Release Notes

17.0.0

Released December 14, 2021 in the App Store and Play Store

This update brings major improvements to many aspects of Reach for both users and admins including a beautifully redesigned, faster, easier-to-use Person screen and a brand new approach to Contact Information which is more flexible, useful, and secure.

For Users

New
  • We have completely redesigned the Person screen. This is the screen you see when interacting with a voter/member/person in the app. The new tabbed design is faster and easier to use, with tons of new features and improved flows now available. There is also a new view for this screen when using Reach in the browser or on tablets. Some features of the new screen include:
    • A new Contact Info tab letting you take advantage of all the new features mentioned in the next section.
    • Separate tabs for Survey Questions and Linked Campaign Survey Questions.
    • New colored-background in the header indicates the person’s response to your Primary Question
    • New Location tab gives you an easy view of the current person’s address, edit it if needed, and browse a list of other people at that address right there on the same screen.
    • New Voting History tab gives you a glanceable view of how this person has voted in the past, when available.
    • It’s easier than ever to add and remove tags from a person.
    • You can add someone to your Network right from the header, faster than before.
  • The way Contact Information is stored in Reach is all new. Some of the new features include:
    • Store and see multiple phone numbers and email addresses on a person
    • Choose whether or not you want to share the contact info you add to Reach with your campaigns
    • Distinguish between contact info provided by your campaign, versus items you’ve added
    • Mark campaign-provided contact information as wrong, give it a thumbs up, or opt it out of hearing from the campaign,
    • Choose which phone number or email address to use every time you contact a person
    • Choose and apply custom labels to each piece of contact information
Improved
  • You can add more than one piece of contact information when creating a Reach Add
  • You can choose contact information privacy settings when importing your contacts.
  • You can now more reliably use the keyboard when interacting with pop-ups by typing Enter or Escape to take action.
  • Our pop-ups and dialog boxes are now more accessible to those using screen readers and keyboard-driven interactions.
  • Speed improvements throughout the app
Fixed
  • Many bug fixes and stability improvements when using Offline Data Sets
  • The notification toggle for chat notification on the web app wasn’t working.
  • The notifications and indicator dots for unread chat messages are more reliable.
  • Various other bug fixes throughout the app.

For Admins

New
  • When creating an Action Card, Reach can now automatically send a push notification to your users to promote it and direct them to it.
  • Action Cards can now be targeted so they are only visible to specific users or groups of users.
  • When generating exports, Reach can now email you to let you know a long-running export is done and include a link to let you download it directly from the email.
  • It is now possible to remove your Primary Question entirely.
  • It is now possible to have multiple question sets active at the same time.
  • Relationship Types are no longer editable per campaign, so the Network Admin Screen has been removed.
Fixed
  • The link to edit your user profile from the admin header was broken. It has been removed and replaced with a quick link to exist Admin.
  • Long strings like URLs in the content of an Action Card could break the layout of the admin screen.
  • In some cases, you could not properly select tags when setting up a People export.


16.5.0

Released December 1 2021 over the air

For Users

Nothing in this version

For Admins

Improved
  • The Network Admin screen has been removed. Relationship Types are no longer editable on a campaign-by-campaign basis.
  • This version includes several changes to export formats to support upcoming features of Reach. The changes are outlined below and full data schema documentation of the new formats can be found here.

Contact Actions Export

  • There are three new types of contact actions:
    • Opt Out
    • Up Vote
    • Mark as Wrong
  • New columns to include which piece of contact info was used in the action. Note that contact info will only appear in this export if it has been shared with your campaign by the user:
    • Contact Info ID: A unique ID for the contact info used in the action. 
    • Contact Info Category: Will be “email” or “phone”
    • Contact Info Label: Will be the user-provided label for the contact info
    • Phone Country Code: Will only be used for the “phone” category and for now, will always be “1”
    • Contact Info Value: The actual email or phone number itself
  • The old Person Phone Number and Person Email Address columns are dropped.

People Export

  • Previously, the People export included the most recently-added phone number and email address for each person. Now, it is becoming a bit smarter and will take into account which contact info we believe to be the most accurate for each person, based on signals from Reach users. Contact info will only be included here if it comes from a pre-loaded data source your campaign has access to, or was added by a user who shared it with your campaign.
  • There will be an additional column called Phone Country Code for phone number country codes, and for now, it will always be “1” for rows with a phone number.
  • We have added some new columns to tell you whether the phone and email address we’re including have been opted-out from your campaign and where the data comes from. The new columns are:
    • Phone Source: Will be a string telling you the name of the data source that the contact info comes from. May be “User-Added”
    • Email Source: Will be a string telling you the name of the data source that the contact info comes from. May be “User-Added”
    • Phone Opt-Out: Either “true” or “false”
    • Email Opt-Out: Either “true” or “false”
  • We are changing the name of the Auto-Applied Tag column to Source Tag.

Relationships Export

  • We have added a Phone Country Code column
  • We are changing the name of the Auto-Applied Tag column to Source Tag.

Tag History Export

  • We have added a Phone Country Code column.

Contact Info Export

We’re adding a brand new export type. This includes all contact info for people in you campaign which has been added by your users and shared with your campaign. Fields include:

  • External ID
  • Reach ID
  • Created Timestamp
  • Updated Timestamp
  • Added by User ID
  • Added by User Name
  • Person First Name
  • Person Last Name
  • Contact Info ID
  • Category
  • Label
  • Phone Country Code
  • Value
  • Opt-Out

16.3.0

Released September 9, 2021 over the air

Mostly laying groundwork for things to come!

For Users

Improved
  • We’ve changed back some of the action buttons to back in the headers on the native app, like they were before the last version. It was better the old way and we’re not afraid to admit when we’re wrong.
  • Some speed improvements
Fixed
  • Toast notifications will appear above overlays

For Admins

Improved
  • It’s easier to make a tag from the empty tags screen.


16.2.0

Released July 20, 2021 over the air

For Users

Improved
  • The full-screen pop-ups in the app now have a more consistent pattern for how you take action from within then, providing a nice big action button at the bottom for you to tap. They also work better on web.
  • The Invite User pop-up is more consistent and faster in all of its various forms.

For Admins

Improved
  • Downloading previous exports, including scheduled exports, will not work more reliably.

16.1.0

Released June 28, 2021 over the air

For Users

Nothing in this release.

For Admins

Improved
  • You can now access Default Content Libraries from the empty Action Cards screen too!
Fixed
  • Saving changes to smart tags will no longer refresh the values in your rules.
  • Errors that may prevent you from saving new tags (like duplicate names) will be more reliably displayed.

16.0.0

Released June 24, 2021 via the App Store and Play Store

For Users

Improved
  • Reach Chat has gotten a major refresh, with a faster, smoother, and better-looking experience all around. The new message overlay pops up when you long press on a message, allowing you to copy message contents, add reactions, and more.
Fixed
  • The auth code entry screen was making it hard to tap back to an earlier cell to clear a code.

For Admins

New
  • Reach now provides libraries full of default content to help jump-start your Survey Questions, Action Cards, Contact Scripts, and Tags! Just choose “Add from Template” to browse the pre-made content and then select one to customize it and add it to your campaign.
  • We’ve made some major improvements to Smart Tags so now the available values are shown in a filterable drop-down when you’re adding criteria rules. This should make it much easier to build smart tags.
  • We’ve improved the experience of downloading exports from Reach. Even long-running exports will not timeout and you can come back later to download an export once it is done. You can even re-download any past export.
  • Whenever you’re editing tags, contact scripts, action cards, you can now “clone” an existing one to use it as the basis for a new one.
  • It is now possible to change the status of Source Tags so you can choose to hide (by setting inactive) even your “Voters” or “Reach Add” tag.
Fixed
  • There was a broken link when trying to view “Invited Users” from the Stats tab of the User Drawer. Now it should be working smoothly.
  • Saving changes to tags should be smoother.


15.1.5

Released June 23, 2021 over the air.

For Users

Improved
  • You can now share Social Media Share actions card content using the default Messages App on iOS.

For Admins

Improved
  • It is now possible to make a Social Media Share Action Card without a link, so just a Script will be shared.
Fixed
  • When adding template tags to a script on a Social Media Share Action Card, we’ve removed the options to add people-based fields since they would not have worked anyway. You can still add user-based fields as templates.


15.1.0

Released June 2, 2021 over the air and via the App Store and Play Store

For Users

Improved
  • Push Notifications from Reach now work better! They will appear while you’re using the app, as long as you’re not already on the screen they’re from and when you tap them, they will bring you directly to the correct campaign and screen!
Fixed
  • Sometimes, after logging out and logging back, in the main head in the app was too small and the Campaign button was missing.
  • On iOS devices without notches, the status bar was jumpy when opening the Campaign Drawer or User Drawer.

For Admins

Nothing in this release.


15.0.0

Released May 17, 2021 via the App Store and Play Store

For Users

New
  • Edit voter data directly in Reach! Right from the app, you can now edit a voter’s name, update their address, mark them as deceased, or even add a personal nickname visible to only you. This is a great way to keep the data you’re seeing in Reach as accurate as possible, avoid dead-naming trans voters, and make sure your outgoing messages are addressed properly. Note that changes you make in Reach will not affect official state voter registration records.
  • More contact information and filtering options during the Contact Import process.
Improved
  • We’ve made the User Profile Edit screen a bit more clear, so it automatically closes when you save your changes and the close button is now labeled “Cancel”
  • Tags should always display with more reliable and consistent sorting.
Fixed
  • The icons used for Push Notifications on Android were missing! You were probably just seeing a gray circle instead of our friendly logo (affectionately called “Ballie the Ballot”). Well, Ballie’s back, baby!
  • We’ve caught a few bits of text that hadn’t been fully translated and translated them.
  • We’ve fixed some styling issues on Android around shadows.
  • We’ve made some improvements so the list views in Reach render more correctly more often.

For Admins

Fixed
  • The character counts of the contact script edit drawer are better.
  • Push Notification Targeting drop-down wasn’t working properly. Now it is.


14.3.0

Released April 22, 2021

¡Reach está en español!
Reach est désormais en français !

Reach was born in Queens, NY, where more languages are spoken per capita than anywhere else in the world. Plus, we know that the amazing organizers using Reach around the country are working in many languages. One of our most requested features has been Spanish-language Reach, but why stop there? This version brings a re-written Reach UI which supports an unlimited number of languages. We are launching today with Spanish and French translations, but we have a new translation web portal which will allow us to gather, manage, and launch new translations quickly and easily any time you have a translator willing to help.

When each new user creates their account, they’ll get to pick which language they want to use Reach in (it will default to the language of their device) and then the entire Reach user interface, from buttons to tabs to input labels to description text, will be in their preferred language. This basically means every bit of text that comes from Reach and not from the campaign itself. Existing users can always edit their user profile to change their language selection.

Plus, in addition to this blockbuster feature, this version of Reach also include a whole new design for navigating within the app, including a new drawer to switch between your Campaigns.

For Users

New
  • Multi-Lingual Support! Spanish and French are live now. Let us know if you want to help translate Reach into a new language.
  • Redesigned Navigation: Check out the new “My Campaigns” drawer on the left and the new “User” drawer on the right. Access these from most screens in Reach.
  • Page Titles and Metadata on Web: Now rather than everything just saying “Reach” in your browser tab bar, it’ll tell you the actual name of the screen you’re looking at.
  • Campaign-Switching via Link: Now every URL for Reach includes the campaign’s “slug” so that going to a link for a different campaign will switch you to that campaign if you’re a member of it.
  • New URL structure: Reach URLs no longer include the “#” like they used to. They are now simpler and cleaner. Do keep in mind that any links you are using/sharing/posting that included the hash should be adjusted.
  • Deep Links and Universal Links: Now, when you click a link to Reach from a device that has Reach installed, it will open directly in the Reach app.
Improved
  • We’ve brought back the previous fancy zoom animation when you open an Action Card from the Home Screen. We’ve missed it so.
  • All links to Reach no longer include the # that was previously part of them.
  • We’ve improved the look of many of the headers throughout Reach so the text is centered better and wraps better.
  • On web, many of our modals look better and are sized better.
Fixed
  • We’ve made some optimizations to help the Person Profile Screen load more quickly even after many searches.

For Admins

New
  • You can now edit your campaign’s slug from the Campaign Settings screen.
  • For Person Vocabulary, you can now choose from a drop-down of available options.