Recommended Timeline
When you are ready to work with the Voter Guide Toolkit , you will find it helpful to have a work plan. This recommended timeline is provided to help you optimize the power and efficiency of the Voter Guide Toolkit. The Voter Guide Toolkit is designed to help you build on online voter guide with responses from candidates in as little as four weeks.
We recommend setting your launch date at least four weeks before your election. Here is your recommended plan.
Four Weeks Prior To Launch:
- Decide which races and intiatives you wish to cover
- Determine which candidates are running for these offices; contact your state secretary or Board of Elections for this data.
- Decide what questions you want to ask the candidates
- Create Questions and Question Sets
- Decide what biographical information you want the candidates to provide
- Create Bio Fields and Bio Field Sets
- Determine what parties operate in your state
- Add any parties not already listed in the Voter Guide
- Review technical aspects in the Administration section, especially device-based page templates
- Contact your local GIS data provider to obtain data for custom districting
Three Weeks Prior To Launch:
- Add races
- Add candidates using either the Race Wizard (all levels) or bulk upload (Comprehensive level only)
- Create invitation and receipt email templates
- Send invitation email to all candidates
Two Weeks Prior To Launch:
- Contact e-thePeople for ALL advanced districting options
- Create remaining templates
- Send reminder email to candidates
One Week Prior To Launch:
- Internal testing
- Send reminder emails if necessary
- Finalize race descriptions
- Contact ethePeople to request Voter Guide widget
- Review all races to make sure they are published
Launch Day:
- Go live
- Begin promotion
One Week After Launch:
- Write articles about the guide online and in print if possible
Two Weeks After Launch:
- Position Voter Guide widget on home page
Three Weeks After Launch:
- Position Voter Guide widget above the scroll
- Use social media assets to promote the guide, i.e., Twitter, Facebook
Post Election:
- Contact e-thePeople for analytics
- Export a copy of the entire guide as a backup
Post Primary Election:
- Archive or delete losing candidates if the election is a primary
- Use the Race Manager to set all your races to General Election
- Use the Race Manager to unpublish all races.
- Should you wish to have the remaining candidates submit answers to new questions, use Campaign Tracker to reset remaining candidates to Invited status and restart Voter Guide timeline.