Field Tracker Dashboard

Problem to Solve

For many campaigns, trying to keep track of their field team can be a challenge. Most of the programs that are used to keep records of their field teams don’t have the best user experience. Therefore, creating a dashboard, so that a campaign manager or field director can have a birds-eye view of the situation, will help them know what their field teams were actually doing.

The need for this dashboard was to make sure that those working in the field were actually entering correct data. Having a dashboard like the one below help to see if there are any anomalies in the data, which means that the field worker might not be entering correct data (or faking data)

Collection/Wrangling Data

For most campaigns, the data is stored in a database maintained by a company called VAN, with VoteBuilder being the UI that allows people to access that database. How it works is that field workers contact voters, they enter the voters’ responses into a computer or app, and then that data is stored into a database (maintained by VAN). Therefore, all of the data that is used for this dashboard comes directly from the VAN database.

The data can either be cleaned using VoteBuilder (by selecting only the items needed), or can be cleaned using Excel, as most data only has a few thousand rows at most. It depends on what data you need as to whether you can use VoteBuilder or Excel to clean the data.

Dashboard Features

You can see a number of features on the dashboard below. As I mentioned in the introduction, the main idea of this is to get a view of the field team. However, it also gives us an idea of the electorate as a whole, and can inform campaign messaging decisions.

Also, as was mentioned at the introduction, this dashboard was created to track whether a field worker was accurately entering data. If you look at the “Important Issue By Canvasser” chart, you can see that Bill Canon has “Jobs” as the least important issue to voters, while most field workers have jobs as either the first or second on the list. This can be an indication that Bill is just randomly entering data, and might require a little more scrutiny than the others.