This data dictionary is your guide to understanding Contact Attempts data in the Exchange. Contact attempts represent the operational record of voter outreach contributed by member organizations across the progressive ecosystem.
What is a Contact Attempt?
A Contact Attempt answers the question: what outreach happened, and what was the outcome? Every attempt contributed to the Exchange becomes a record other members can use for list hygiene, channel routing, and saturation analysis. This includes whether the voter answered the door, the number was disconnected, or no one was home.
While you may see “disposition” used as a technical term for the outcome of an attempt, Contact Attempts is the data type name you’ll see in Nexus.
The Three Dimensions
Every Contact Attempt record is defined by three fields, which are also the three filters you’ll see when configuring Contact Attempts in Nexus:
- Contact Method — How the voter was contacted. Values include Canvass, Phone, Text, Mail, Email, Digital, Relational, and Event, among others.
- Contact Channel — A subcategory within the method, distinguishing how the method was executed: for example, community canvass vs. distributed canvass, or predictive dial vs. manual dial. Most queries can leave this at All unless your program needs to distinguish channel subtypes.
- Contact Response — The outcome of the attempt. Common values include Canvassed, Not Home, Wrong Number, Disconnected, Refused, Moved, Do Not Call, Hostile, Unsubscribed, and Bounced.
A definition worth knowing: Canvassed
An attempt can only carry a Canvassed response if the voter answered a survey question during the contact. An attempt that produced no survey response is not a Canvassed record. This rule is what makes Canvassed a meaningful signal as it indicates a substantive interaction, not just a knock on a door. (Dashboard canvass rates count Canvassed and Cultivation outcomes as successful contacts.)
Saturation
A voter’s saturation is calculated by adding the total number of contact attempts from across the entire ecosystem. Saturation filtering (Greater Than, Less Than, Equal To 0) is available on One-Time Exports of Contact Attempts data. See “Using Saturation Data” for workflows.
How this data is delivered
Contact Attempts exports use a consistent field structure across all exports and have been updated with the new data model. For the current field-level schema for your pipeline, contact support@demexchange.com, and our team will provide the documentation matching your delivery configuration.