Questions & Tags

This guide will show you all you need to know about Tags, Questions and Master Questions.

Questions and Tags store the key information about your voters, so you need to know the differences between them. You will find Questions and Tags whenever you look in an individual voter's record, when you create a list and also in scripts and forms.

What's the Difference?

There are several key differences between Questions and Tags. The most obvious one is that questions have answers and tags don’t. So Questions are used to store things like canvass data, where people can give different answers. Tags are used for things like a profession or community position which is always relevant, even if not current. Questions have a year associated with them (sometimes referred to as a "cycle") while tags continue unchanged from year to year so may not reflect the current position of that person.

National v Local

Tags are set nationally, whereas you can create your own local questions. You can use local questions to ask about local issues or record local petition signers. Users from Senior Activist upwards can create Questions.

Associated Data

Each tag allocation or question/answer has additional information stored with it. These are:

• Canvasser
• Date canvassed
• User who entered data
• Date data was entered
• Contact type (Doorstep, phone, etc)

Some of this associated data is stored automatically by Connect. Some of it, such as canvasser name and canvassed date, you need to enter yourself.

Master Questions

In Connect, there are a few Master Questions which pull together answers to other questions. You can find the Master Questions at the bottom of the question list and can recognise them because they don't have a year (or cycle) in their name.

The Master Question you will probably use the most is Master Party ID. This allows you to quickly and easily search by canvass response, as it will search all the different questions that ask about voting intentions from any year. If you create a new question locally and want to be able to search on it using a Master Question, then you'll need to put in a support request (using the "Contact the Admin" link on the left hand side of the main screen) in order to get the question mapped.

The question Type can give you a clue as to which Master Question it is mapped to.  For example, Vote Intent questions are mapped to the Master Party ID question, while Volunteer type questions are mapped to the master Volunteer question.