Admin Home Page
Covered in this section:
About Admin Home Page
NavBar Defined
Preview Button
Logout Button
Nav Bar Sections:
About Setup
About Creating Races
About Communication & Management
About Advanced Districting
About Administration
The Admin Home Page is the default entry page once you have logged into the voter guide.
From this page you have all the tools to set up your guide – create races, set the appearance of your guide, create biographical field sets and question sets, etc. – as well as additional tools to manage your guide, eg. exporting data for print use.
You are able to view a dashboard, providing an instant visual summary of your guide, review your guide’s online status (‘live’ or not) and see the URL used to access your guide through a browser.Note for LWV/AARP affiliates: It is not necessary to select Go Live from the Home page to activate a particular race in your guide. Once you have approved the candidates, they will appear shortly.
Voter Guide tools can be found in the gray navigational bar (aka “navbar”) on the left-hand side of the page. The navbar is broken into three sections:
Setup: Data entry for the guide can be found here, including Bio Fields, Questions, and Email Templates.
Creating Races: Race Wizard utility, Candidate and Race/Initiatives data entry are accessed in this section.
Communication & Management: Candidate Communication, Email Blast, Mail Merge, Race Publishing & Race Manager, Candidate Delete & Archive and the Recycling Bin are accessed in this section.
Advanced Districting: All districting options beyond basic are found in this section.
Administration: Advanced technical features such as Appearance, Page Templates, Data Export and scripts are in this section.
Preview: To review a preliminary version of your guide. Note that preview will show all data, not just candidates that have been approved and races that have been published. You will find a notice in the guide alerting you that you are in preview mode.
Logout: You may wish to log out of your system for security purposes, especially when you are using a public computer.
Here are the main Navbar sections of the Voter Guide and a brief explanation of the subsections on the Navbar.
This section includes all of the basic data features you will need to start working with your guide. For a full description of how to set up your guide, including a timeline and recommended best practices, review ourQuickstart Guide. For optimal results, we recommend building your guide only after attending a training session.
To access a specific area in Setup, click on its link in the index.
In this section you will find the Race Wizard, a powerful, interactive tool for creating races quickly, and two informational sections: Candidates and Races & Initiatives. In our terminology a race without human contestants is an initiative, aka referendum, proposition, etc. For more information on each of these sections, select them from the index.
About Communication & Management
This area contains all of the tools you will need to communicate with candidates. There are three types of communications: email that are generated and status-tracked by the system via the Campaign Tracker, emails that are generated by the system but not status tracked via Email Blast, and snail-mail communications via Mail Merge.
This area also contains tools you can use to manage races you have created, including the Race Publisher,Delete & Archive, Race Manager and Recycling Bin.
For more details, click on the individual sections in the index.
Best Practice: Before attempting any advanced districting operation, please contact e-thePeople.
The Voter Guide Toolkit is equipped with a very powerful basic districting tool. Using just a street address, city and zip code, you can match users with their races in the following basic districts:
- National
- Statewide
- Congressional
- State Upper House
- State Lower House
- County
In most cases, this is enough. In the event you need more granular districting, such as a municipality or a precinct, the Voter Guide has four types of Advanced Districting: Composite, District Sets, GIS Districts, andZip Code Districts. Advanced districting types are defined below. To view an in-depth description of each type and an example of its use case, visit the individual pages.
Composite Districts: Used when a district is composed of two or more wholly-contained districts.
District Sets: Used when a district is composed of part of another wholly-contained district.
GIS Districts: Preferred advanced districting tool, using mapping to determine a district.
Zip Code Districts: Used to create districts using wholly-contained zip code areas.
About Administration Administration contains the tools used to manage the technical aspects of the guide, including its rendering, and bulk uploads and exports. Often, this area is accessed by your IT personnel.
Below is an overview of each area. For more details, click on the individual sections in the index.
Appearance: Manages the rendering of the Voter Guide tool within your site, including width, header images, contact info, instructions and standard messages. Text in this area is typically HTML, but we have created a UI that uses keys that will
Email Settings: This area is used only when you wish to use an internal email system in place of our own.
Best Practice: Do not edit this area unless you have a compelling reason for doing so. Emails within our system are logged and tracked, and you will be opting out of some key features of the Voter Guide Toolkit.
Page Templates: Allows manipulation so the Voter Guide’s surrounding area has the look and feel of the rest of your site.
Data Export: Creates a backup copy of your guide, typically between a primary and a general election, or following a general election, or creates a version to be used for publication.
Script Interface: Allows JavaScript programming that interacts with our system.
Script Library: Pretermined scripts that are used to bulk upload or export specific data.