• What's the difference between an advocacy campaign and a messaging campaign? How do Action Alerts fit in?
• I've just hired someone/been hired. How do I get started on GetActive?
• When's the next GetActive training?
• How do I know how many good e-mails there are in my state/affiliate?
• How do I add all these names I collected to GetActive?
• How do I get a list out of GetActive for phone banking/canvassing/invitations/etc.?
• How can I make sure my supporters don't get overloaded with e-mail?
• How many advocacy campaigns and messages is the right amount?
• What can I do about all these duplicates on my list?
• How can I be sure to get credit for the supporters I recruit?

To suggest a question to add to this page, please contact the Online Organizing Manager.

back to questions

See the new users page.

back to questions

Please see the monthly training schedule and the Dashboard > Help > Training area in GetActive.

back to questions

The simplest way to find the number of good (or "deliverable") e-mail addresses in GetActive* is to create a query. Start at Dashboard > Data Management > List Management and click Subset of Members. On the next page, check off Email Delivery Status. At this stage you may also want to select by PP Affiliate if you share your center with other affiliates, or by U.S. Geographic and Political Information if you want to narrow the selection by state (if your center covers more than one state). Then click the "continue" button. You will be asked for additional information on the next page to clarify your search. Then click the "Select Members" button and be patient while your query is conducted.

Once it's complete, you will see the number of records with good e-mail in your search. On this page you will also be prompted to save your query for future use. This is a good idea if you would like to find or count these members again in the future. Be sure to put a clear Name for your query that will make sense to you and your colleagues in the future. Copy the Selection Criteria (it starts "Members who...") on this page and paste it into the Description so that you will have a precise record of the stored criteria. Then check the box that says "Check to save this member selection query for future use."

* GetActive considers a blank e-mail to be "undeliverable" as well as addresses that produce a certain number of bounces.

back to questions

Please see the Import Instructions archived on ToosforChoice.org and in the Dashboard > Data Management > Import section.

back to questions

Please see the Export Instructions archived on ToosforChoice.org and in the Dashboard > Data Management > Export section. Be sure to include any information you will need on each person in the Export Format (step 1).

back to questions

Although each person on your list has their own unique tastes and desires, there is one way to make sure they are getting what they want: ask them. GetActive allwos you to create "Subscriptions" (special purpose lists) that members can opt-in to for more information about a specific topic. Some affiliates use these to send updated to volunteers, to send a sex ed newsletter. or to reach supporters in a specific geographic area. To create your own subscriptions, go to Dashboard > Data Management > Data Structure > Manage Subscriptions. (more instructions are available there.)

Especially in the current political climate, pro-choice Americans very much want to hear from Planned Parenthood and to see that we are actively working to protect reproductive rights. It is a much bigger danger to fail to mobilize your supporters than to risk over-messaging them.

back to questions

Advocacy is one of your best methods for recruiting new list members, so always have at least one "live" advocacy camapign in your action center. Live campaigns are ones that have been launched, and have not yet expired. They appear on your center home page in the section called "Current Advocacy Campaigns in..." Even if your legislature is not in session, people can contact their elected officials to express their support for pro-choice policies or contact other targets such as pharmacists, newspapers, state health officials, school board, etc. Again, always have at least one action to engage your supporters at any given time.

At a minimum, you should send at leat one message to you entire list every month. This in as opportunity to let your supporters know that you are still working hard and that you still need their support. In addition to legislative information and advocacy, you can include updates on your clinics, invitations to events, health information, positive (or negative) news stories and editorials, volunteer opportunities, and so on.

back to questions

What can I do about all these duplicates on my list?

We have seen tremendous growth in our activist lists across the federation in 2004 thanks to grassroots organizing and supporter identification. Having such a large list increases the size of the muscle we can flex when we do online organizing. However, there is also a downside. Since we use such diverse recruitment methods, we often end up adding the same person to our lists more than once. This was exacerbated by the addition of names recruited at the March for Women's Lives (see July GettingActive ).

So now we have this wonderful list of supporters (over 750,000 nation-wide!), but the list needs some cleaning-up so that we can communicate with those supporters more efficiently. GetActive has a built-in tool that identifies potential duplicates and walks you through the process of updating and deleting duplicates as necessary. Go to Data Management > List Management > Find & Merge Duplicates to use this tool. GetActive will display a list of duplicated addresses, and prompt you to select which records are duplicates and which ones to keep. It will then display all of the data to be merged together and allow you to select which versions of each field to keep.

If you want to de-duplicate your list in smaller segments you can do the merging off-line and re-import your fixed list. We have posted detailed directions to do this on Tools for Choice, in the GetActive Info section. Briefly, the process is this: Export list to be de-duped. Open export file in Excel. Sort the list to browse and mark duplicates. Merge duplicates together into one record per person. Create lists of duplicates to be deleted, and merged records to be updated. Send the two lists to Ruby for updating and removal, respectively. For more details, download the directions from Tools for Choice.

back to questions

Did you know that you can send your source code in a link to GetActive pages? All activists who join through your center will automatically get your center's default source code, but if you want to send activists to a statewide or national campaign and still get credit for recruiting them, all you have to do is add the following code to the end of the link:

?source=[your 5-digit code]

For example, if you are at PP of Stark County and you want to send activists directly to the latest action against the Holmes nomination you would take the link http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/holmes and add your source code 91250 to make the link:

http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/holmes?source=91250

If you make this a link in your HTML-formatted message, your list members will never even have to see the code! (See below.)

back to questions

More answers to come!

If you have a common question that's not answered on this page, please contact the Online Organizing Manager.