OutReach is a tool to build a virtual phonebank on top of your Reach data. It was prototyped quickly in the final week of the Ossoff 2020 GA Senate run-off, and is currently very tightly-coupled to the data pipeline for that campaign and untested.
A public demo is available here. (Note: because the demo uses the heroku free tier, it may take a minute or so for the first page load)
For now, this repo is just provided for reference and to fork for future campaigns. In the future, it can be abstracted to support any campaign using Reach.
Some basic documentation will be provided in the future, though the amount of effort spent on this will depend on interest from other campaigns. If you're interested in using this, please email me at benmuschol@gmail.com
The current state of the codebase is not totally usable by other campaigns, though it could be with some adjustment. For the most part, the functionality here is meant to be a UX improvement ontop of reach for relational phone/textbanking events, so you may have better luck simply using reach on its own rather than trying to deploy outreach.
That said, to set it up for another campaign, the work should focus around:
- Graphics: The homepage features a photo of Jon Ossoff which should be rotated in favor of a photo of your candidate
- Data pipeline: The data pipeline is currently tightly-coupled to the Ossoff campaign's data. Though most of the data is essentially directly from the Reach API, it was imported via BigQuery, so there is no implementation to load data from Reach directly. Additionally, some data around voter scores or polling places was loaded from non-Reach data pipelines. The codebase should be modified to work with null values in that instance or import them through some other source.
The app comes with fake data to use and play around with for development purposes so you can set it up without this data pipeline for testing, but it will take effort to use it in production.
In addition to the BigQuery dependency mentioned above, you will need to set up the Twilio API for login.
After you have cloned this repo, run this setup script to set up your machine with the necessary dependencies to run and test this app:
% ./bin/setup
It assumes you have a machine equipped with Ruby, Postgres, etc. If not, set up your machine with this script.
This app is deployed using heroku. Each PR will get a review app which it can test changes on.
In addition to the people who have comitted code to this repo, we are thankful for the contributions of Cat Audi, who designed all of the front-end elements, and Joshua Kravitz, who built the data pipelines which power this application.