Hi team,
Hope you’re doing well and staying safe. Back in November, we received over 150 submissions with feedback on our VAN support from the 2020 cycle, and one of the most common requests was to have an option for help ticket submissions via email. After a few months of prospecting services and setting up, we rolled out a new VAN Help Ticket portal last week that will allow us to receive tickets from a number of different sources and respond to tickets faster and more efficiently.
There are now two preferred ways to submit a help ticket to the TDP Data Team:
- Submit a ticket online: txdem.co/van-help (preferred option!)
- Email vanhelp@txdemocrats.org (please include your associated campaign / county party / organization in the message body).
You can still submit a ticket on the old Google Form, so feel free to continue using that if you have it bookmarked. We do kindly request that all questions and queries come through one of the preferred methods, rather than the “Support Requests” form within VAN. Due to technical limitations with VAN, we cannot efficiently process requests that come through that portal, and if you do submit a support request through VAN it will take significantly longer for your request to be processed and responded to.
Voting History in VAN
Voting history for the 2020 November general is loaded into the 2020 Nov General Voters targets in VAN. We’re still working with our partners at the DNC and VAN to process this into the voting history section in VAN, but we hope that this can be helpful in any voter contact targeting or post-election analysis. If you have any questions or issues accessing the target, please submit a help ticket.
API Keys expiration dates
Last week, NGPVAN updated the API Key request process so that API keys can have set expiration dates for each key. Our practice will be to set API keys to expire on the first day of the month after a candidate’s general election, or on December 31, 2022 for county parties. The only exception for this is Mobilize API keys, which will not have an expiration date. If you would like to request your API key to have a date different from this, please submit a help ticket or include it in the support request thread created when you request your API key.
Hustle Contracts
If you have a Hustle contract with the TDP’s discount, you probably got an email that your contract has expired. We’re in the process of finalizing the 2021 Hustle contract, and if you can, we’d recommend waiting on signing a new contract so that you can get the discounted rate. If you have any questions about this, please submit a help ticket.
(Campaigns / PACs only) - Renewing VAN
Are you running for office again in 2021/2022? You will need to renew your VAN license for the next election cycle. VAN committees for campaigns / PACs for the 2020 cycle will be inactive 2 weeks after complete voting history is loaded into VAN. To request / renew VAN, please fill out this form: http://txdem.co/VAN-Request. If you have any questions, please submit a help ticket.
All the best,
TDP Data Team