Feature Request: Show "people contacted" today on texter "Home" screen

[arena]

Problitunity (not really a problem ...an opportunity) As a texter, I want to know how many texts I've sent.

Solution A number at the top of the Texter "home" screen (aka Texter Dashoboard) that communicates my reach as a texter.

If > 2 texts sent out for the day: String: "You’ve contacted" + people-contacted-for-currrent-day + "people today 🙌"

If < 2 texts sent for the day: "Welcome home, noble texter. 📱 "

Gamification Ethics This number should not be comparative, competitive, nor should it encourage unnecessary sms messages to be sent --- it should just let me, the texter, estimate the impact I'm having through my efforts. Down the line, this number could be clickable and take me to a screen that shows all my stats. Stats should encourage effective communication. Stats should help volunteers see that their contribution is appreciated. Stats should NOT encourage unnecessary text volume (including fees) just to drive up a number. Stats should NOT make one volunteer feel like they are better (or worse) than another volunteer, especially since some people have more time and resources than others and impact from person to person communication is impossible to quantify accurately.

[ibrand]

I really like that you're including an ethics section here. Would love for @DinahSanders to take a look at this since she mentioned some leadership thoughts on texter stats.

That said, this seems like a really reasonable implementation of texter stats with some guidelines around the ethics. If we do move in this direction, I'd be really interested in us formalizing those ethics bullet points into something in docs/ to preserve guidelines for gamification ethics!

[bdatkins]

I think it's a great idea and texters love numbers! One thing we need to be careful about differentiating between what the texter has sent vs what they are currently assigned. Often at WFP, we have newer folks "power send" & not handle replies, and then have "reply specialists" take their conversations and respond to them.

[joemcl]

Agree that having counts sent (and I think 'leaderboards' as well) in the user UI would be useful. We (WFP) have been posting 'leaderboards' in Slack for awhile and recognizing top texters in a Slack channel, doing queries from an external dashboard - we used redash for awhile for that and are now using a similar dashboarding platform. TextOut, a similar but proprietary peer to peer texting platform, has 'leaderboards' built into the user UI. Some of the SQL queries we've created are in the docs here...https://github.com/MoveOnOrg/Spoke/blob/main/docs/TEXTER_ACTIVITY_QUERIES.md

[arena]

@bdatkins do you feel like this number might end up discouraging to your reply specialists?

[arena]

It occurs to me that "People contacted" could work for both "senders" and "responders" and the number would represent conversations-with-a-unique-phone-number for the current-day

[bdatkins]

@arena Actually I think the number might discourage power senders, because if they send a bunch but the conversations are reassigned, then the numbers would be off.

[arena]

@bdatkins Do you think that if the number was kept accurate even if the conversations were reassigned, would that keep it encouraging?

[ibrand]

Would we consider making this stat a "per campaign" stat either in addition to, or instead of a daily one? Just had someone write in about a campaign level stat and I'm curious about people's thoughts.

[arena]

I am actually leaning toward per campaign in my wip prototype of the dashboard .

[ibrand]

This is a great issue for someone to jump in on. Start by @-ing arena to get confirmation on the mock

[schuyler1d]

This could end up a somewhat expensive query for texters, so an implementation should leverage caching -- that makes per-campaign metrics add some complications, but not impossible.

[arena]

How hard (or expensive in terms of performance) would it be to count and cache the number of initial texts sent per campaign?

[arena]

note: would be nice to see all time sent for org sent this day number of convos responded to (convos with a response to a reply)

[DinahSanders]

The MoveOn team rejected gamification of stats in 2018 for the same reasons we'd reject a dollar donation count leaderboard: the ability to send more texts tracks with privilege and we don't want to devalue or demotivate team members with less free time, slower connections, less powerful devices, etc.

I suggested some alternate metrics here which still could add a sense of fun and be motivating, but which don't have that same problem: https://github.com/MoveOnOrg/Spoke/issues/499#issuecomment-419553489

In contemplating gamification, therefore, let's look at the behaviors we want to reinforce which are applicable to texters of all abilities and availability. For example: texting every week (celebrate a continuous streak of showing up week after week) timely completion of workflows (all texts sent before 8pm local time in target area) followthrough (no replies left unhandled either by responding or use of 'Skip Reply')