District-Based Targeting

Rally’s national voter file includes district level information for matched voters at the state, county, congressional, state senate, and state legislative levels. 

Admins can target actions at contacts who live within particular districts. In this article, we walk you through how to do that. 

Step 1: Select Geographies of Interest

From the content page, click on “+ Add geographies of interest,” select the corresponding State, District Type, and District you would like to be able to target actions to. When finished, click on “+ Add District.” When you are finished adding districts click on “Continue.”

• Note: You can edit or add additional districts at any time from the Content page.

Step 2: Target an Action Item

Once you have set your geographies of interest, you’re ready to implement district-based targeting. Create a new Action Item or edit an existing one. (Check out Action Items: An Overview for help getting started with Action Items). To target an Action Item based on the specific district(s) contacts are registered to vote in, select the geographies you wish to target from the dropdown under “Contact’s Location,” then click “Save.”

Note that if you set criteria both for contacts’ districts and key question responses, your action will only show up for contacts who meet both sets of criteria.

If you want to have an action that is targeted at people within a certain district OR people with a certain key question response, you can do that by making two separate actions and targeting them to your desired district and Key Question response, respectively.

Here are a few use cases for how your program can incorporate district-based targeting:

• Inviting voters in a specific district to an upcoming community event
• Sharing county specific voting information 
• Targeting voting-related action items only at contacts in your district
• Asking contacts who live in districts surrounding yours to make a grassroots donation
• If you are running a statewide program in a state where there are competitive down ballot races, you can target action items at contacts in competitive state legislative or state senate districts
  • Example: A multiple choice action that gathers a support ID for their district’s state senate candidate
  • A free response action titled “Make sure they know to vote for Peter Pan for State Senator”, and a description asking them to let you know how the conversation went in the text box below.
• If you are running a national advocacy program, you can use district-based targeting to make different asks of contacts in different states
• Direct service: If an extreme weather event is affecting the safety of people in a particular area in your state, you can use district targeting to target an action at those who may be affected asking if they need to be connected to resources

How do Mobilizers interact with districts?

Mobilizers interact with district information in 2 ways within the Mobilizer Platform:

1. If you create actions that are targeted by district, mobilizers may see different actions available for different contacts 
2. Rally displays district level data for all Rally contacts who are matched to the voter file. To view the District Information associated with a contact, a mobilizer just needs to click into the contact’s profile. From there, they will be able to see district level information for the matched contact at the state, county, congressional, state senate, and state legislative levels.