Creating Advocate Searches

The ability to search and group key advocates together is one of the most powerful features in Engage. To use it, you’ll need to create an Advocate Search. This will allow you to find, and even email, targeted groups of advocates.

Once you login into Engage, Go to People -> Advocates

This will take you to the “Find Advocates” area of the site. From here, you can see any previous searches and create new ones.

To create a new search, click on the “Create Search” button:

Once you click on Create search option, a new page will open up. Give an appropriate search title and add it to a Search Group. You can select a Group for your Advocate search, by default “My Advocate Searches” group will be selected.

  • Search Title: Name the search type.
  • Search Group: Choose the group type.

Selecting a Search Criteria:

After selecting the group you will select a “Search Criteria”. Now depending on the kind of result you want, you will add different search criteria from the right hand column. Here’s a preview of all the available fields.

In total there are 8 different search field categories to select from.

Advocate Location:  This includes fields like city, state, county, ZIP, Federal District and State Upper & Lower districts. It will search the advocate based on their area or location.

Advocate Representation:  This will search based on the federal representation of an advocate. You can filter by US Senator, US Representative, State Senator, or Local official.

Advocate Activity: This will search based on advocate’s activity levels. You can search it based on the number of actions taken, action on specific engagement, date of last action, and minimum number of actions.

Advocate Status:  This will search based on the status of an advocate record. You can apply filters like active, global e-mail opt out, migrated from Capwiz, advocate source, engage mobile app source, disabled by bounce and never subscribed.

Advocate Details:  This will search based on the general information about an advocate. You can filter by job title, company name, tags, last name, e-mail address and last update date.

Advocate Communications:  This will search based on the communications an advocate has received. Searches can tell you if a client was sent communications, unopened communications, opened communications, clicked thru communications, bounced communications or unsubscribed using a specific communication.

Advocate Record Created Dates: This will search based on the advocate data created date. You can search on the basis of days since creation, created on specific day, and if the advocate was created in date range.

Custom Questions: Any custom questions you create can also be searched using the advocate search. Here are a few examples, but this should reflect questions made in Engage -> Questions:

When you have set your search criteria, you can either “View Search” to see the results of the search before saving it, use “Save Search” to save what you have so far, or “Cancel” to exit the process.

Selecting more than one search criteria

The Advocate Search feature in Engage is very flexible and allows you to create deep searches. Here are a few examples of how you can search more than one criteria:

Searches of multiple entities within the same field (such as listing several zip codes in the ZIP field) will treat the search as an OR search. Searches of different fields types (such as City and State) will treat those different field types as an AND search.

Multiple Fields: When you select multiple fields (such as City and State), your search will report only results where both City AND State are present. So, if you search city=Portland plus state=Maine, it will only find results where there is a city called Portland in a State called Maine. It will not display other cities called ‘Portland’. Another example: if you search zipcode=20171 plus ‘Created on specific day’=11/21/2012, Engage will display only results where both fields are present

Multiple values within the same field: If you search multiple data values within the same field, Engage will search for results matching any of the items listed. So, if you select City=New York, Dallas, Orlando, it will search for either New York OR Dallas OR Orlando. Only one of these cities needs to be present in order for the search to return a result. Another example: if you search for an advocate location where ZIP=20171, 08810, Engage will find results where the zip code is either 20171 OR 08810.

 

Showing the Empty/Not-Empty search

While adding the particular fields to your search, you can always specify that the particular field should contain records or not. For Instance:  If you choose “Field is Empty”, then no records will be shown once you run the search. In this way, you can customize the search. On the other hand, if you choose “Field is not Empty”, then the records will be displayed in that field.

You can learn more in our Empty/Not-Empty search write-up here.

Using “Add Filter Logic”

Changing the filter logic on the search is a powerful way to alter and expand your results. You may add additional AND/OR logic to your search query by clicking the “Add Filter Logic” button.

When using a combination of ANDs and ORs, the system will group criteria options in a logic string if you do not add parentheses to specify your desired grouping. For instance, if you update your filter logic from “1 and 2 and 3” to be “1 and 2 or 3” and don’t add in any parentheses, Engage will treat this as “(1 and 2) or 3”.

If you save a search or report without adding any parentheses, when you come back to view the search or report later, you will see that Engage has added the parentheses to indicate how it has done the grouping. This can be updated at any time by adding in parentheses or changing the location of the parentheses.

NOT Filtering

You have the ability to search for a negative (“Everyone who took action but is not part of the last upload”) using a NOT statement

Put parentheses around the term you want to negate and prefix that term with ‘not’ as in the following:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4


turns into:

1 and 2 and 3 and not(4) 

        Note: there is no space between ‘not’ and (4)

Also, you can use parenthesis to group items together and exclude them. For example:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4


could turn into

1 or 2 and not (3 or 4)

 

Author: Engage Team

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