Users and People Vocabulary
It’s important to understand the differences between “Users” and “People” in Reach.
Users are your volunteers and canvassers who use download the app and make accounts. People are voters from the voter file and “Reach Adds” created by your users (often with the intention of registering them to vote using Reach’s voter reg features). You can read more about the difference between Voters and Reach Adds here.
Users have User IDs (and sometimes also MyC VAN IDS) while People have Reach IDs (and often other external IDs like DNC Person ID, State File ID, MyV VAN ID, or even MyC VAN ID for Reach Adds)
In some cases, Users are also registered voters of course. But not all users are voters and certainly not all users are voters who are registered within the targeted geography of a given Reach campaign they are working on.
Some of our campaigns do try to match their users to the voter file and there are two main ways they do this:
- As a part of training and onboarding users to the relational features of Reach, encourage all users to search for themselves in the voter file and add themselves to their “Network” in Reach using the “Self” relationship type. Then you’d be able to identify the Reach ID of a user with great accuracy. But only if you drill it during training and users do it. And only for users who are registered voters in the campaign they’re working on.
- You can use any external voter file matching tools based on the user data you can get out of Reach (name, email, phone, address (optionally).
