1. How to Find New March Names
    
2. What Source Codes are - and How (Not) to Use Them
   a. How Turn Your Source Codes Into Origins
   b. TIP: How to Recruit using State and National Campaigns
    
3. July Trainings

1. How To Find New March Names  back to top

As we announced last month, the new activists recruited at the March for Women's Lives have been added to PPAN.  Just like any other nationally-recruited activists, these names automatically flowed into the corresponding local centers based on how their addresses were turfed.  This means there are thousands of new activists for you to contact!

It's very easy to find these new names.  When you are selecting members, choose New March Recruit as a criteria, and then search for the value "Y." (See screenshot at right.)  You can combine this with other criteria such as PP Affiliate to find a smaller subset of list members.

A caveat: in spite of the herculean de-duplicating effort, there were some names that slipped through who were already on our lists.  If you want to ensure that you are only contacting brand new names, add Registration Date to your search criteria, and select people who joined after June 11, 2004.

2. What Source Codes Are and How (Not) To Use Them  back to top

Example Source Codes

91250 Planned Parenthood of Stark County 90600  Planned Parenthood of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta 90140 Planned Parehood of the Golden Gate SPA06 Iowa Planned Parenthood Affiliate League SPA21 Texas Association of Planned Parenthood Affiliates SPA14 New York State Family Planning Advocates ppfa nationally-recruited care2 recruited from Care2.com saveroe recruited via saveROE.com

Not sure about your code?  The final word for affiliates is the PPFA Nationwide Directory, last published in October 2003.  To get a copy, contact the PPFA Marketing Department.  SPAs can contact ruby.sinreich@ppfa.org to confirm their code.

Because of the way we share names with each other in GetActive, it is very important to keep track of where each list member came from.  This is done using the field called Source Code.  The value in this field will either be the 5-digit code of an affiliate or statewide association, or a short code corresponding to a national source.  (See examples at left.)  All of the valid source codes are pre-defined nationally to ensure consistent tracking across the federation.  Each center has a default Source Code corresponding it's state or affiliate so when people sign up in your center, they are automatically sourced with your code.

It is of critical importance that this field only be used to indicate the national, state, or affiliate source of the name.  For your internal tracking purposes, please use the Origin and/or Recruitment Method fields.  Origin allows you to enter any value you like, so you can use your own system or enter unique values for each person. 

Recruitment Method has fixed values to ensure consistency.  (Those values are: Web Ads, Tabling, Web Joins, Materials, Referral, Constituency Recruit, Coalition Work, Development, Petition, Clinic Advocacy, Conference, Concert, Event, LAC (legislative action center), Phonebank, Mailing, and action camp.)

In addition, you can use the Affiliate ID field for serial numbers that you may want to correspond to an external database.

2a. How to Turn Your Sources into Origins  back to top

The role of the Source Code field has been unclear in the past, and some of you have used it for other information. If you have nonstandard data (ie: not your affiliate/state code) in the Source Code field, here’s how to fix it by moving the codes to the Origin field:

Export the problem records. Make sure that: Your export format has Organization Member ID and Source Code. Select members by Source Code, using your nonstandard codes as the criteria. Open the downloaded file in Excel and Rename the Source Code column to "Origin." Make a new column called "Source Code" with your affiliate/state code in every row. Save this file as tab-delimited text. Import the file you just made, making sure that: Your import format contains Organization Member ID, Origin, and Source Code. You match members by Organization Member ID, and overwrite existing data.

HELPFUL TIP: How to Recruit using State and National Campaigns  back to top 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.)

Training topics:
Intro to GetActive	Get Started
Import/Export	Import Data
Export Data	Data Structure
Reporting	Center Design
Best practices in online communication	Messaging & Advocacy
Messaging (Email) Campaigns	Advocacy Campaigns

3. GetActive Training in July back to top

Want to learn more about how to use GetActive? If you are a brand-new user, or just looking to brush-up your skills, there is free training available for you online! Planned Parenthood and GetActive both offer web-based trainings on a variety of topics (at right).

For more information, see the training schedule and instructions (on ToolsforChoice.org), or visit the GetActive training center by logging in and selecting the Training link under the Help tab. Also, look for an announcement about advanced online trainings later this summer!