The Main Menu has yet another time-saving feature: the Show Details button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen will expand the preview pane so that when a record is selected, you will see additional information associated with it: date entered, membership status, geographical categories, comments, etc. Clicking on this button a second time will Hide Details.

Tracking Codes. The most important feature provided by Show Details is the ability to directly access tracking codes, which are used to categorize your members and supporters as involved in various activities (the Act button), interested in key issues (the Iss button), or as part of various constituencies (the Cons button). Clicking on each of these buttons brings up a separate window, showing up to 32 checkboxes that make it easy to track this key organizing information. Section B explains how to customize these tracking codes.

Using the view provided in Show Details, you can easily scroll through a list of people in the search results box to update the tracking codes in their records. For instance you can mark participation in an activity like membership on your board or attendance at a conference. Or you can identify the people interested in hearing news about an issue your group works on. Finally, if you are interested in doing outreach to immigrants or youth in your area, the tracking code feature makes it easy to identify those individuals who have connections with those communities. Of course, changes to contact information, comments, or district information still require that you use the Edit button as mentioned earlier.

The fourth tracking code button, the VID button, is the most powerful feature of all. This stands for "Voter/Volunteer Identification" - a process organizers use to ID, or identify, people who are most supportive of an organizing campaign. You can have up to twenty VID codes. The idea is that in any campaign, you want to be able to identify your likely supporters, sympathizers, core committee members, people on the fence, occasional volunteers, etc. Political campaigns often do this by rating people on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 indicates solid commitment and 4 indicates least commitment.

Of course, how you use this feature is up to you. Most often in an election campaign you will enter hundreds or thousands of possible supporters into your database, rating each person a code of "3". Then as the campaign wears on you will cultivate these potential supporters, and try to move as many as possible into the "1" column. In a well-run campaign, most of the people by the end will either be rated as "1" or "2" (potential supporters) or as "4" (someone who supports the other side).

You can also use the VID code to rate the chance of receiving gifts from prospective donors. For example, you could code potential high donors in your database with a VID code named "High Donor Prospect" and start them at rating level 3. Then, when you meet them face to face, you can change the code to 2 if the results of your effort warrant it (or 4 if this donor does not seem like he or she will give to you). Then, if the potential donor shows real interest in supporting your group you can elevate their "High Donor Prospect" rating to "1."

Similarly, you can set up a VID code at an activist organization to keep track of the level of involvement of members of your group. "1" is usually used to rate core members who come to meetings. "2" is for key members who don't attend meetings but still get the minutes. "3" is for people who volunteer occasionally, and "4" is for those who only attend your events.

Note: you can check off, or assign, multiple tracking codes to people or groups in your database. That means a person can have several Activity codes, several Issue Codes, several VID codes, etc.

Source Codes. (Note: If you cannot see the SRC code in the detailed preview pane, make the window wider by clicking and dragging the edge of it.) The idea behind source codes (called SRC codes in ODB to distinguish the term from the software term "source code") is to preserve information on the source of each record in the database. If you import 1000 records from three different organizations at the start of your run for office, it might be useful to know which of these organizations was responsible for giving you Joe Frasier's name.

SRC code fields can be automatically populated when importing data to make it easy to track this kind of information. SRC code fields are also automatically associated with the date the code was added, so by default you only see the codes that were recently added, and therefore tend to be in active use. For this reason, SRC codes are useful for organizing events and activities. For example, you can set up a SRC code for "Attended 3/15/04 organizing meeting" and you can check off this box in the SRC code editing screen for everyone who attended the meeting. But SRC codes are distinct from activity codes as they are kept in a different data table, and will be queried differently by the record selection tool.

SRC codes are turned on by default in all templates, but there may not be any codes initially created. To create, delete, or modify them, see section B.