Queries for Congressional and State Districts

Jeffrey Kingsland

This document discusses congressional and state disctricts and how to build queries to group your constituents into congressional and state districts.

How does Convio know which district a constituent is in?

When a consituent is created, Convio will take the address and send it to a third party vendor to find the congressional and state districts. The district information is then put in the constituent's profile:

Congressional District (Automatic)

State Senate District (Automatic)

State House District (Automatic)

County (Automatic)

What is the district is wrong?

Districting is more of an art than a science, and this automatic feature is only as good as the information it is based on.  If you know you have better district information than what was automatcially deteremined, you can enter this information in the following fields:

Congressional District (Manual Override)

State Senate District (Manual Override)

State House District (Manual Override)

County (Manual Override)

How do I create a group based on a state districts?

You can create groups based on state districts by creating a query and using that query to build a group.  When you build the query you'll use the value in state field and the values for both the automatic and manual override district fields.  Doing so will allow the query to return the same results if the state district is correct and if you've corrected the state district manually. So, for example, a query on Texas state district 1 would look like this:

(Home Address State/Province equals TX

OR Home Address State/Province equals Texas)

AND (State House District (Automatic) equals 1

OR State House District (Manual Override) equals 1)

Note that the placment of the parentheses and the ANDs and ORs are important.

One you've created the query, you'll need to save the query, run the query, click Use Query, and then select Create a Group to have a query-based group that automatically populates when a need constituent with an address that district is added.

How do I create a group based on congressional districts?

Congressional districts are built-in groups in Convio, so there is no work that needs to be done.  These groups even automatically adjust when you type in a manual override to a congressional distrcit.  To view these groups, select Constituent360 | Groups, then in the group list navigation bar click All Groups | Congressional Districts to see the list of congressional district groups.