Action Builder Update | September 19, 2024

1. Identify and Merge Entities with Shared Email Addresses and Phone Numbers
2. Specify Address Types for Improved Mapping and Filtering
3. Set a Default Saved Query for Campaign Wall Charts
4. New Filter Options for Complex Filters Feature
5. Cut Multiple Turfs At Once on the Map
6. Upload Multiple Responses for a Single Field in One Row
7. API Update: Remove Tags Using Person Signup Helper
8. API Update: Mark Contact Information as Bad
9. Bug Fixes / Minor Improvements
   • Reuse Names for Saved Queries and Complex Filters
   • Chart View: Respect Name Display Settings
   • Remove Login Pages from Search Engine Results
   • Enhanced Wall Chart Query Builder Performance
   • Display Line Breaks in Note Fields and Expand for Full View
   • Edit Assigned Users on Flagged Follow-Up
   • Delete an Entity's Age
   • Somali Added to Preferred Language Options
   • Search: Include Accented Characters
   • Quickly Add Multiple Entities with ‘Save and Add Another’
   • Improved Accessibility for ‘Add New’ Button on Mobile

🪪 Identify and Merge Entities with Shared Email Addresses and Phone Numbers

Sometimes entities share an email address or phone number because they’re two separate people (or organizations) that legitimately share those things. However, sometimes this can be an indicator that duplicates of the same entity may exist in the system. We have added an icon on entity profiles that indicates when that entity shares contact information with other entities (in the same campaign and of the same entity type). Clicking on that icon shows you the potential duplicates, and gives you the option to merge them. You can also check out the details of the possible duplicates so you have more information to help you confirm that they should be merged. Once you hit ‘merge’, the merge process is the same as if you were to click ‘merge’ directly on an entity profile.

🪪 Specify Address Types for Improved Mapping and Filtering

In an effort to make the mapping features of Action Builder work more smoothly, we’ve added the ability to specify if an address is a physical address or just for mailing purposes. If an entity only has an address marked as ‘mailing’, it will be excluded from all “mappable” areas of the tool (wall chart, creating turfs in tasks, driving directions). There is also now a filter in both the query builder and complex filters for address type.

“Physical” is the default for both new addresses and all of those that already exist in your AB instance, with the exception of any existing addresses that look like a PO Box, we will do our best to find all of those and set them to mailing to save you some work in updating your data to use this new feature. You can update address type via upload and the API as well.

📊 Set a Default Saved Query for Campaign Wall Charts

Loading up saved queries, or reminding other users to use saved queries, every time you/they log in to Action Builder can get tiresome. We’ve introduced a new way to set a default saved query for your campaigns so that everyone who logs into that campaign has the same filters applied on the wall chart (in addition to any turf restrictions they may have, individually). Now when you create a new saved query, or edit a previously existing one, you can set it as the default for all users:

There can only be one default at a time, so if you try to set another query as default, you will be asked if you want to replace the existing default query.

If a default query exists, all users will see this message at the top of the query builder:

Once you set a default query, you may need to log out or switch campaigns in order to see it applied.

⚙️ New Filter Options for Complex Filters Feature

We have added a bunch of exciting new filter options to Complex Filters (which can only be created by Leads and Admins, but can be used by everyone). The new options are:

• Connections
  • Under ‘Choose a Filter’ > ‘Connections’, In addition to what we had previously, which was the ability to search for entities that have connections to a specific entity and/or connections with specific responses, you can now search for entities that have ANY connections.
  • You can also exclude any of the above, which means you can now search for entities with NO connections (aka exclude entities with ANY connections).
  • You can also specify a connection type for any of the above filters
• Missing Name Info
  • Under ‘Choose a Filter’ > ‘Name’, You can now search for entities that have no Last Name, Middle Name, or Preferred Name.
• Include/exclude entities that have any response on a field
  • Previously if you wanted to do this you would have to select all the responses on a field, which could get wonky if you have a lot of responses. So we’ve made that easier by adding a new way to include or exclude an entire field (instead of having to select specific responses): in the ‘Choose a Filter’ dropdown, there are now two options: ‘Info - Fields’ for the former and ‘Info - Responses’ for the latter. Also under ‘Connections’ you can toggle between ‘Info (Fields)’ and ‘Info (Responses)’ do do the same for Connection Info Fields. 
• Entities with no assigned user
  • Under ‘Choose a Filter’ > ‘In User’s Assignment’, you now have an option to search for entities that have not been assigned to any users.

🗺️ Cut Multiple Turfs At Once on the Map

When creating turfs in a task, you can now cut multiple turfs on a map at one time, instead of having to create each turf on a map individually. You can only do this if no turfs exist yet. We do not save the polygons that you draw using this map, so once you create these turfs, your targets will get split into them and from there you will have to edit them manually or start over if you want to re-draw them.

📤 Upload Multiple Responses for a Single Field in One Row

Previously, if you wanted to upload multiple responses to a single field on an entity, you would have to do so with a new row for response. We’ve made this process more streamlined by now allowing you to map multiple columns on the same row to different responses for a field.

Just make sure that for any non-standard fields you have additional columns, one with the response name and separate columns with the additional information needed for the field. For example, for a date-type field, you’ll need a column with the date:

Check out the upload template on the 'New Upload’ page for examples of how to format different field data types in your CSV file.

🤖 API Update: Remove Tags Using Person Signup Helper

You can now remove tags (responses) with the person sign up helper. This helps reduce the number of API calls you need to make and can help make API processes faster.

🤖 API Update: Mark Contact Information as Bad

You can now mark any contact info (email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, social media profiles) as bad using the API.

🪲 Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements

⚙️ Reuse Names for Saved Queries and Complex Filters

Saved queries and complex filters used to have to have unique names, even across campaigns. We’ve removed that requirement.

📊 Chart View: Respect Name Display Settings

There was a little UI bug where we were accidentally showing last name on “single name” entity types in chart view. This is a random edge case but thank you IATSE for bringing it to our attention!

🔎 Remove Login Pages from Search Engine Results

We have been getting reports that when users are trying to log in to their Action Builder account, they often search Google (or other search engines) for “Action Builder”, and try to log in to whatever AB organizations happen to show up there (it’s often IATSE, randomly). Unfortunately we can’t completely control what Google lists in their search results, but we can add code to our sites, like the ‘noindex’ meta tag, that tell Google to not list our login pages (https://[your-subdomain].actionbuilder.org) in their search results. Here’s hoping it does the trick!

📊 Enhanced Wall Chart Query Builder Performance

There were some issues with certain queries freezing, especially on larger campaigns, or in certain combinations of filters. We have optimized the code and these should be running smoother now. Thanks CWA for helping us identify these pain points!

📒 Display Line Breaks in Note Fields and Expand for Full View

We used to remove line breaks to save space for note-type info fields, but that made them hard to read. We now preserve the line breaks, so you can read the text more naturally! Thanks CWA for flagging this and giving us feedback on the design!

🚩 Edit Assigned Users on Flagged Follow-Up

You can now change the assigned user on ‘flag for followup’s.

🪪  Delete an entity’s age

There was a bug where if you entered an entity’s age, or just a date of birth (which we then use to calculate and set age), you could edit or delete the date of birth, or if no date of birth was set, you could edit the age, but you couldn’t delete age. Now you can delete age, too! This is helpful in cases where ages were uploaded incorrectly and you just want to reset the field. Thanks USW for reporting!

🇸🇴 Somali Added to Preferred Language Options

Somali is now an option for preferred language for entities.

🔎 Search: Include Accented Characters

When searching for a name with accented characters in it, you can now search for names with similar un-accented letters and Action Builder will find them (and vice versa). Examples: “Ulvi” will find “Ülvi”, “Aurelie” will find “Aurélie”. Thanks CWA for flagging and testing this one!

🪪 Quickly Add Multiple Entities with ‘Save and Add Another’

Now when you’re creating a new entity using the ‘add new’ button, you can save that entity and quickly reload the form so you can keep adding new ones. It’s one less click and a few less seconds, which adds up if you’re manually adding a bunch of new entities!

🪪 Improved Accessibility for ‘Add New’ Button on Mobile

Speaking of the ‘add new’ button, we’ve given it a new home on mobile screens. We got some feedback that it should be more prominent and easier to click on, so we’ve moved it to the top, right between the campaigns dropdown and the search button.