Hi team --
Hope you're doing well and staying safe. Wanted to reach out with a quick heads up on a change that we are making to all VAN user profiles in the state. Going forward, all VAN users (including Texas 1 Admins) will not be able to bulk apply mailing addresses in VAN.
Earlier this week, we noticed an issue where a user mapped blank fields to mailing addresses, which resulted in over 80% of mailing addresses being removed in a district. VAN was able to roll back the bulk upload and restore the mailing addresses, but there were a few days with virtually no mailing addresses in the district. Typically, VAN catches errors like this and pauses the upload, but their system didn't catch this. We're making this change because we know that folks cannot afford for errors like this to be made at any time, but they are especially catastrophic during GOTV.
Our goal is to protect the data of every single VAN committee in the state, so in order to do that, we request that any mailing address bulk uploads be submitted in a help ticket and our team will happily upload on your behalf. While fields like emails and notes are unique to your VAN committee, mailing addresses and phone numbers are some of the few things that, when applied to a voter, exist for that voter in every single VAN committee.
If you have any questions about this change or would like to have our team upload mailing addresses for you, please submit a help ticket at txdem.co/van-help or drop us a line at vanhelp@txdemocrats.org.
Thanks, and have a great weekend!
Danni Gonyo
Data Director, Texas Democratic Party