Annual Connect Manager Housekeeping

This guide will highlight some of the tasks you should perform as a Connect Manager each year

If you are going to take over as Connect Manager for your local party, please have one of the previous Constituency Connect Manager, your local party Chair, Data Officer, Elections Officer or Campaigns Officer email connect@libdems.org.uk with approval so that we can give you the right access permissions (or do so yourself if you hold one of those roles).  If your local party boundaries have changed and you are a Constituency Connect Manager or Deputy, please also email us. 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, with approval from their Connect Managers.

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 2026 Local Elections in May 2026, the cycle changed to 2027 in anticipation of the 2027 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 2026 Local Elections in May 2026, the cycle changed to 2027 in anticipation of the May 2027 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 archives standard national questions over the summer after each election, so you’ll always find past questions in the archive.

Data Reconciliation

It is important that Connect is a database full of real people, with all the information we have on each voter being stored in one place - on one profile. This makes Connect more useful for us as campaigners.

Reconciling Connect data ensures that everyone’s details are in one place - their address, their email, their voting intention and all of the data we use to decide how to campaign to win someone’s vote - and that the two sides of Connect (My Voters and My Campaign) know that they are the same ‘person’.

We don’t want lots of stray profiles full of fake data, or people’s data being in lots of different places on Connect. This will make it harder for us to find our current and potential volunteers in the system. 

We have a full guide to Data Reconciliation here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-OIAYaVWEvzkM-DO8SLbuVSPWPXTm8TvIvqXQLmWkDU/edit?usp=sharing