Collecting Customer Data via Email Outreach to Voting Organizations

[staceyrebekahscott]

Overview

Finding organizations that have voting as their main focus and emailing to see if we can schedule interviews.

Notes from meeting on 06/14/22:

• Sending emails to info@ (general) inbox at organizations.
  • Idea re: finding people via LinkedIn to send to directly has not yielded results in past experiences.
• Generally having difficulty with cold email outreach
  • This method works best when combined with networking efforts
• Carrie will try approach of sending to info@ email inboxes via Collecting Customer Data (Customer Outreach, Calendly and Customer feedback) #492

Creating a new issue to address outreach and findings going forward- issue #492 is becoming more complex and this will allow for the assignee to focus and for findings to be easier to find in the future.

For general notes: Ballot Nav Customer Development Activity Log For keeping track of contacts and responses: Voter Mobilization Research Feedback

[staceyrebekahscott]

@kaerii Please use this issue going forward to document your work on emailing organizations, scheduling interviews and documenting the process.

Tasks for this week:

• [ ] Sending follow up emails to the organizations emailed on 06/15/22- if it has been at least 7 days since last contact and no response (factor in that June 20 is the Juneteenth holiday).
• [ ] Finding 10-15 more organizations and sending emails.
• [ ] Make sure all notes are added to the spreadsheet: Voter Mobilization Research Feedback

I saw that Vanessa Snow from MassVOTE responded and was open to a call- Did you follow up with her? I didn't see a response or notes in the spreadsheet. Please make sure we are responding to these emails right away so we don't lose momentum and credibility with them.

[staceyrebekahscott]

Some other orgs with affiliate links to research:

https://866ourvote.org/partners/ https://nationalvoterregistrationday.org/2022-partners/ https://www.voteriders.org/partners/ https://www.populardemocracy.org/our-affiliates https://allianceforyouthorganizing.org/our-network/

From @layneam > here's another: https://movement.vote/groups

[staceyrebekahscott]

@kaerii Did you see Mya's response in Slack? Please follow up to see if you can get a call scheduled. And let's use this issue for notes on the interviews with Mya and Sophia. Thanks. And let me know if this workload is OK for you. We need to scale up our data collection efforts but I don't want to give you too much. Whatever you can handle is fine.

[staceyrebekahscott]

• Prepared and sent Mya Stark questions via shared Google Doc (she has long COVID and it's easier for her to give written responses).
• Mya gave responses, but she has not had much experience with voting orgs. Her idea for BallotNav came from her frustrations as a voter. Her feedback will be more useful once we get to prototype or MVP testing, so we should reach out to her then.
• I asked her to let us know about any online tools she uses, for voting or other, as it is always helpful to know about tools with good design and navigation.
• I have added pertinent communication from Slack to the Google Doc: Interview questions for Mya Stark

[staceyrebekahscott]

@kaerii I have been in contact with Mya Stark (see shared Slack DMs). How is your research going? Were you able to connect with Sophia yesterday? Please update with your notes ASAP. Thanks!

[staceyrebekahscott]

Adding @zuriisawesome to this issue.

@kcoronel Can you give Zuri the same access to the BallotNav email that Carrie has, with the forwarding to her personal email as well?

[kcoronel]

@zuriisawesome I have sent you an invite to 1Password (HackforLA's password manager), please create an account, once you are done with that, I will confirm you to the team and add you to the BallotNav vault which is where you will find BallotNav's gmail password, which you will need to sign in to the account and send emails from. I will have all responses from BallotNav's email forwarded to your personal account during this research time. Feel free to ask any questions in this comment thread.

[zuriisawesome]

just signed up for 1Password!

[staceyrebekahscott]

@kcoronel Please confirm Zuri's access to 1Password and forwarding in Gmail.

[staceyrebekahscott]

Sent a DM via Slack to Sophia Alice to get a call scheduled with the PM team for sometime this week.

[staceyrebekahscott]

@kaerii @zuriisawesome I wanted to check in and see where you stand on progress on this issue. Are you having any issues or challenges with emailing more organizations? Please let us know so we can assist.

[zuriisawesome]

Hi @staceyrebekahscott sorry for the late response! When I go to login to the HFLA gmail account, I need to use the password saved in 1Password. I forgot the password that is the key to all of the other passwords I have saved in the system, and was wondering if I could get an administrator's help recovering it (@kcoronel). Once I can do that, I'm happy to email a few of the organizations listed above.

So sorry!!

@zuriisawesome No worries, I also sent a follow up to Karen so she should be responding to you shortly to assist.

[zuriisawesome]

great! I emailed about 7 organizations yesterday and am still waiting to hear back. I can email at least 10 more later this week

[kcoronel]

@zuriisawesome can you create a spreadsheet for all the organizations you emailed? This way we can attach it to this issue and have a reminder of it. Please be sure the document is created within the BallotNav Shared folder. Thank you!

[zuriisawesome]

hi @kcoronel – all of that information lives here!

I can't remember who created this spreadsheet – maybe Carrie or Stacey – but I've just been adding to it.