What the Supporter Database Does
The Supporter Database is available with certain paid subscription plans. The Supporter Database is required to use Sparkswell’s Canvassing module.
The purpose of the Supporter database is to be the single true record of information about current and potential supporters of your campaign. This could be Contacts that follow you on Sparkswell or those that you have uploaded to the database outside of Sparkswell.
Using the database you can keep track of things such as contact information, all interactions you have had with a contact, if they have donated to your campaign and if they plan on voting for you.
The database is also designed to power the Canvassing module, being the source for contact information and the repository for information collected through canvassing. The Supporter Database also powers Lists and is required for Email.
The Supporter Database is primarily designed to do these things:
- Provide you access to the contact information of Supporters who opt to follow you, volunteer, rsvp to attend an event or say they have attended through the Sparkswell platform
- Provide you access to the issues/organizations and political parties of those Supporters who opt to follow you, volunteer, rsvp attend an event or say they have attended through the Sparkswell platform
- Provide a record of the donations a contact has made to your campaign
- Track all interactions a Contact has with your campaign through the Sparkswell platform
- Create custom fields to include additional data from outside Sparkswell
- Enrich Contact data using outside files
- Upload Contacts to Sparkswell, such as those from acquired voter files
Important Things to Know About Using the Supporter Database
You own your data and the right to share, or not to share, that data with others. Sparkswell will not sell or share your data. We will not use this data to sell advertising to you or your contacts. The only reasons Sparkswell would access your contact data would be at your request for trouble-shooting purposes or potentially to inform the design of new product features.
You can upload data from other sources into your Sparkswell Supporter Database. For example, you may want to purchase a voter file and add this into the system. Or, you may just want to enrich the Contact you already have collected with Sparkswell with additional data fields, such as age or education level. Note, to upload data files they must be in CSV format and be labeled so that they appropriately map to the right data fields in Sparskwell.
You can manually enter data into the Supporter Database.
You can download your data. Downloads, like uploads, are in CSV format only.
The data fields populated by Sparkswell cannot be over-written by uploading external data.
If you cancel your Sparkswell account, or downgrade to a subscription that does not have access to the Supporter Database, you will lose access to your data. The data will be saved for up to year, so if you decide to renew, you will be able to regain access to this data. Though, it is still recommended that you download all you data if you plan on canceling or downgrading your subscription.
There is no “undo” when writing to the Supporter Database, so be very careful when you upload external data files or manually enter data into the database. You may want to download a full copy of your database periodically so that you have a back up version.
