Dan Robinson of AdvoKit spent some time showing off Advokit 0.8. It is an impressive system built specifically to enable people to organize campaigns and manage the work load of campaign activities. The system has huge potential for advocacy groups and small campaigns as well as the really big efforts currently underway for November 2004.
Top five things I liked:
1. Reasonable volunteer workflow based the operations of GOTV operation. Call flows, scripts, taking information from the people you call.
2. Pretty slick work tracking and permissions models to enable coordinators to monitor what has been done and what needs to be completed.
3. Slurp of voter files and permission based access to data. (volunteers can only peek at little windows of the overall data set)
4. Sounds like a very flexible and robust data model with a customizable interface and configrable display of fields and tabs.
5. Communications management and the ability to mange phone, email, walking lists and label outputs.
Things I look forward to seeing in the future.
1. GUI improvements, documentation, help guides etc.
2. Volunteer data cross checking and import to support effectively working a peer network
3. Web interface for managing volunteer recruitment.
4. A hosted instance for campaigns of groups that want to target less than 10,000 people.
5. Donation processing
6. Plug in for GMT on environmental advocacy campaigns.
It is a great bit of work. Smart tools that are network-centric in that they encourage peer to peer organizing. They enable diverse leadership to access high quality tools, they build situational awareness of the campaign coordinators and the tools enhance a campaign team to scale effectively. Help them out if you can.
AdvoKit 0.8.0 Free
