Connecting Your AI Tool to CTA's Knowledge Base

Modified on Mon, 13 Jul at 5:09 PM

Give your AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) instructions to search NotePAD - CTA's online knowledge base - so its answers about PAD reflect CTA's documentation, not just the AI's general knowledge.

To help partners who use AI to plan, build, and troubleshoot work in PAD, CTA has created the sample instructions below. Adding them to your AI tool allows it to search NotePAD and incorporate PAD-specific documentation into its answers.

How to Use

Most modern AI tools can retrieve web pages as needed. By adding the sample instructions below, your AI can search CTA's online knowledge base for relevant articles before answering your questions.

For the best experience, add these instructions to your AI tool's persistent or custom instructions. If you don't want them enabled all the time, you can instead paste them at the beginning of a conversation or save them to a PAD-specific project.

Once set up, you can ask questions like:

How do I set up a service account in PAD?
Walk me through creating an authorized view in PAD.
How do I query JSON fields in BigQuery within my PAD project?

Your AI tool will fetch what it needs from the knowledge base and combine it with its own knowledge about Google products to answer.

Troubleshooting: Not all AI tools fetch URLs equally reliably. If your tool doesn't seem to be pulling from the knowledge base, try explicitly prompting it: "Please fetch https://help.techallies.org/support/solutions before answering." If it still doesn't work, check whether web access is enabled in your tool's settings.

Keep in mind that searching and retrieving more articles increases token usage, and AI-generated answers may still be incomplete or incorrect. If you're unsure about anything, contact help@techallies.org.

A Note on Privacy: Don't paste PII, voter file records, donor data, or credentials into AI tools when asking questions.

Sample Instructions

Copy everything in the block below into your AI tool. Replace everything in angle brackets with your own details, or delete the "My PAD context" section if you're not sure what to put there yet.

When answering my questions, refer to CTA's knowledge base at https://help.techallies.org/support/solutions and fetch relevant articles as needed.

Step 1 - Search the knowledge base. Search for relevant articles with queries like: site:help.techallies.org/support/solutions/articles [keywords]. If your search tool doesn't support the site: operator (or it returns nothing), go straight to the Fallback below. Always run 2–3 targeted searches with meaningfully different keyword combinations to ensure good coverage. Think broadly: search not just for the end goal but also for component steps that might have their own dedicated articles. Fetch all plausibly relevant articles before synthesizing. More recently updated articles are preferable.

Step 2 - Fetch and synthesize. Combine what you find across all fetched articles with your general knowledge to give a complete answer. Cite the article URL for any knowledge base information you use.

Fallback: If search returns few or no results, browse the folder index at https://help.techallies.org/support/solutions to identify the most relevant folders. Paginate through the relevant folder's pages (follow "Next" links, up to 5 pages per folder) before concluding an article doesn't exist.

If a question is specifically about how CTA has configured PAD, CTA's recommendations, or CTA workflows, and you can't find a relevant article, say so rather than guessing. For all other questions, combine your general knowledge with anything relevant in the knowledge base. Prioritize conciseness in your replies; summarize relevant articles and provide links instead of repeating them fully in the chat. Do not assume CTA policies; everything should have a source, and recommendations are not equal to hard policy. Encourage users to contact help@techallies.org for anything that's not clear.

My PAD context:
My project is <insert project ID here>. I primarily use PAD to <insert activities here>. I use data from <insert data sources here>. Sometimes I also use <insert tool or activity here>.

Sample PAD Context

If you’re not sure what to put in your PAD context, a couple of examples are below:

“My project is cta-example. I primarily use PAD to analyze data in BigQuery with SQL. I use data from the Catalist voterfile, the TargetSmart voterfile, and a VAN instance. Sometimes I use Data Studio to visualize, or I write simple scripts locally to ingest and process data.”

“My project is cta-example-2. I primarily use PAD to build workflows and data pipelines in Python via Cloud Run Functions to standardize data in PAD and send it to external buckets. I use Catalist voterfile data and my organization’s polling data. Sometimes I also use BigQuery GeoViz to make maps.”