Add Personalized Polling Location to Texts

Updated by Alexis Salcedo

You can customize your initial text broadcasts and canned responses with polling location information from iwillvote.com.

Switchboard uses location data associated with each phone number to create a custom, prefilled, tracked link that prompts your recipient to a page with all the information they need to vote: drop-off sites, early voting locations, and election day voting locations.

Save Location Data for your Recipients

You will need to make sure that you have saved location data for your phone numbers. The only way to do this is to save an address and ZIP Code for each of your phone numbers using reusable fields: sb_street_address and sb_zip_code. You can do this when uploading CSVs to Switchboard. Set these fields to match the relevant columns in your dataset.

Be sure to strip any commas from your address data before uploading it into Switchboard as a CSV. Data in a CSV is separated by commas, so additional commas in the address field may throw off the data associated with each column resulting in the wrong information saved in Switchboard's reusable fields. If you are not sure how to do this, upload your file to Google Drive / Sheets, then export as a csv. Google's export will correctly format your data.

When you are drafting your text, you will see the option for "Polling Location 2024". This button will drop the custom prefilled link (with tracking) into your broadcast wherever your cursor is!

When you are creating a canned response, you will see helper text near the text editor with a link you can copy and paste into your canned response. Adding this to your canned response will populate a prefilled, custom, tracked link for any recipient of the canned response.

  1. What happens if I load the wrong information into the Switchboard Reusable Fields?
    1. Unfortunately, we only have the information you provide us. Please be sure to double-check address and zip code information are correct before setting your fields and sending texts with the custom polling location links. If you need to update the data saved in these fields you can always update your CSV and re-upload the data to Switchboard.
  2. What happens if I don't have saved location data for a recipient and I send them the custom link?
    1. The recipient will click on the link and be prompted to manually type in their address!
  3. How do I track this link like a normal shortlink in Switchboard?
    1. All of the links we provide, both in the broadcast draft editor as well as the copyable link in the canned response editor, have the tracking syntax already applied!

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