How to filter lists

TRC  has rich filter abilities that let you:

1. Interactively explore your data.
2. Determine a subset of targeted voters.
3. Create a subsets that you can assign and share with others 
4. Use your filtered view with any other feature in like printing, exporting a mail list, and maps.

Accessing the Filter plugin

There are several ways to access the filter ability:

1. You can access the Filter plugin directly from here.

2. You can access filtering via the standard list view on a sheet. Click the filter icon in the top-left view:

3. You can also access Filter from the plugin list for your sheet.
Common things to filter on are:

• History –   this is how likely somebody is to actually vote.
• Party Id  – this is the party affiliation.
• Answers to questions like Result of Contact or Supporter
• Other microtargeting information.

Using the Basic View

There are several views for filtering.  The “basic” tab lets you qickly filter on History, PartyId, and Age.

Using the Query Builder view

You can also switch to the “Query Builder” tab to create a more complex query.

Here’s a basic query to look for ‘social’ equals ‘hard left’, ie, social liberals. You can select the column, operator, and value to create a rule, and then click “run query”:

We can then build up the query to also require people over 55 years old. This is means “social liberal AND over 55”.
The “add rule” button adds a new rule to the current group. Note that we have ‘and’ selected which means both rules must apply.

If we meant “social liberal OR over 55” , then we can select ‘or’:

Tip: If you got 0 results, check that you didn’t confuse an ‘and’ with an ‘or’.  For example, (Party == 1 and Party == 2) will give you 0 results. It should be (Party == 1 or Party == 2)

We can add multiple rules. This means social liberals between 45 and 55.

We can also click “add group” to create more complex expressions. This means “Social liberal AND (party is either 3 OR 4)”. Using groups is needed when you want to combine AND with OR expressions.

The other trick is to us the ‘history’ score (likeliness to vote) to narrow the number of targets. You can see the “Previous Results” tab at the right shows the results of queries you’ve made so far. For example, this query finds fiscal conservatives that are very likely (0.90 is 90% ) likely to vote. Note that is must be specified as a decimal between 0…1 and include the leading 0. (so “0.90”, not “.90”, not “90%”).

For example, this query is for any women with Party equal to 1 and that live in the specified zipcode or city.

 In our case, it gives us 4900 voters. We can repeat the query with 0.70 instead, and gets 17000 voters. 

Tip: If you want more data, you can upload it yourself via the data uploader or purchase additional data from a data vendor like Voter-Science.

 

Saving the filter

Once you run your query, you can set it as the targets or save it as a regular sheet:

The “Save Query” button will prompt you for a name for this filter. When you hit the back button to go back to the List View, you’ll see it on the sheet list. At this point, the filter acts just like any regular sheet, and you can share it, print it, or use it with any other plugin.

Click on “walking list” next to that filter, and you’re now viewing just within the filter.

You can click “share this” to share just this filter with another volunteer.

You can click “view entire walking list” to get back to the full list and possible create new filters.

Viewing on a map

You can also visualize a heat map for the results.  For example, here’s a query of “Who are supporters that haven’t voted yet”. You can then map it, and chase them down:

 

Technical notes

Filtering creates a new “child” sheet that applies a filter-expression to extract a subset of the rows from the original (“parent”) sheet. The filter creates a a view that shares the same sandbox as the original sheet, so all changes in the child are instantly visible in the parent. However, the child sheet still maintains its own history tracking and audit logs.