Problem Addressed
Handwritten petitions still form an important part of campaigning infrastructure, but it can take a lot of time to read through pages of petitions and turn the signatories into digital records that campaigns can use for outreach and updates.
Approach & Implementation
We brought this challenge to our Hack Nights and Campaign Lab volunteer Eddy Davies built a new version of an older tool that reads handwritten petitions and transcribes the results into an easy-to-use CSV. The tool captures names, email addresses, phone numbers and postcodes, and can scan up to three pages of petitions at a time.
Partners have used the tool to save significant time on manual data entry. However, like most AI tools, it can make mistakes, so manual review and human checking are strongly encouraged.
The tool uses OpenAI to process the data, with training on submitted data turned off.
Resources
As with all of our tools, iterative improvement is only possible through testing and user feedback. If you have any feedback on the tool, please feel free to get in touch at [email protected].