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Intro

Many Broadstripes projects use events and event steps to capture particular actions in the workflow of a given campaign activity, for example:

  • To track petition signatures
  • To track invitations, RSVPs, and attendance for a meeting or rally
  • To record whether someone has signed a membership card

Keep in mind that events are created and customized by users and admins, so each project will have its own unique events. (Learn more in the creating events article.) Even though events are unique to your project, Broadstripes search allows you search by any event step you create. You can even combine event-based information with other search criteria.

Search by event step

For this example, we’re going to show you how to do a search for anyone who has showed support for our campaign, but hasn’t actually signed a card yet.

  1. Start your search by clicking the Search builder button to the right of the search box at the top of the page.
  2. search building panel will open below the search box.
  3. Initially, the panel will offer to search for people by Name, but you can easily change that to search by a whether or not their card has been signed, their assessment, or any other criteria.
  4. Since we want to limit our search to workers who haven’t yet signed a card, we’ll set that up first. We’ll do the search based on an event in our project called “Card” to find all the people who have a certain status for the event step “Signed.” From the left-hand drop-down menu in the search builder, we’ll choose the Card – Signed step under the Events section of the menu.
  5. Next, from the middle drop-down list, we’ll choose “is not checked,” since we only want to see those workers who have not signed a card.
  6. Our first search criteria (also called a “rule” in Broadstripes) is complete.
  7. Next, we’ll need to add another rule to the search, since we also want to see only those people who we know were assessed as supporters. Add an additional search rule by clicking the + Add rule button located above and to the right of the existing search rule.

    Click the + Add rule button to add another search rule.

  8. We’ll leave the first rule we created as it is and begin configuring our second rule. This rule will limit our search results to the workers who have shown support (those with an assessment code of 1 or 2).
  9. To create the second rule, we’ll start by selecting Assessment in the left-hand drop-down list.
  10. In the center drop-down list, we’ll choose “is less than or equal to.”
  11. To complete this rule, in the right-hand text box, we’ll type “2.”

    A search forAssessment is less than or equal to 2” will show us supporters with assessment codes of “1” and “2” but not “3” or higher.

  12. Last, we need to check our Boolean operator “AND“. Since our search depends on both of our rules being true to find people who have not yet signed a card and who have a supportive assessment, we want to confirm we’re using the “AND” operator in our search.

    The dark blue box indicates that “AND” is selected.

What’s a Boolean operator?

Boolean operators are used in searches to connect and define the relationship between search rules. Broadstripes uses two Boolean operators: AND and OR.

Use “AND” to run a search where all of the rules are true.
Use “OR” to run a search where at least one of the rules is true.

  1. Our search is complete! We can see the results by clicking the Search button.

More

Great work! You’ve learned how to search events for unsigned cards. What if you’d like to run this search again in a week to see how many new cards have been signed? Check out our article on building a date-based search to learn how: