Required Contact Fields on Action Alerts Regardless of Target

Liz Pomper

I've noticed since the last release that most contact fields are now required for action alerts, regardless of the target. We used to be able to target the President or other non-legislative targets without requiring all fields, like Title and Street 1. Do you think this is a bug? Here's a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/gTrGxEAhv

Christopher Masak 2

It's not a bug. Short answer is: Congress requires that info. 



Long answer:  There's an effort to standardize Congressional webforms so that they all collect information in the same exact way. This will do many things, but primarily it will 1) prevent individual offices from "breaking" integrations built by vendors like Blackbaud and 2)Allow congressional staff to improve the ways they sift through the massive volume of inbound messages. To achieve this, both Congress and senders (vendors, individual websites) have to agree to collect the same exact info in a uniform way. So, if the U.S. House decides that they want to collect the T-Shirt size of constituents, you should expect a field called T-Shirt Size to become a mandatory field on the alert forms. As of right now, most standard name, title and address fields are required.



This is not yet the case throughout Congress (1/2 the House has yet to switch to the new format, and the Senate hasn't even started) or in state legislatures, but in anticipation of this new standard Luminate has opted to force the collection of standard info.  It's a smart move on their part.



This initiative is part of the Communicating With Congress effort put on by the Congressional Management Foundation. Read about it here: http://www.congressfoundation.org/projects/communicating-with-congress/251

Liz Pomper

Right, but I'm talking about non-congressional targets. We used to be able to set up petitions where people could just add their name and possibly zip code, for instance, which is no longer possible.



The fields were always required for Congressional targets, which makes sense. The change is that they are now required for all targets, even whent the target does not require those fields. For instance, the President or Secretary of Interior.

Christopher Masak 2

Indeed. The upgraded system will be using APIs to deliver communications/data instead of email or webform overlays, and some (not all) targets like federal agencies, executive branch, etc. may be switching over to that mode of communication as well. And some targets are becoming more interested in location data for their own metrics.



But, frankly, it's probably a "let's just make this all uniform for everyone rather than fiddle with who is/isn't set up with the new format" type of policy. That way Luminate product managers don't have to keep jumping into the system to toggle individual fields on and off as mandatory fields. Saves time and energy.



While it seems a bit annoying, it also begins to set expectations on the constituent/action-taker side that they'll need to provide more info whenever they take an action. 



If you're just conducting a petition and not particularly worried about delivering the message immediately, why not use a survey form to collect the responses. Then you can download afile or (gasp) print the responses for delivery? If you'd rather Luminate handle the delivery, then it looks like those additional fields will have to be part of the equation.



If you know for a fact that a target will accept submissions via email, then even if they already exist in the system, you could set up a custom target using that email address. Custom targets don't require all fields.

Liz Pomper

That's what I'm saying. Custom targets DO now require all those fields (I'm working on an alert with a custom target right now). And we prefer to use action alerts to surveys because then our constituents are automatically flagged with participating in an action alert, information we use for all kinds of slicing and dicing.

Christopher Masak 2

Ah, then you're clearly right, that may be a bug. I'm not seeing that in our account. For custom targets the only required fields we see are First, Last, email.



Before submitting a ticket, check to see if:

1)You have mixed targets (ie. You're targeting both a Senator and a custom target)  -Settings will default to the most demanding target.

2)Is it a newly created alert or are you editing something that previously existed?  - Make sure you're not inheriting legacy target requirements.

3)Did you get the latest round of product updates? -Could be related to an errant upgrade or a lingering bug.



Other than that I can't think of any other scenarios that would cause this...so submit a ticket and let the group know what you hear.

Liz Pomper

Creating a new alert did allow us to select fields again. I should have thought to try that. I am going to pursue this as a bug, though, because I copying alerts saves a lot of time, and the contact field selection used to change if the target changed. Thanks for your help thinking this through!