transitioning to a new voting portal hosted directly on our site at /us/vote. The Tracking Source used for the voter registration form on this page functions as described above in [Tracking Source]('#tracking-source'). In the event that an r query parameter is present in the URL we'll include that value as the tracking source instead.

Influencers / Marketing Partners

We host customized voter registration drives for influencers on our Instapage, by creating pages like https://vote.dosomething.org/NoorAldayeh on Instapage and passing a relevant tracking source when redirecting to the RTV registration site:

source:influencer,source_details:noor_aldayeh

We've started porting over our influencer & marketing-pertner Instapages over to our own website.

The pages are powered by the Voter Registration Marketing Page Contentful content-type.

Content types

Utilities

CivicEngine Voter Widget

A CivicEngine Voter Widget can be embedded in the footer of a ContentBlock.

The Voter Widget is hosted on BallotReady - for 2020 we subscribed to maintain our own instance of the widget, instead of using the shared TMC instance (switch was made on October 13, 2020 from shared to white-labelled)

Content Block - CivicEngineVoterWidget footerType

  • Note: For the 2018 election, we used a PollLocator component which linked to the Voting Information Project. In 2020, we'll instead be using the CivicEngine Voter Widget as a polling locator, so the PollLocator component was removed in #2373.

Start Voter Registration Form

The StartVoterRegistrationForm component displays form fields for email and zip, and redirects a user directly to the RTV registration site upon submitting. It's currently hardcoded on the Voter Registration Drive Page and the Quiz Result Page components, and displayed on Voter Registration Marketing Pages.

A clicked_voter_registration_action analytics event is fired when the user submits the form to continue their voter registration on the RTV registration site.

Online Drives

The call to action in the Online Voter Registration Drive (OVRD) campaign asks a member (the alpha) to get their friends to register to vote, by providing them with a custom OVRD page URL to share with their friends (the betas).

Voter Registration Drive Page

The VoterRegistrationDrivePage is a hardcoded component, displayed on path /us/my-voter-registration-drive?referrer_user_id=58e68d5da0bfad4c3b4cd722 (where the referrer_user_id is our alpha's user ID).

This beta page shares some components with the OVRD campaign pages, like its CoverImage and scholarship information. The OVRD campaign's contentful ID, 3pwxnRZxociqMaQCMcGOyc, is the same in all of our dev, qa and production spaces. Usually this isn't the case -- our Contentful ID's don't match between our dev and production spaces -- but this entry was created before we introduced different Contentful environments to our Phoenix space. Because of this, we're able to hardcode this Contentful ID to use in both dev and production environments.

We hardcode specific configuration ContentBlock ID's:

Production:

Dev:

Notes:

The initial version of OVRD beta page was hosted on Instapage - https://vote.dosomething.org/member-drives. Example URL:

vote.dosomething.org/member-drive?userId=${referrerUserId}&r=user:${referrerUserId},source:web,source_details:onlinedrivereferral,referral=true

This page had inline JS that would query Northstar to find a user's first name based on the userId query parameter passed.

Quiz

The Quiz content type is only used for voter registration campaigns.

Users are redirected to /us/quiz-results/:id to see their quiz result on a Quiz Result Page.

The QuizResultPage component expects the :id route parameter to be the ID of one of the Link Action entries referenced by the Quiz's Result Blocks multi-value reference field.

To display the Start Voter Registration Form on a quiz result, add a sourceDetails property to the Additional Content field on the quiz result's Link Action entry. This value will be set to the source_details of the voter registration tracking source if a user submits the form.

A header image can be added by selecting an asset in the Affiliate Logo field.

A static Gallery Block entry is displayed all for all Quiz result ID's:

  • Production: 78WaGsvDEzAxnreEvNx3Za

  • Dev: 2VGFq3XBcqCfKOA8mC5mP4

Voting Quiz Campaign

  • Gated: /us/campaigns/ready-vote - user must signup to take the quiz from the action page

  • Ungated: /us/campaigns/ready-vote/quiz/ready - user can take quiz but must signup to see their result

Production Quiz Results:

Dev Quiz Results:

Related links:

Notes:

  • Please avoid editing the Quiz entries if possible, as they are delicately configured (deleting one of the LinkAction entries referenced by the resultBlocks field would not be pretty).

Appendix

Voter registration features built in 2020.

OVRD

An OVRD alpha page is a campaign action page, which displays VoterRegistrationDriveAction and VoterRegistrationReferralsBlock entries in its blocks field.

  • Individual

  • Group -- Note, you must join a group from the campaign landing page to avoid action page errors.

The OVRD beta page is hardcoded to render a VoterRegistrationDrivePage component at path /us/my-voter-registration-drive.

Misc

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