Best practices for uploading phone responses to VAN
How to make sure that all of your phone data is recorded properly in VAN
Introduction
We generally want to use virtual phone banks to do voter contact in VAN - they make sure data is automatically recorded and reduce the use of paper. However, if its not possible to use electronic lists it’s important to make sure our data is still being entered back into VAN.
Challenges with Grid View
For a video summary of this section click here.
Grid view might seem like the easiest way to enter that data back into VAN. However, when data is entered back into VAN important data is lost, including:
Only allows you to call preferred numbers, rather than all numbers
Doesn’t associate contact result with number (e.g., wrong number, disconnected) with a phone number
Leads to marking good numbers wrong and never marking wrong numbers
What do I do instead?
Virtual phone bank - Takes care of all of your challenges, and no data entry!
Export / import using CSV
If I need to use paper lists, what should I do instead?
For a video summary of this section click here.
Exporting calls
Create list in VAN
Click Export
Select phone list
Download as CSV
Add columns for every survey question in script
Print list
Importing back into VAN
Enter back into csv file
Upload file through bulk upload
Select contact type - Phone
Map survey questions accordingly