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Getting Started By far, the best way to get started learning how to use the program is to just experiment with it. The best way to get started doing that is to make a copy of your district file. Rename the copy with the prefix, 'practice' so 'MO00037.mdd' would become 'practiceMO00037.mdd'. Then open that practice file and just experiment around with the program. If you need to and haven't created your district data file(s) yet. The program must first be installed. The district(s) are then extracted from the State data and MrDistrict data files are created. The program was designed for politicians and organizations with political goals. If you are a member of one of those groups then you will instinctively see dozens of uses for the programs various tools. If you are having trouble seeing those uses, skip on down this page to the section marked Strategies and read it. There is a built in Help prompt which can provide instant feedback as to how to use the program and there is no teacher like experience. At the least, new users should have spent an hour or so experimenting before attempting to read through the Help file because the familiarity gleaned will make the Help file much easier to understand. Be sure to check out the 'Settings' screen because many parts of the program are customizable. If you are still at a loss as to what the program can do for you read up on Groups or go to the reporting screen and generate a set of Culled Address labels. Casually do the math as to how much money can be saved in a single mailing to your entire district (around 40% right off the bat) and then imagine if you had first excluded; inactive voters and voters with very low participation percentages using the Advanced Find tools. Grouping of records is unlimited, and any group can be sent an email (Cc or Bcc), Mapped to show where they live, sent a form letter, or used as the base of a random set of people to Poll. Are you planning on doing any pavement pounding, let MrDistrict© make you 1000% more effective. Plan out your routes using the mapping features of MrDistrict©, generate a group based on those streets, print out your map and a 'Group Contact Sheet' and you will only be stopping at the '2 out of 10' people's houses that actually contain voters. You will know exactly what territory you have covered and as you go you can fill in your 'Group Contact Sheet' with phone numbers and email addresses. As the Representative of twenty thousand voters, it’s quite possible that you may actually meet or contact, let’s say, half of them. There is no way that a person can remember all of those people. By using MrDistrict©, Notes can be made on constituents that you meet within a few days of that meeting. When John Smith later calls you on the phone, a quick glance at his record’s Notes can remind you to ask if his daughter is out of the hospital yet or if his problem with the local utilities company was ever resolved. This kind of familiarity with your constituents will do a great deal to project you as a politician who really cares about his constituency and I don't have to tell you that that kind of image really can work magic at the Polls. What this all means to you is that a tremendous amount of work and money can be saved at campaign time, also that the work that you do will be massively more effective. All of which translates into really increasing your chances for election/re-election. Security Getting Started | Strategies | Security MrDistrict has the ability to be customized to your style of management. One part of this is the Security settings that you configure on each workstation where you have installed MrDistrict. In other words, will logins with passwords be required. Another part is the Security settings that you configure on your data files. If you like, the security of your installation can virtually be turned off. An administrator log in will only be required to access the Options and Settings switchboard and to access 'Administrator only' copies of data files. When I first mentioned, to one of our early beta testers, that I was adding security features he said, 'Great ... just so I can turn them off'. Security is not everyone's cup of tea but is becoming increasingly important as the information age matures. Through the careful management of user accounts the system can be set up so that all account-types (User and Administrator) access the same data file but non-administrators (Users) have limits as to what they can see or do to/with that data file. MrDistrict can be set up this way on a network (local or wide) and multiple users can view/make changes/etc. to a single data file. This type of set-up works well for small to mid-size offices and will quickly build a useful database. If a larger number of people will be working on your files you will probably want to use the physical boundary method described next. Another office style that MrDistrict can accomodate is considered very secure because it adds a physical boundary between the different types of users and the data they can access. The program is first installed on the owner's or his designated Administrator's computer. The districts are extracted from the State data and MrDistrict data files are created. A backup of these files is made and then copies are made. For instance, one for the Owner (and/or his Admistrator), one for the staff, and one for volunteers to use. Since you are making an exact copy of the data file, all of the ID numbers will match perfectly. Give the files distinct names that indicate their level in the heirarchy. Something like changing a default name of MO0061CTm083105_1216.mdd to something like Volunteer_MO0061CTm083105_1216.mdd would do nicely. At this point, everything is in place for a 'trickle up' data stream. Trickle up means that data is collected from various sources but is gathered upstream into a Master copy of the database. The process becomes one of uploading, from your junior staff members' or volunteers' copies of the data file, extended data like phone numbers, address corrections, email addresses, pledges, and notes that they have entered into the physically secure Administrator's and then, after review of the changes, to the Owner's copy. Volunteers can enter extended contact information like phone numbers, and email addresses, Poll data, make notes, take pledges etc. using the copy of the original data set aside for volunteers or junior staff members. The file can still be set to only allow entry and not allow browsing of entered Notes and Pledges. When the volunteers have all gone home, that information can be uploaded to an Adminstrator's copy of the data file. She can verify that everything went well and then export her changes to be uploaded to the Owner's (Master) copy of the data file. The volunteers' copy of the data file can be cleared of Note and Donation records easily with the Clear Tables utility and be ready to go for the next canvassing/polling session. With just a few people entering data and using this trickle up method, the database quickly becomes very powerful and useful because of course, the Adminstrator(s) and Owner of the data file are adding things like organizational, business, vendor contacts/purchase records, corporate and PAC contact information along with their own personal Notes to the master data file and your Administrator is entering such information as financial bookkeeping and delegating tasks, managing appointment scheduling, and more. Plus, all of the data is being sent upstream where it can be analyzed and the information can be put to best use formulating/implementing campaign strategies and initiatives. This is one of the more advanced styles of management and works well for mid to large-size or multi-site offices covering a larger region although it can also work for a small staff. Strategies Getting Started | Strategies | Security There is an old addage that asks the question, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?' While looking at installations of our competitors products on various politicians' computers; at how little the data had been expanded on; at the levels of difficulty to be surmounted to do anything really useful and several other factors, we were led to a corollary that goes like this, 'If a user accesses a database and neither puts to use nor expands upon the information, is that person really a user?' We built MrDistrict so that almost anyone can learn to use it, effectively. In about an hour, someone with no database experience at all can be performing analytical tasks that would normally require a DBA; creating targeted mailings, creating and administering Straw Polls and much more - but it is up to you and your staff to put the information to use. Public relations, Door to Door campaigning, Public Awareness initiatives, Grass Roots initiatives, Sign Placement/Retreival, Straw Polling, and Canvassing are all tasks that can be improved upon by the use of a quality database but only if you and your staff can quickly and easily put the information to good use. That's where we've got you covered. Entering data by hand (typing the information) in MrDistrict is faster than in other databases. Many fields will pre-fill or fill in even before the information is completely typed in. Several fields auto-correct and auto- capitalize and phone numbers auto-format. Other fields like City names, States, Area Codes, and Zip Codes can cross-fill based on the information enterd in them. Shortcut keys are in place for users so inclined. Needless to say, 'by hand' is the least popular method of data entry but one which, we at MrDistrict feel, will probably be with us for some time yet. That is why MrDistrict has several paradigms available for the aggregation of data while protecting that data from even casual browsing by your volunteers/junior staff members. MrDistrict can 'pull' data into it's data files using several methods. One is to, first, export a copy of some of the tables in a MrDistrict data file to Excel and distribute it (or parts of it) to volunteer(s). Excel is almost universal on most computers and is all that is required to begin 'extending' contact information in your data file. The Excel files are filled in and then imported back into the MrDistrict data file (thereby adding the expanded data entered by your volunteers or staff). Another method of pulling data into MrDistrict is something called the 'Record Matching Import', which is an interface where fields in most any Excel spreadsheet are matched up to fields in MrDistrict. Once that is done, MrDistrict can match those records to actual voter records and add the information to those matched records. For example, both parties provide lists to their candidates identifying people of like mind and known former donors. You may have actually created some type of spreadsheets to organize your own lists of donors, etc. even including data from those party spreadsheets. That data is only marginally useful because, in the case of party spreadsheets, much of it is out of date by the time it trickles down to the candidate and in the case of your own spreadsheets, they may be a permanent record but they can't easily be analyzed especially against other data. Using fuzzy logic, MrDistrict can find matching records within your MrDistrict data file and enter the spreadsheets data into those records. Depending on the level of automation the Record Matching Import is set to run at, quite literally, thousands of records can be updated automatically (with very little to no typing) with Excel format success/failure logs so that 'no data gets left behind'. Demographics data, Phone listings, and more can be imported from spreadsheets provided by various data merchants, who can, for instance, starting with data exported from a MrDistrict data file match voter's names and addresses against publicly available databases such as, white pages reverse lookup data, adding en-masse thousands of phone numbers or possible address updates. These data merchants often charge (very reasonably) based on successful matches. They update your exported data file with extended data like contact information and more if you want. After you receive the file back just import it into MrDistrict with the Record Matching Import feature and it will import the data and automatically create an extended note in each file, and thereby an archive of the full contents of that import. Right out of the box, using the Export and Import features, you can extend data collection/aggregation on to machines that do not have a copy of MrDistrict installed. Allowing volunteers/staff that have just Excel installed the ability to really contribute to the building of your data. Also, commercial demographics data is included with the Microsoft Map Point control included with MrDistrict. MrDistrict can also very easily be used for systematically eliminating invalid voters and bad data from Voter Registration data. If you have ever sent a large mailing to your constituency (or the constituency you are hoping to represent) then you well know that it is expensive to do. It's often called mass-communication. MrDistrict can create all kinds of mass communications via email, postal mail, or phone with options in place that can ensure only one letter per household ($), break large email lists up to avoid having your ISP identify you as a spammer, 'Don't Call' list functionality, and also the ability to navigate records by household to avoid consecutive multiple calls to the same residence, something which most families find very annoying. At MrDistrict, we believe there is a largely unexplored area of communication which we call micro-communication. We firmly believe (and our tests indicate) that micro-communication can be much more powerful than most forms of mass-communication. For instance, if you send a Form Letter to the three hundred senior citizens who voted in the last election thanking them (using their actual name) for participating, perhaps highlighting some issue of particular interest to senior citizens and lastly, taking about a half hour to personalize as many of those recipients letters as you can 'put a face to' then you have, without a doubt, gained more political mileage than a very expensive one-size-fits-all-glossy could ever muster. The process can be automated in MrDistrict to the extent that you only have to create the body of the letter. Furthermore, doing it regularly all year, targeting different groups of voters, will quickly build your political machine at a fraction of the cost and with exponential efficiency compared to a massive postal drop. People just react more favourably to communications which they feel were personalized for them. They are also much more likely to talk with their associates, friends, and neighbors about a message they feel was sent particularly to them because they feel involved. A similar effect happens when a politician or candidate conducts straw polls. The data collected, of course, serves as a gauge into the opinions of your constituents, but also, know that when a voter is asked his opinion and given the chance to speak his mind he will surely remember whom it was that asked. This again, serves to demonstrate a personal connection with your constituency. People want to feel that their elected officials really represent them and want to know what they think. A politician may very well want to use MrDistrict to optimize his communications with other politicians/associates he is working with or frequently contacts. If he enters records for those people then he has all of his data, including Notes, Maps, and more, in one place and this increases his efficiency. |