Append Legislative Districts and Elected Official Contact Information to Your CRM in 5 Steps
If your organization is doing any sort of advocacy or legislative outreach, like targeting members of Congress or fighting to pass state legislation, you might find yourself in need of a tool that will update your CRM with accurate legislative district and elected official contact information. District Match will do just that in only a few simple steps.
District Match is a fast and affordable way to match addresses to legislative districts with the highest levels of accuracy. It pulls from the Cicero database, which is updated daily with robust contact information for elected officials at the national, state, and local levels in the U.S. and 8 other countries. Appending quality data to records in your CRM will mean that you can match your members to districts and officials with confidence, helping you make a greater impact.
To use District Match, you’ll export records from your CRM, select the districts and officials you need, and receive the data back within hours. Getting started is easy:
Step 1: Select contacts for matching and export
Do you want to update your whole database, or just some of your records (for example, all of your contacts in Kansas)? You can run projects of all sizes on District Match as often as you’d like. Once you’ve decided which records you want to match, navigate to your CRM’s export settings. Here you will filter on which contacts you want matched. When you’re ready, hit “export”.
Step 2: Format your spreadsheet
Open up your contact file in whatever spreadsheet software (Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, etc.) you have access to. Before you upload this file to District Match, make sure that it’s clean and formatted in a way that will secure the best match. Here are some helpful tips from our formatting guide:
- Assign a unique ID to all records.
- Add a header on the first line of your spreadsheet if you don’t already have one.
- When naming each field in the header, use no special characters (% # $) or spaces. Underscores (_) are fine.
- Do not begin the field name with a number.
- Include apartment numbers or any additional address information in a second address field, apart from the street name and number.
- Format Zip codes as text fields to preserve leading zeros (08755)
- Most importantly, save your file as a CSV.
For more information about ways to clean your address data, check out our guide.
You should also take this opportunity to remove any fields that are not absolutely necessary for the match. We take your privacy and security very seriously and will never resell or redistribute your data. However, it’s always best practice to remove any sensitive information from your files. When you’re done, your spreadsheet should look something like this:
Save this version of your export list as a CSV so that it’s ready to upload to District Match.
Step 3: Run a District Match project
Now that your file is formatted, you’re ready to run a District Match project.
Sign up for a District Match account. Visit www.cicerodata.com/districtmatch. Click the “Get Started” button and sign up for an account.
Create a new project. Log into your new account and click the “Create New Project” button under the District Match tab.
Import data. Name your project and locate your CRM export CSV file for upload.
Match fields and validate. Select the name of your CSV fields from the dropdown list. Make sure you select the correct fields. You’ll have a chance to preview them once you click “Verify.”
Select data fields for stamping. Here is where you select the data that will be appended to your records. For districts, you can choose National, state, and/or local legislative districts. You can also select non-legislative districts, such as census tracts and school districts. If you want to associate your members with elected officials and their contact information, choose “Districts and Officials”, or “Districts and Officials with Social Media” to add on things like their Facebook and Twitter identifiers.
Verify and confirm. Here you’ll see a breakdown of the project and its price. Check to make sure that your order is correct. Enter your payment info and hit “Submit Order”.
Step 4: Import your new data back to your CRM
You will get an email when your project is complete. Navigate to your project dashboard and download your results. To keep the records in your CRM clean, you may want to pare down the data in your District Match results to only include the information you want attached to your members (for example, you may not want to carry over elected official websites or fax numbers). Do this by simply deleting the columns of data that you’re not interested in. Once you have only the data you need, resave the file as a CSV. Remember, you can access a District Match project from your Project Page for up to a year if you ever want to incorporate more data in your records.
Now you’re ready to re-import the data into your CRM. Navigate to the import settings in your CRM. For many CRM’s, like Copper, Dynamics 365, and Hubspot, this is done by clicking through screens like Settings > Data Management > Import data. Other CRM’s, like Salesforce, have an import wizard to walk you through the process.
Find your results CSV and select the fields that you want to append to your records. Be sure to follow any templates or documentation for creating custom fields if things like “Congressional District” or “City Councilor” are not already a part of your CRM. When your data looks good, click “Submit Import.”
Step 5: See results
You will now see District Match data appended to the records in your CRM!
You can use this data to do things like pull reports on the number of your members in each congressional district or run action alerts urging your members to email their state representatives about a crucial piece of legislation.
Sound easy enough? Sign up for a District Match account and try it out for yourself, or get in touch if you have more questions!
Are you using the Salesforce NPSP or CiviCRM? We also have direct integrations with those platforms to make appending districts even easier.
