Annual Connect Manager Housekeeping

This guide will highlight some of the tasks you should perform as a Connect Manager each year, perhaps over the summer or at Christmas.

If you’ve recently taken over as Connect Manager for your local party, drop a support request to ‘Digital Support’ so that we can give you the right access permissions (or ask your previous manager to). We’ll need a local party officer to confirm your appointment. If your local party boundaries have changed, please also drop a support request to ‘Digital Support’. We can change the ‘geography’ you can see, but can also help if a number of local parties, constituencies or local authorities want to work across boundaries as a team.

Removing previous users

For data protection reasons you should always remove users who no longer need access to Connect. To do this, open the user’s details and mark the account as ‘inactive’. There is a guide in this section that goes over the process to manage user accounts. 

You should also check what voter roll access your users have by checking in My Voters under the Assign Person Access by District section, and adjust it to what they currently need

Remove old scripts and phone banks

Scripts and phone banks you are no longer using will clog up menus at various points in the system. To make it clearer which scripts and phone banks you want users to use you should mark unused ones as ‘inactive’. If you need to use them again, you can mark them as ‘active’ again.

Following the scheduled May elections, we change what elections cycle the system is using. For example after the 2023 Local Elections in May 2023, the cycle changed to 2024 in anticipation of the 2024 May elections. When this occurs it is important to create a new version of your script that is using the new cycle of questions, and archive the one on the previous cycle

Archiving old questions

In order to make it clear when data was collected, and for which election it was collected, all questions have a cycle name (in the format ‘2018: Question’). You should always use questions in the current cycle, and archive any old ones so they don’t get used by mistake.

To archive a question, change its status to ‘archived’ in the Edit question screen. You can still use archived questions in searches & counts. Just make sure you mark them as archived not inactive - you can’t use inactive questions in searches or counts. To access your archived questions in searches, scroll down to the bottom of the list of questions, and choose ‘show archived’ – your archived questions will then show up in the list of questions.

Following the scheduled May elections, we will change what elections cycle the system is using. For example after the 2023 Local Elections in May 2023, the cycle changed to 2024 in anticipation of the 2024 May elections. When this occurs it is important to recreate any relevant local questions in the new cycle, and archive ones in the old cycle

The Connect team archive standard national questions over the summer after each election, so you’ll always find past VoterID questions in the archive.