Hey there, Admin!
While everyone using Hustle does some pretty incredible work, it seems everyone uses the tool just a bit differently. The reason for this is often internal practices, organizational structure, and agent-bases who do the text messaging that you set up.
We’ve broken down the best practices by the general categories Hustle typically works with. While none of these are holy-grails, they certainly had input from each area’s Client Success team to get you up and running as soon as possible, and keep you going for the long haul.
As a Non-Profit admin, you’re working with large networks and communities of people to connect with in order to further your organization’s efforts, increase participation, and often up patronage to your cause. Here’s some gentle guidelines to get your efforts in focus!
NPO: Groups
NPO: Orgs
NPO: Tags
NPO: Custom Fields
NPO: Assignment Strategy
Groups:
- Create groups to organize your universe of contacts into smaller communities of people for Agents to connect with. Group Admins can continue to upload lists of contacts and add agents/organizers to those groups if this option is left turned on.
- With Organizing, you’re looking to have conversations with contacts over a period of time from the same phone number, your Contacts should remain in one group, rather than being added to multiple groups.
- If fundraising, specific Agents own relationships (ex. P2P Fundraising), so each Agent can have their own group as long as there isn’t overlap of contacts across groups.
- Regional groups can work here when teams share a region.
- If you’re running a specific campaign that is time-bound, and you don’t mind if future outreach is from a different phone number, you can create a group specific to the Contacts of that campaign.
- If fundraising, specific Agents own relationships (ex. P2P Fundraising), so each Agent can have their own group as long as there isn’t overlap of contacts across groups.
- Consider a naming structure that is scalable (ex. CO — West Slope Region)
- Make sure to add a group description in Group Settings to explain further who is in that group.
Orgs:
- Org creation is not something that you should need to do often. There are a few considerations for NPOs here:
- If you are using the Salesforce integration, you can only link one Salesforce instance to one Hustle Organization.
- If you are using VAN, you should use one Hustle Organization per VAN Committee for optimal use of the VAN integration.
- If you use the Blackbaud Luminate Online integration, you can sync multiple Hustle Organizations to one BBLO instance.
- Nonprofits usually have on Organization that separately houses the work of their Development team. This is because the valued donors data is relative and usually differs from that of field teams, so it’s important to those doing outreach for development purposes to have a unique setup.
- The only information about contacts that is shared across Orgs (if you choose), is opt out info. Tags and custom fields are specific to orgs.
- Integrations
- Teams
- A new Org should be created when either a new team at the organization wants to start using Hustle (ex. Development, Field, Volunteer Services, etc), or for Accounts with federated models or state tables. When a new organization/affiliate comes onto the platform, they would get their own Hustle organization.
Tags:
- Tags are most commonly used to collect information from Contacts that Agents are texting with (ex. Language or Opt Out reason), targeting based on time-bound/specific information that exists outside of Hustle (ex. Someone who registered for a specific event and needs follow-up or to be excluded from a particular goal), or information that cannot by added as a custom field through an integration.
- Removing tags in bulk from a specific subset of your lists is time intensive, so if you have info that may change often (like donation amount or city) do not use tags for that -- use Custom Fields.
- For tags that you want to use temporarily for targeting (ex. pledged), give them a name that is unique to the campaign/event (ex. Pledge_sustainer_2/6 or Registered_Event_3/6)
- Tags that may be helpful to consider:
- Language preference
- Volunteer Prospect
- VIP
- Board Member
- Moved
- Wrong Number (opt out tag)
Custom Fields:
- Custom Fields are used to fill in donor data or voter info in scripts for personalization, legislator and districts info for calls, and for geographic targeting.
- Custom Fields that may be helpful to consider:
- member_id
- highest_contribution_amount
- last_donation_amount
- last_donation_date
- donor_type
- city
- state
- zip
- county
- Development:
- Organizing:
- city
- state
- zip
- County
- congressional_district
- LegislativeDistrict_CD
- LegislativeDistrict_HD
- LegislativeDistrict_SD
- PollingLocation
- PollingAddress
- HD_Legislator
- HD_LegislatorPhone
- SD_LegislatorPhone
- SD_Legislator
Assignment Strategy:
- Contacts get distributed to agents in goals based on their assignment status. Here are some things to think about when creating goals. If a contact is:
- Unassigned: any agent in the group can message and respond to the contact. Threads with Unassigned contacts are designed to be more flexible so when a contact replies, they’ll get a response from an available agent. We recommend leaving contacts unassigned when you want to reach out to your contacts and don’t mind which agents message them.
- Assigned: the contact will only be messaged by their assigned agent. Threads with assigned contacts are designed to maintain a consistent relationship between specific agents and contacts in a group. However, contacts can be reassigned to a different agent or unassigned and the conversation history will be preserved for any new agent messaging on the thread.
- For more information, see How can agents message contacts?
- Generally, text banks leave contacts unassigned to make sure that contacts aren’t left hanging after the text bank is over. Team Outreach leaves contacts unassigned when it doesn’t matter who is speaking to contacts, allowing them to add teammates as agents and they can share the work.