Counts of Constituents by District

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Does anyone have a way in Convio to get this information OTHER than manually pouring through each Group and writting down the current group count manually? I've worked through support on how to do this and have thus far come up empty (they're working on a feature request on this). The information I am looking for is fairly simple... We have an interest category (and optin/out groups) that mark a person as a member of the CARE Action Network -- that's our Advocacy list. Our Advocacy group wants to know for a number of reasons how many people we have overall in each disctrict and how many of them are CAN members. (they litterally want to build a wall map with this information as some hokey inspirational thing -- not my business, but as someone who does appreciate good data, knowing these numbers over time would very important from a government relations perspective). In addition, I'm looking to understand how many actions people are taken broken down by district and by CAN and ALL. So, in GA-1 there might be 200 members, 50 are CAN. 70 total actions have been taken by people there, 59 of them by our CAN Advocates. When/if we go looking for congressional support for something, information like this would be very useful to bring to the table.

Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone else out there wants this sort of information and might already have a way to get it out of Convio without a labourious manual undertaking.

Thanks!

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Comments

  • Hey Michael,

    No thought comes to mind about how to do it in Convio itself, but could you do an export (I'm assuming but don't really know that you could export just the pieces of data you need...) and do a sort/group and count in some other program, excel or some db program (depending on how big that list might be)?

    Less trivial obviously, but it would not be as much of a manual process the more you do it (the export you should only have to set up once, importing into another db or excel is pretty easy, setting up the sort/group and count could be done once, or easily repeated).

  • Adrian Cotter:

    Hey Michael,

    No thought comes to mind about how to do it in Convio itself, but could you do an export (I'm assuming but don't really know that you could export just the pieces of data you need...) and do a sort/group and count in some other program, excel or some db program (depending on how big that list might be)?

    Less trivial obviously, but it would not be as much of a manual process the more you do it (the export you should only have to set up once, importing into another db or excel is pretty easy, setting up the sort/group and count could be done once, or easily repeated).

    Yeah, that's how we did it in GetActive because you could create a totally custom export with any field in the whole system that was a member attribute -- and Congressional and State Districts were member attributes -- sort of like Mail Merge I guess... except I can't find anywhere to export members in such a way as to also include their congressional districts. All you had to do in GA was export the list (whatever segment you wanted, and you could include Action Count in that export too... so one export for All members, another for CAN Only) then sort and subtotal. It was a little labourious, but not difficult or particularly time consmuming.

    The only way I've found in Convio so far will require and estimate of 22 hours to complete. That is, manually rebuilding each of the 440 district groups (since they only recycle yearly... I mean. YEARLY?! How is that even remotely useful?) then recording each membership number after that completes... I estimated about 3 minutes per group, it could very well be longer.

    The good news is, Convio has created an official Feature Request for this: FR-16646. Anyone who would like this information in a productize manner should mention this to their account manager.

  • Michael :

    Yeah, that's how we did it in GetActive because you could create a totally custom export with any field in the whole system that was a member attribute -- and Congressional and State Districts were member attributes -- sort of like Mail Merge I guess... except I can't find anywhere to export members in such a way as to also include their congressional districts. All you had to do in GA was export the list (whatever segment you wanted, and you could include Action Count in that export too... so one export for All members, another for CAN Only) then sort and subtotal. It was a little labourious, but not difficult or particularly time consmuming.

    The only way I've found in Convio so far will require and estimate of 22 hours to complete. That is, manually rebuilding each of the 440 district groups (since they only recycle yearly... I mean. YEARLY?! How is that even remotely useful?) then recording each membership number after that completes... I estimated about 3 minutes per group, it could very well be longer.

    The good news is, Convio has created an official Feature Request for this: FR-16646. Anyone who would like this information in a productize manner should mention this to their account manager.

    So you can get an export from Report Writer with the congressional district.

    But I don't know if how you find if they have a certain interest selected or not... Wondering if you could do that using engagement factors?

    And that would not take into account the rebuilds of course.

  • Adrian Cotter:

    So you can get an export from Report Writer with the congressional district.

    But I don't know if how you find if they have a certain interest selected or not... Wondering if you could do that using engagement factors?

    And that would not take into account the rebuilds of course.

    Mail-merge does let you choose which fields you want, and you can include the districts, and you can include the Overall or YTD alert count (although the YTD count is wrong, but it should be fixed in Whitney). Mail-merge operates on the result of a query (run query, choose Use Query link) or on a single group (set up mail-merge, then it will ask you which group you want). Download the results as csv and read into spreadsheet or database software of your choice. You will probably want to do two selections (one overall, one for the CAN group) so you can choose to avoid the inactives, no-email, etc contacts that could skew your counts.

  • I was going to ask the same question as Michael, but found his post from December. I see adrian cotter says that you can get an export from Report Writer with congressional districts, but I don't see that field. What kind of report is it, and what category is that field under? According to laura.vacco you can include districts in a query mail merge export, but I don't see any district fields listed as export column options in the query mail merge either. Does anyone have any advice for me?

    Thanks!

    Clara

  • Clara Shapiro:

    I was going to ask the same question as Michael, but found his post from December. I see adrian cotter says that you can get an export from Report Writer with congressional districts, but I don't see that field. What kind of report is it, and what category is that field under? According to laura.vacco you can include districts in a query mail merge export, but I don't see any district fields listed as export column options in the query mail merge either. Does anyone have any advice for me?

    Thanks!

    Clara

    For us, the answer turned out to be that Convio didn't enable our district fields -- or, more precisely, didn't make them visible to us -- when we migrated. As soon as they switched that, things became much easier...

  • Michael :

    For us, the answer turned out to be that Convio didn't enable our district fields -- or, more precisely, didn't make them visible to us -- when we migrated. As soon as they switched that, things became much easier...

    Thanks, Michael! I'll see if they can enable ours in the same way.

  • I see this is an old convo, but I was wondering if anyone knew Feature Request: FR-16646 was every completed. is there a way to run a report counting constituents by state and district? I'd also want to be able to see the districts where we don't have any constituents.

  • Shawna Templeton:

    I see this is an old convo, but I was wondering if anyone knew Feature Request: FR-16646 was every completed. is there a way to run a report counting constituents by state and district? I'd also want to be able to see the districts where we don't have any constituents.

    This report that provides a count of constituents by district is not currently available in Convio. However, it is on my radar and I am working to have it added to a future release.

    Thanks,

    Michelle Shefter

    (Product Manager for Advocacy)

  • Michelle Shefter:

    This report that provides a count of constituents by district is not currently available in Convio. However, it is on my radar and I am working to have it added to a future release.

    Thanks,

    Michelle Shefter

    (Product Manager for Advocacy)

    How about a more versitile solution and do what Michael was originally after? A report on groups and the number of members. That seems like it should be easy to do.

    Regards, Brian

  • Brian Mucha:

    How about a more versitile solution and do what Michael was originally after? A report on groups and the number of members. That seems like it should be easy to do.

    Regards, Brian

    The List Activity Report in ReportWriter added earlier this year can do what you're describing. That report does not include default system-generated groups like the Congressional District groups, that is why the potential product enhancement Michelle alluded to is needed.

  • Noah Cooper:

    The List Activity Report in ReportWriter added earlier this year can do what you're describing. That report does not include default system-generated groups like the Congressional District groups, that is why the potential product enhancement Michelle alluded to is needed.

    Hey, very cool! Thanks Noah.

    The Report Type for these reports (for step 1 in Report Writer) is LIST ACTIVITY.

    Regards, Brian

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