ControlShift

2025: Year in Review

2025-12-15T19:21:03+00:00

As we wrap up 2025, we’re looking back on some of the great work ControlShift has helped to power. It’s been a busy year for many of our customers as they work for a more progressive, just, and fair world. Here are some of the campaigns from the past year:

One World Sign by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

🇦🇺 In Australia, the Victorian Trades Hall Council uses their Megaphone platform to campaign for workers rights and benefits. In 2025, they and one of their partner unions, the Australian Services Union, won a 3.5% pay rise for community and disability services workers. They also worked together to protect aged care services, which saved 300 jobs and ensured that elderly residents would maintain access to support services.

🇦🇹 In Austria, people who work physically demanding jobs are eligible to retire at 60, while the retirement age for non-physically demanding jobs is 65. Carolin, a nurse, launched a petition on mein #aufstehn to have nursing reclassified as physically demanding to match its strenuous nature. More than 195,000 Aufstehn supporters joined the call. Multiple in-person events and a survey of nurses sponsored by the Aufstehn team followed. Eventually, the petition was delivered to the Social Minister. And they won! Nursing is now classified as physically demanding, allowing nurses to be eligible for retirement at 60 instead.

🇦🇹 Also in Austria, a woman was assaulted and then turned away from a hospital without an examination or forensic collection. A lawyer saw the news coverage of this event and created a mein #Aufstehn petition calling for the establishment of a violence clinic. She and the Aufstehn team rallied allied organizations and more than 9,000 supporters. Together they pressured the leaders of Upper Austria and following their efforts, the deputy governor announced that the clinic would be established.

🇫🇷 In France, Greenpeace France (via their GreenVoice platform) launched a campaign opposing a proposal to grant Paris Saint-Germain more than 120 acres of land in a nature preserve for their new stadium. The campaigners were very concerned about the impacts this project would have on biodiversity and air quality. After more than 10,000 supporters joined the campaign, PSG announced that they would no longer consider the proposed site.

A Train at Night by Osman Rana on Unsplash

🇫🇷 Also in France, Greenvoice supporters launched a campaign to stop the government from cutting night train service to Berlin and Vienna. With the trains carrying more than 65,000 passengers in 2024, the campaigners didn’t want passengers to fly instead given environmental impacts. More than 95,000 supporters signed the petition and the campaigners also organized in-person protests to save the trains. With the groundswell of support, a new Paris-Berlin night train was announced.

🇩🇪 In Germany, Berlin planned to cut funding for violence prevention projects, despite there being thousands of cases of domestic violence, stalking, etc. per year. A social psychologist launched a petition on Campact’s WeAct to stop the cuts, and more than 18,000 supporters joined the campaign. After a month of campaigning, the government announced that they were reversing the cuts and would instead expand the support programs.

🇩🇪 Also in Germany, a petition was created to push back on massive budget cuts to a program that has offered free language classes to new immigrants for more than 50 years. This cut would have meant cancelling almost all language classes. A user created their petition on the WeAct site and more than 65,000 supporters joined the fight. Together, the petition creator and her supporters demonstrated in front of the Bundestag before delivering the signatures to a member of the education and budget committees. After the demonstration, it was announced that the funding cuts were reversed.

🇭🇺 In Hungary, a petition was launched to push back on a plan to sell one of the largest and most valuable development areas in Budapest to foreign developers. The project was to build luxury skyscrapers in the area, while also requiring Hungary to loan money to the investors and without undertaking any public consultation. The campaigners wanted locals to have a say in how the land was developed – with an eye to affordable housing and with environmental impacts appropriately considered. After more than 25,000 supporters joined the campaign, it was announced that the government was no longer backing the project and the land would be available for purchase by the city.

🇮🇪 In Ireland the government had announced that state-funded hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would be made available to peri-menopausal and menopausal women. Then they walked it back. More than 1,500 Uplift supporters jumped into action to ensure that the government followed through on the previous promise, and within a month, state-funded HRT was available.

Camogie Equipment by Adrian Payne on Unsplash

🇮🇪 Also in Ireland, Camogie players and supporters came together to push back on an outdated rule that prevented the girls and women who play the sport from wearing shorts. After more than 6,500 supporters joined the campaign, the Camogie Association announced that players would be given the option of skorts or shorts.

🇳🇿 In New Zealand, Auckland students receive discounts on public transit. For students below the university level, tickets are discounted by 40% but for university students, the discount was only 20%. This led to some university students spending more than a third of their budget on public transit. The Auckland University of Technology Students Association created a petition on Our ActionStation and after more than 4,500 supporters joined the appeal, the Auckland Transport announced that university student rates would now be discounted by 40%.

🇷🇸 In Serbia, a newly-rebuilt train station canopy collapsed killing 15 people. This was the catalyst for more than a year of (ongoing) mass nationwide protests against governmental corruption, which protesters blamed for the shoddy construction work. In March of 2025, one of the (if not, the) largest protests in Serbia’s history took place in Belgrade with more than 100,000 protestors in attendance. During the protest, hundreds of protestors reported that the government used a sound cannon against protestors, which is illegal in Serbia. After the government denied the use of the weapon, Kreni-Promeni, launched a petition calling for a UN investigation into the use of the sound cannon. The campaign was massive, with more than 500,000 people joining the call. While the campaign and the protests continue, special rapporteurs from the UN responded to the campaign by requesting additional evidence and responses from the Serbian government.

🇷🇸 Also in Serbia, Kreni-Promeni launched two major campaigns opposing new mining projects. The Jadra Valley is “bordered by mountains, surrounded by water and known as the most fertile land in Serbia,” and yet the Serbian government agreed to allow a foreign company to establish a lithium mine in the valley. Kreni-Promeni launched a petition to revoke the license. This kicked off a multi-year campaign, including in-person actions, court cases, and more than 300,000 supporters taking action. This year, the mining company announced that they were halting the project. The strong opposition was making the project too costly to pursue. Similarly, the Kreni-Promeni team was also working to prevent a new copper and silver mine that would threaten the water supplies of the third largest city in Serbia. After more than 20,000 people joined the call to action, the planning commission withdrew the mining plans.

🇸🇪 Simret Tekiewas fighting for a residence permit that would allow him to stay in Sweden. His wife had been killed in a mass shooting, which caused the migration board to pause his application for residency. He and his four children were grieving and stuck in migration limbo. Nearly 25,000 Skiftet supporters came together to support Simret’s cause. After the petition hit the media, the migration board announced that he’d be allowed to stay.

🇨🇭 In Switzerland, Tox Info Suisse Foundation raised an alarm: the Poison Control Center hotline, which provides advice to people, including doctors and parents, who have questions about accidental ingestions or other poisoning emergencies, risked being shut down due to lack of funding. The foundation partnered with Campax to rally support. More than 115,000 people joined the call asking the government to provide the necessary funding. After 5 months of campaigning, the government agreed to allocate CHF 1.1 million to keep the hotline open.

🇿🇦 In South Africa, a listeriosis outbreak led to more than 200 deaths and more than 1,000 people falling seriously ill. In the years since the outbreak, Amandla supporters have been campaigning for justice for those affected. While that fight continues, in 2025 Tiger Brands announced that they would be making advanced payments to those with urgent medical needs.

🇬🇧 In the UK, more than 93,500 38 Degrees supporters came together to ban the use of NDAs to silence employees reporting harassment and discrimination. MP Louise Haigh spearheaded the campaign, which also included in-person signature deliveries to parliament and an event connecting MPs to victims. Following the campaign, banning the misuse of NDAs and protecting whistleblowers were included in the bill.

Music Lesson with Saxophone by Maxence Pira on Unsplash

🇬🇧 Also in the UK, the Midlothian Council announced that they’d be cutting funding for musical education basically in half. The Educational Institute of Scotland started a petition on Megaphone, the project of the Trades Union Congress. Nearly 3,000 supporters joined the call to protect musical education after which the council restored the funding.

🇬🇧 The Trades Union Congress also prevented the closure of three day centers aimed at providing support and community to adults with learning and/or physical disabilities, dementia, etc.

🇺🇸 In the US, Starbucks Workers United launched the largest Starbucks strike in history. They also organized a petition pushing back on a new dress code for baristas. Under pressure, Starbucks reversed its course on parts of the dress code, allowing durags, bonnets, and colorful socks.

🇺🇸 Also in the US, EveryLibrary continued their work to increase library funding and block proposed book bans. They use their Fight for the First platform to support local campaigning. Some of their wins this year include: returning books to a school library in Elizabeth, Colorado; preventing the closure of a library in Lebanon Township, New Jersey; and blocking a bill that would have censored research databases in Utah.

🇺🇸 Also in the US, the Franklin Pierce School District was deciding whether to renew their contract with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, which had already announced that it would collaborate with ICE (in opposition to Pierce County and Washington state laws). A MoveOn member launched a petition calling on the school board to not renew their contract with the sheriff’s office and instead invest the money in educational and community programs. Together, they were able to successfully pressure the board, and the contract was cancelled.

🇺🇸 Red Wine and Blue is working to organize suburban women for progressive causes. In 2025, their network grew to more than 800 local groups, which hosted more than 4,000 events attended by more than 80,000 people. Their organizing had real, on-the-ground impacts. In North Carolina alone, 15 of their members won offices in local elections.

These campaigns are just a slice of the great work we saw in 2025. A big congratulations and thank you to each of these organizations, and all of our other customers, who have dedicated so much time and energy to making the world better, safer, and more progressive. We’ll be with you as we work together for big changes in 2026 and beyond!

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In addition to the excellent work shown above, we’ve also been hard at work improving ControlShift. You can see the full list of changes in our changelog, but here a few of our biggest updates:

We spent months working on a major overhaul of our local groups features. The changes include major updates to the design of public and organizer-only group pages, new features for group organizers, easier communication options for admins, and more security options for groups.
We rolled out organization-sponsored events and petitions giving organizations more options for their official actions.
We added new post-action flows for event attendees and petition signers, making it easier for organizations to customize what a user sees after taking action.
We updated the email supporters pages for petition and event creators. The updates allow them to more easily understand the process to update their supporters and look back on previous messages.
We changed the event and petition creation flow for organization administrators, giving them additional options and allowing them to bypass the moderation queue.
We’ve expanded Themes to support more customizations, including email customizations by theme, to power coalition work, microsites and other organizing goals.

We’re proud to stand with this global community of progressive organizations and we’re looking forward to continuing the work in 2026!

Build Community with Updated Local Group Features

2025-11-13T15:21:47+00:00

From the beginning, ControlShift has been dedicated to the idea that the organizations and movements we support are most powerful when supporters take the lead – using their authentic voices and experiences to drive movements forward. At ControlShift’s inception, opportunities for member leadership were limited to online petition campaigns. As we grew, we added events and groups – allowing supporters to take their actions offline and into the real world.

The local groups toolset was built to make space for longer-running, sustained supporter-led actions. These local groups allow supporters to meet their neighbors, build connections, and keep working toward progress together beyond the bounds of a single petition or event. We think that the ability to build real community among supporters is incredibly powerful and especially important given the scale of the fights we’re all working on.

We’ve spent the last few months working to make the groups tools more powerful and more user friendly. This has been a huge project – overhauling most of the existing group pages and adding new functionality for group organizers. While we’re not done making improvements, we wanted to share some of the exciting updates that we’ve rolled out recently.

New Group Page Designs

The most visible set of changes are redesigned and modernized group pages for members and organizers. We worked with a design firm for user research and design improvements. The new designs are cleaner, more modern, and easier to interact with especially for mobile users.

We also wanted to be sure we were highlighting group’s offline actions more effectively. The new designs have dedicated pages showcasing upcoming (and past) events, along with active (and ended) petitions. These new pages ensure that existing and prospective group members can see the various ways the group is taking action in their community.

Maintaining a group’s momentum can be difficult, so we wanted to also include encouragement and tips for organizers. In the new designs, organizers will see prompts to create new events, petitions, resource pages, and posts.

We’ve also moved resources up the page when present. This allows the organizer-created, evergreen pages to be more easily accessible for group members.

We welcome you to join a group and take a look around to see all of the new designs!

New Functionality

While the refreshed designs are the most obvious changes to groups, our recent releases have also included new functionality to make groups more powerful. Here are some of the updates:

Blast Emails: One of our most requested group features is now here! The blast email functionality allows organizers to send longer messages (or messages that don’t make sense for a forum post) to their members. This functionality can be used for things like newsletter updates, report backs from events or meetings, etc. Group members can also adjust their subscription to newsletter-only.
Closed Groups: We now support closed groups for extra security. While open groups allow anyone to join the group immediately, closed groups require prospective members to submit an application to join the group which can be approved or rejected by the group organizer. This setting can be helpful for groups working on contentious issues or in difficult political environments.

Banned Members: We’ve tightened banned member settings, which can be helpful when a user is causing issues on the platform. The updated rules will also prevent banned members from RSVPing to events (or signing petitions) and being added as listening members of the group.
Notifications: We’ve added additional emails to open group organizers, ensuring that they know when they have new group members.
Targeted Broadcasts: We’ve updated the way broadcast posts work for admins. Previously, staff could send forum messages to all groups in the collection. Now, staff can also target the message to groups in specific regions, with (or without) specific labels, or groups assigned to specific mentors. This functionality allows organizations to more easily release specific calls to action.
Organizer Announcements: We’ve added a new organizer announcement feature, making it easier for staff to communicate with group leaders from within the platform. The new feature allows organizations to share info with the group leaders only, potentially targeted to the leaders of groups in specific regions. This may be useful for more complicated calls to action or suggestions that shouldn’t be shared with the full group.
Better Intros: Group collections now support multiple membership questions, allowing organizers and staff to more easily get to know the people joining groups.

We’re so excited to announce all of these changes to groups, and there’s more to come! If you’re interested in bringing groups functionality to your organization, get in touch!

Attributions for Event Images in Screenshots:

Royal Liver Building Event Image by Conor Samuel on Unsplash
Stage Event Image by Vivu Vietnam on Unsplash
Fireworks Event Image by Mario La Pergola on Unsplash
Man with Liverpool Flag Event Image by Shaun Donnelly on Unsplash
Seattle Event Image by Felipe Galvan on Unsplash
Coffee Event Image by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

2024: Year in Review

2024-12-30T17:54:48+00:00

As 2024 draws to a close, we’re taking a look back at the year in organizing. With the most voters in history heading to the polls this year, many of our customers were working to mobilize voters and fight back against misinformation and voter apathy. Throughout the world, we had some exciting successes and some gut wrenching losses.

“Stop Denying Earth is Dying” by Shayna Douglas on Unsplash

Amidst headline grabbing electoral races, all of our organizations were simultaneously working hard to ensure that the fight for progressive ideals didn’t stop at the ballot box. Here’s a selection of the campaigns we saw in the last year:

🇦🇺 In Australia, the Victorian Trades Hall Council and the Migrant Workers Centre had a big win for worker protections. Due to their campaigning, the Australian government introduced a workplace justice visa. This visa allows migrant workers who file a complaint against their employer to remain in the country for 12 months during legal actions and maintain full work rights during that period.

🇦🇺 Also in Australia, teaching students are required to complete up to 80 days of practicum placements. These placements were unpaid, which made it difficult for students with financial responsibilities. Thanks to the Victorian Trades Hall Council, the Australian Education Union, and almost 14,000 Megaphone supporters, the practicum placements will now be paid.

🇨🇦 350.org Canada ran a large campaign in support of a universal, free heat pump program. The campaign will continue in 2025, and the 350.org team has already won the support of numerous Members of Parliament from multiple parties.

🇭🇺 In Hungary, aHang members learned that two state-funded schools would be privatized with very short notice, requiring parents to pay tuition for their children to attend. This included one of the top-rated schools in the country. Then more than 12,000 aHang members jumped into action – they prevented the last minute change and ensured that the schools remained state-funded and free for parents and students.

Students in a Classroom by CDC on Unsplash

🇭🇺 Also in Hungary, the government announced that soldiers would be used to fill teaching positions, even if they have no teacher qualifications. More than 16,000 aHang members, recognizing the importance of education and the need for qualified educators, came together to protest the proposal and the government backed down.

🇮🇪 In Ireland, an investigation by RTÉ uncovered abusive behavior at a horse abattoir in Kildare. Uplift members jumped into action, with more than 35,000 people successfully calling for the Minister of Agriculture to shutter the facility.

🇳🇱 In the Netherlands, 13,000 DeGoedeZaak supporters signed a petition in support of the “Bed Bad Brood” (“Bed Bath Bread”) program in Rotterdam which provides housing, food, and opportunities for undocumented residents. The program had been on the government’s chopping block, with 45 residents to lose access to housing and support on 1 January. The DeGoedeZaak petition made support for the program clear and the program will continue.

🇳🇿 In New Zealand, stalking is not a crime. ActionStation members, together with the Coalition for the Safety of Women and Children, organized more than 20,000 supporters to pressure the Minister of Justice to make anti-stalking legislation a priority. Months later, the new legislation has been introduced and passed its first reading.

🇷🇴 In Romania, the Vrancea County Students’ Council created a campaign because multiple schools had no heat amidst falling temperatures in November. By successfully calling attention to the issue and rallying the support of more than 1,000 Declic signers, the students were able to get the heating debts paid, the heat turned on for most of the schools, and classes moved online for the non-heated school.

🇷🇴 In Romania, Declic signers successfully squashed a proposal to limit the number of PHEV chargers in the Suceava municipality.

🇿🇦 In South Africa backlogs led to long delays for graduates waiting to receive diplomas and certifications needed to secure employment. Amandla.mobi members came together to draw attention to the issue and diplomas have begun flowing again.

🇸🇪 In Sweden, Skiftet members came together to prevent the proposed closure of a local preschool.

🇨🇭In Switzerland, more than 17,000 Campax supporters demanded and won an increase in funding for the Women’s European Championship 2025. The tournament is a flagship project for Swiss football and the increased funding demonstrates commitment to women’s sport.

🇬🇧 In the UK, the Trades Union Congress and GMB secured wins for Tetley Tea workers, including a backdated 5% pay increase, a 5% pay increase for the coming year, and additional days of leave.

🇬🇧 Also, in the UK the Trades Union Congress, Unite the Union, and more than 5,000 Megaphone supporters campaigned to increase caterer pay at the Drax power station. They won and secured the equivalent of a 19% pay increase.

🇬🇧 In the UK, 38 Degrees and the Coal Action Network partnered to block the establishment of a new deep coal mine in Cumbria. After four years of campaigning and more than 115,000 38 Degrees members coming together in opposition, the UK government announced that it would keep to its commitments under the Climate Change Act 2008 and withdraw its plans for the new coal mine.

🇺🇸 In the US, San Diego flooding displaced more than 900 households. An emergency housing voucher program was set to expire when MoveOn members jumped into action. Pressure from supporters led to the board of supervisors committing an additional $9.6 million in food and housing vouchers for flood victims.

Person in Library by Rabie Madaci on Unsplash

🇺🇸 EveryLibrary has continued fighting the good fight against book bans in the United States. In 2024, they reached a big milestone: more than 100 community-focused campaigns have been launched on their Fight for the First platform and they’ve secured wins around the country.

🇺🇸 Starbucks Workers United celebrated their 500th unionized store in the United States. Throughout the year, they’ve organized solidarity events around the country.

🇺🇸 While the US presidential election didn’t go the way we wanted, Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom For All each worked to mobilize voters across the country. Reproductive Freedom For All’s texting team had conversations with over 1 million people! Together, their work led to the passage of abortion protection measures in seven states and the election of pro-choice candidates down the ballot.

These are just some of the excellent campaigns we saw in 2024. Congratulations to each of these organizations – and all of our other partner organizations for your wins this year. We’d also like to send you a heartfelt thank you for the time, sweat, and tears you’ve put into the fight for a safer, more just, and more progressive world.

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In addition to the great work of our partners, we’ve also rolled out numerous improvements to the platform in 2024. While the full list of updates is available in our changelog, here a few of our biggest updates:

We completed a series of improvements to our event shift features – making it easier for hosts to switch attendees’ shifts, allowing attendees to add new shifts to existing RSVPs, and improving communications about event shifts.
We added rich text formatting to all petitions and events. The new options give event hosts and petition creators greater control over the events and petitions they create and make it easier for them to communicate their message with potential supporters.
We added new post-action flows for petition signers and event attendees. We also made it easier for organizations to test different post-action flows by using labels and URL parameters to set the flows.
We improved the groups features by allowing group organizers to see more information about their members, making it easier for group members to contact their leaders, and ensuring that admins can more easily see the connections between petitions/events and their sponsoring group.
We gave event hosts more options when creating their events – allowing them to create events with unconfirmed locations.
We made it easier for supporters to contact their event hosts and petition creators with our new reply by email functionality – allowing supporters to reply directly to any emails they receive from the platform.
We’re now allowing event hosts and petition leaders to target their emails to specific sets of supporters based on responses to custom fields, shift selections, and attending statuses.

We’ve been honored to play a role in the important campaigns our organizations have run in 2024 and we’re looking forward to continuing the fight in 2025.

Improving Communications Between Supporters

2024-12-16T22:33:47+00:00

Communication has always been key to successful organizing. At ControlShift we’ve been focused on making communications between leaders and their supporters even easier. To that end, we’ve rolled out two big improvements to the platform: better blast email targeting for petitions and events and easier replies from supporters to their organizers.

Orange and Brown Envelopes by Kelly Sikkema onUnsplash

Blast Email Targeting for Petitions and Events

While we’ve always allowed leaders to contact their supporters via the platform, we wanted to make it easier for leaders to have more targeted conversations with smaller segments of their supporters.

New targeting options are available for event hosts and petition creators.

For petition creators and event hosts, blast emails can now be targeted to smaller audiences of supporters based on the supporter’s responses to checkbox and/or dropdown custom fields. This new email targeting can be used for things like: contacting only the people who said that they’re employees of the company that’s being petitioned; emailing only the attendees who said they’d be willing to help with logistics for an event; and sending one call to action to the parents at a school, while sharing a different set of tactics with the teachers. Regardless of the campaign, with our new email targeting, petition creators and event hosts can be more specific and strategic in their communications with supporters.

Beyond the custom field targeting that’s available for both petitions and events, additional targeting options are also available for event hosts. For events with shifts, hosts can now target their messages to the attendees of one or more shift. This allows the host to speak only to the setup and clean up teams, for example.

Event hosts can now also target messages by attending status. This would allow hosts to send one message to those who attended their event, with a different message going to the no shows.

The new email targeting options are available for all events and any petitions with either a dropdown or checkbox custom field. In the moderation queue, admins can see the audience for each blast email they’re reviewing and update the targeting if needed.

Replies by Email

We also wanted to ensure that supporters who receive emails from organizers can continue the conversation if needed. To make those communications more efficient, we overhauled how email replies work on ControlShift.

Previously, replies would be sent to the organization’s email address – relying on staff members to triage the messages their organization received and send them along to the appropriate leaders. We wanted to make communications between leaders and supporters faster and remove the admin bottleneck, but we also needed to ensure that we respected the privacy of participants and gave organizations visibility into those communications.

With those goals in mind, we’ve rolled out our new replies by email feature. The new tools allow supporters to reply directly to the confirmation and blast emails sent to event attendees, petition signers, and group members. Each thank you and blast email includes a tokened reply-to email address that keeps the leader’s information hidden while allowing us to route the message appropriately.

When we receive replies from supporters, we automatically check them for spam and profanity to ensure that they’re appropriate to send to leaders. Messages that have passed our various checks are forwarded to the petition, event, or group’s leaders who can then continue the conversation from their personal email accounts.

Admins can view the replies sent to petition, event, and group leaders.

All received replies are visible to admins with the appropriate permissions – even the ones that have failed our checks. In addition to reviewing the messages, administrators can also trigger the sending of messages that were otherwise rejected by our automatic filtering.

We know that communications between leaders and supporters are integral to all ControlShift campaigns. We’re excited that our new blast email targeting and replies features will make those communications easier, faster, and more robust.

Distributed Organizing and Fundraising

2024-02-28T18:40:16+00:00

When organizations think about distributed organizing, they often think about the campaign impacts – that distributed organizing leads to more new and authentic actions led by your supporters, deepened engagement with your members, and increased leadership among your base.

While those effects of distributed organizing can be easily seen, we also know that impact and supporter engagement don’t happen in a vacuum. For nearly all organizations, donations and fundraising are other organizational metrics that cannot be ignored.

Because distributed organizing is often considered through a strictly campaigning lens, it can lead to a false dichotomy: should my organization invest time and effort into distributed organizing or should we focus on donations? The underlying assumption is that distributed organizing is completely separate from an organization’s fundraising efforts. However, that’s just not true.

Distributed organizing tools and the ethos of member leadership and engagement that distributed organizing inspires can be integral to an organization’s fundraising efforts.

Donations Image by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

What are the specific ways that distributed organizing can fuel your fundraising? Let’s take a look!

List Growth: Fundraisers often spend hours crafting ads and landing pages aimed at identifying new potential supporters who can be converted into reliable donors. A key element of distributed organizing’s success is that it relies on your existing supporters to help you identify future supporters. Your existing leaders know who within their networks already support the causes that your organization is working on. They act as trusted intermediaries to introduce their networks to your organization. This list of new supporters – the people who have shown their alignment with your cause by signing a petition, attending an event, or joining a local group supported by your organization – are people you can reach out to for future actions, including donations. We recommend integrating these new supporters into your main list as soon as possible – making sure that they receive updates about the other actions your organization is supporting, other opportunities to get involved in your work, and yes, any upcoming fundraising pushes.

Best Practice: In your CRM, create a welcome mailer for newly-added supporters. This email (or series of emails) can be automatically scheduled to send within the first week of joining your list and should welcome the new supporter to your organization, give them more context about the work you’re doing, and tell them how to get involved. You can add a basic donation ask to this welcome mailer.

Deepening Connections: Everyone on your list is likely supporting the work of other organizations too. They’re likely being asked for time and money from many organizations all the time. So how can your organization cut through the noise? One of the key tenets of distributed organizing is that the people on our mailing lists aren’t just email addresses or credit card numbers – they’re leaders in their communities who are trusted and relied upon to take big actions on behalf of the causes that we collectively care about. Distributed organizing is at its best when both the organization and its supporters feel deep trust and connection with each other and join in the shared vision of the world you’re trying to create together. Allowing supporters to take the lead for your organization, via distributed organizing, deepens their connections to your organization and their trust in your intentions. Supporters are more likely to become regular donors if they believe in your organization and its role as a good steward of your shared vision for the world.

Best Practice: Organizations can use member-created actions to check in with your base and ensure that your supporters are with you on specific issues. Some organizations will send issue surveys to a segment of their list asking, “Should we prioritize work on this issue?” in response to newly-created petitions or news events. All “Yes” responders can then be immediately asked to create an action on that issue or to donate to a rapid response fund.

Small Donors: Most organizations would love to find a super committed supporter who’s ready to donate millions of dollars to the organization every year in perpetuity. However, that donor can be a bit difficult to find. For most organizations, the lifeblood of their donation program is the small recurring donors – the people who donate $20 every month to the cause. Distributed organizing makes it easier to identify potential donors. The people who are creating petitions and hosting events are often your most committed supporters and your most likely future monthly donors.

Best Practice: If your organization is planning a higher-touch campaign to convert one-time donors into new recurring donors, the list of supporters regularly taking distributed action is a great place to start.

Show Urgency: A compelling story is the key to a great donation ask and distributed organizing can offer new ways to talk about your organization’s work. For organizations, the fights we have to focus on can sometimes seem too far removed from most supporters day-to-day lives. We can explain why a piece of legislation working its way through parliament is going to be important if it’s passed, but it can be hard to turn that into a truly compelling fundraising ask. Because distributed organizing has real supporters leading the work, those leaders are often able to articulate the stakes of the fights in different and potentially more compelling ways than staff members. Our supporters may have stories and backgrounds that illustrate the real and personal impacts of our work. Their leadership on those campaigns can not only breathe new life into the campaign itself, but also illustrate the urgency of the fight in fundraising contexts.

Best Practice: When looking for supporters with stories to tell, checking for petitions that have been created on that issue is a great place to start. The leaders of those petitions are committed to the cause and looking to tell their story. On ControlShift, signers can also leave reasons for why a campaign is important to them. These comments can be springboards for new ways to talk about an issue in fundraising appeals.

New Stories: Distributed organizing programs can also provide new avenues for fundraising. Maybe your staff has been working tirelessly on that piece of legislation – rallying support and helping to craft changes. That’s such important work, but it may be difficult to craft a compelling fundraising message when so much of the work is happening behind the scenes and at a high level. Distributed organizing allows supporters to work on the causes close to their hearts in parallel with the work your staff is doing. Often, these campaigns can lead to great storytelling about how your organization is supporting impactful community work on a smaller scale, in parallel with the larger fights happening nationally. The story about working on a piece of legislation may be difficult to turn into a fundraising appeal, but the story of how your organization helped a teen save their local library from closure or how a community came together to protect a local park is easy to explain, shows immediate impact, and gets people thinking about the tangible role that your organization plays in bettering their community.

Best Practice: A great distributed organizing program always relies on storytelling and modeling. As supporter-led campaigns win, the story of how the campaign was won is used to model good campaigning for the next generation of leaders. The same stories that inspire future campaigners can be used, with some changes, for fundraising appeals. Reconnect with the leaders of impactful campaigns and get quotes about how your organization helped them in their campaigning. These stories can be used for rolling recruitment emails – recruitment both to create new campaigns and to become a donor.

Better Segmentation: The most effective fundraising programs know a lot about the people they’re reaching out to: who’s donated before and how much and how often; what are the key issues that this person cares about; what previous asks have they found most compelling; etc. Distributed organizing can help grow the information you have about your existing list while also getting you detailed information about the new people who are joining. Organizations using ControlShift’s petition tools are able to easily track which petition categories a person is signing – are they interested in racial justice, labor organizing, or the intersection of the two? Even for organizations working in a specific issue area, there’s often an array of sub-issues that your supporters may be particularly interested in. The activity that’s generated during distributed organizing – the petitions they’re creating and signing, the events they’re hosting and attending – can help you to learn more about each individual supporter. That information can then be used to better segment your donation lists.

Best Practice: Using the information generated from your distributed organizing program, craft different donation asks for different segments of your list. The people interested in increasing civic engagement can receive an update about the voter registration events your supporters are hosting and be asked to donate to support those efforts. Meanwhile, let the folks who care about the environment know about the new bike lanes your supporter successfully campaigned for. Everyone who has taken more than two actions on your distributed organizing platform can also receive a fundraising appeal focused on keeping the platform up and running.

The key takeaway here is that your distributed organizing program isn’t separate from your fundraising program. Instead, the activities generated by distributed organizing should be integrated into your donations program. Just as distributed organizing adds depth, authenticity, and vigor to campaigning, it lends the same qualities to your fundraising.

That sounds great – how do I integrate fundraising into ControlShift?

At the technical level, there are a few options to start asking for donations on ControlShift:

Make sure that you’ve added links to your donation tool to your ControlShift header and footer. ControlShift’s Themes features can also be useful in allowing you to designate different donation page destinations for different types of actions (e.g. if you have a specific donation page in support of a day of action, you can make sure that donation page is linked on the event page headers).
It’s also possible to ask for donations after someone signs a ControlShift petition. By asking immediately, they’ll still have the tangible example of your important impact in their minds when they’re asked. To implement this flow, you have a few options:
- If your donation modal supports iframe donations, you can set up a new post-action flow that asks your supporters to share their petition or event on social media before being shown the iframe donation ask in a pop-up on the petition or event page. The iframe option also supports adding tracking parameters and other information to the resulting donation.
- ControlShift has a welcome modal that allows organizations to introduce your organization and the work you’re doing. This can be especially helpful for newly-identified supporters who may be less familiar with your organization’s work. The welcome modal can be configured to include a donation button that redirects to an offsite donation form.
- Users can be automatically redirected to an offsite donation form after taking action. We generally recommend using this only for specific campaigns (vs. for all actions on ControlShift) and to redirect the user to a campaign-specific donation page.

Best Practice: If you don’t want to immediately ask a newly-identified supporter for a donation, ControlShift allows you to configure different post-action flows for new vs. returning supporters. These rules can be set up at the platform or individual petition level.

Bonus Best Practice: Some organizations use ControlShift’s APIs to automatically customize their donation page with information about the campaign the donor has just signed. The customizations can include the petition’s image or a snippet of the petition text. This requires some tech capacity but can be a great way to personalize the ask to match the donor’s already-identified interests.

You can add a donation ask to the thank you for signing/RSVPing emails that we send to supporters. You could also add an ask to the reminder emails that are sent to attendees before their upcoming events. ControlShift supports conditional logic for text blocks, which allows you to do things like limit donation asks to only the petitions that have been given the highest approval by your moderators.

Want to know more about how distributed organizing can help fuel your fundraising efforts? Interested in making your existing ControlShift instance as donor friendly as possible? Get in touch with our team – we’d love to chat.

2023 In Review

2023-12-22T18:00:14+00:00

As 2023 comes to an end, we’re taking some time to look back on all of the amazing organizing work that’s been done over the last 12 months. As is often the case, the last year saw a lot of hard fought battles. Organizing work is never done, and it’s important for us to pause to celebrate the victories that our partners have achieved all around the world.

Fight for a Better Tomorrow by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

🇦🇺 In Australia, leaders in Victoria proposed cutting the budget for visiting teachers – experts who provide direct support for children with disabilities and other complex needs. The Australian Education Union created a petition on Megaphone AU, a project of the Victorian Trades Hall Council. Thousands of supporters came together to demonstrate the importance of visiting teachers and prevent the layoffs.

🇨🇦 Amnesty International Canada organized hundreds of events at schools, cafes, libraries, and private homes in support of activists fighting against oppression.

🇫🇷 Thousands of Greenpeace France supporters joined a campaign on Greenvoice to secure increased funding for railways. Their pressure worked – Prime Minister Borne included a 100 billion Euro investment in railways in her transport plan.

🇳🇱 Milieudefensie and their supporters joined the Amsterdam Climate March, with groups of supporters traveling in together from dozens of cities in the Netherlands – including one group that cycled in! Milieudefensie’s supporters were among the more than 85,000 people who turned out in support of tougher climate regulations.

“THERE IS NO PLANET B” by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

🇳🇿 In New Zealand, thousands of women have received pregnancy support and labor care at the Nga Hau Māngere Birthing Centre. 75% of those who received care at the centre identified as Māori and/or Pasifika, populations who have historically received inequitable care. When the local community learned that the centre faced imminent closure, they mobilized with the help of ActionStation to reverse the closure. Nearly 10,000 supporters came together and were able to secure the funding needed to keep the birthing centre open.

🇷🇴 In Romania, parental medical leave only applied to parents of children under the age of 7, leaving parents of older ill children few options. More than 65,000 supporters joined a Declic supporter’s campaign to extend medical leave to the parents of any sick child under the age of 18. Following months of organizing and public pressure, the campaign claimed its first victory: parental medical leave was extended to parents of sick children up to 12 years of age. Organizers are continuing to campaign so that all parents of sick children have access to necessary parental leaves.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 In Scotland, parents fought back against a plan to stop funding access to after-school clubs for disabled children. Working with 38 Degrees, parents in Edinburgh started a petition, organized a media campaign, staged an in-person delivery, and won – securing ongoing funding for the program!

🇿🇦 Thousands of supporters joined a campaign on VUMA to raise their voices about dangerous E. coli levels in rivers in Durban, South Africa. Greenpeace Africa Durban volunteers staged a petition delivery, which led to invitations to speak with experts and join the restoration work.

🇸🇪 In Sweden, 12,000 residents in Malmö were facing their second round of rent increases in less than a year. The Malmö Tenant’s Association launched a campaign on MittSkifte, and working with Skiftet were able to prevent the increase.

🇨🇭 In Switzerland, Campax saw a victory in a long running campaign. After four years of campaigning, abolishing the ‘tampon tax’ moved closer to success. They’d already sealed approval from the Bundesrat (Federal Council) and Nationalrat (National Council), but this year saw the unopposed approval of the Ständerat (Council of States) too. This is a big win for women in Switzerland, and they’re now pushing for free menstrual products too!

🇬🇧 Workers at St. Mungo’s (a charity tackling homelessness in the UK) saw their pay not keeping up with inflation while their workloads skyrocketed. With the help of the Trades Union Congress, the workers and Unite the Union created a petition on Megaphone UK to increase visibility while also organizing strike actions. After three months of campaigning, they won a 10% pay raise!

🇺🇸 EveryLibrary used their Fight for the First platform to prevent book bans in the United States. By partnering with and providing their expertise to local library and school associations, they’ve secured victories and defeated book bans across the country.

“Image of Library” by Redd F on Unsplash

🇺🇸 Similarly, MoveOn organized authors, celebrities, and hundreds of thousands of supporters to prevent book bans across the US. They even sponsored a banned bookmobile that went on a multi-state tour giving out the most commonly banned books.

🇺🇸 Starbucks Workers United has been organizing Starbucks employees across the country and promoting solidarity events all year. In November, they launched their Red Cup Rebellion, with more than 500 events taking place at Starbucks locations around the country.

These are just some of the great campaigns we watched in the last year. A very big congratulations and a hearty thank you to each of these organizations – and all of our other partners and friends who have fought for a safer, more equitable, and more progressive world in the last year.

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On the tech side of ControlShift we were also excited to roll out various platform changes in 2023. Here are some of the highlights:

We made it easier for staff and supporters to find great, royalty-free images for their petitions and events.
We overhauled our partnerships feature with new page designs, additional permissions for partner admins, and improved functionality.
We rolled out support for coalitions – made up of multiple partners who can all work together on events, petitions, and days of action.
We retired our previous mapping integrations which allowed us to make maps available to everyone, even those in the EU. We also improved searches and embeds, to make it easier for supporters to find ways to get involved.
We improved the local groups experience, giving more control to local organizers and making it easier for people to find, join, and engage in local groups in their area.
We improved security by updating our two-factor authentication method, tightened restrictions on banned users, and improved contact messages to prevent misuse.

We’ve been honored to help support the important work our organizations have done in the last year –– here’s to a great 2024 together!

ControlShift Calendars 🤝 Pre-Chosen Decision Makers

2023-09-01T14:35:24+00:00

ControlShift’s calendars feature makes it easy for organizations to start and manage large events mobilizations. The tools allow your supporters to quickly find events near them or be recruited to host events in their communities. Organizations around the world have used calendars to organize days of action, watch parties, lobby days, and more.

Now we’re making the calendar tools even more powerful.

With our recent releases, the calendar tools now support events targeting specific decision makers.

What are decision maker calendars?

Decision maker calendars allow organizations to easily create and run events mobilizations with specific targets in mind. This allows organizations to ask their supporters to do things like:

deliver petition signatures to the public offices of specific elected officials.
protest outside of specific stores in response to their decision to not provide reproductive health medications.
stage actions outside of bank branches pushing them to change their position on fossil fuel investments.

With decision maker calendars, organizations start by choosing the locations where they want their supporters to organize events. After uploading the list of locations, organizations can customize things like: default titles, descriptions, and start dates and times. Organizations can also provide special instructions for hosts – letting them know exactly what’s expected of them.

What does the host experience look like?

Once a supporter lands on the calendar lookup page, they’ll be asked to search for their location – we’ll then show them the closest pre-selected decision maker (within a radius that the organization can customize). If an event has not already been organized for that location, the supporter will be asked to become the host. If there is already an event, they can RSVP to the existing event, or they can host a new event if there’s another unclaimed decision maker nearby.

Just like elsewhere on the platform, all events created by supporters are sent to moderation for admin approval. Organizations have full visibility into and control over the events created on the platform. Also, like other events on the platform, event hosts will have access to various tools to make their event a success – like the ability to email supporters, add event shifts, and use the event’s discussion forum.

Decision maker calendars can also be paired with our partner tools, which makes it easier to scale your events work. If you’re interested in starting an events mobilization, we’d love to hear from you.

Boost Your Events Mobilizations with Coalitions

2023-05-15T13:56:51+00:00

Organizing a large series of events, like a day of action, can be a powerful way for an organization to demonstrate their reach and show the full breadth of support for their cause. However, recruiting so many events and adequately supporting all hosts can be a daunting task for a single organization to manage.

Event Library Image Above by Susan Q. Yin on Unsplash

Luckily, these event mobilizations are great opportunities for collaboration with partners. Working with partner organizations can make it easier to recruit and support hosts, find new attendees, and manage events on the day. The additional support from partner organizations can help you grow your mobilization and ensure its success.

Protest Event Image by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

ControlShift’s partnerships and calendars features make it easy for organizations to work together on events mobilizations. Now, with our recent releases, we’ve made our partnerships and calendars features even more powerful – allowing you to configure the tools to match your unique coalition.

Four common ways to use ControlShift’s partners and calendars features together:

Single Partner Events: Collaborate with a single partner organization to recruit, cohost, and manage a series of events. Every event will be included in the partnership, and attendees may be shared with the partner.
Primary Partner Events: Collaborate with multiple partner organizations to recruit, cohost, and manage a series of events. One organization is the primary partner – they’re a cohost for all events in this mobilization and all events will be included in their partnership. There are also secondary partners – they’re only collaborating on a subset of the events in this mobilization. This type of arrangement can be used for a national series of events, where a national organization is the primary partner and local organizations are secondary partners on the events in their communities only. Depending on the event, attendees may be shared with one or both partners.
Independent Partner Events: Collaborate with multiple partner organizations, each of which will independently recruit, cohost, and manage their own events within the broader mobilization. Each partner may have access to the attendees of the events that they recruited. This can be used for a day of action that includes very different types of events cohosted with very different organizations.
Coequal Partners/True Coalition Events: Collaborate with multiple partner organizations to recruit, cohost, and manage a series of events. All partners are equal cohosts of every event, regardless of which organization initially recruited the event. All attendees may be shared with all partners.

Regardless of which type of coalition matches your organizing, ControlShift’s calendars feature can make it easy to collaborate and manage the events, hosts, and your partners. Paired with our partnerships feature, your organization can decide exactly how attendee data is shared with partners, how much access partner organizations are given, and even customize event pages with partner-specific fonts and colors.

If you’re ready to start an events mobilization, we have some recommendations for how to get started. You can also see our recommendations for configuring ControlShift’s tools to power each of the use cases above.

Recruit Hosts

Recruiting event hosts is the most critical stage of an events mobilization. More events mean that your potential attendees are more likely to find events near them. More event hosts will also grow your event mobilization audience, as hosts recruit new supporters from their networks.

Email your list: Sending an email to your existing list is often the easiest way to start your recruitment.
- When sending your email, make sure to explain why the event mobilization will be key to your success, so that prospective hosts understand that their actions will be crucial to the win.
- Segmenting your list by location, and tailoring the event host ask to their location (e.g. “Will you host an event in Liverpool?”) can help reemphasize the host’s importance.
- Agreeing to host an event can be a bit scary for a first-time host, so providing information about what will happen during the event can be important to allaying those fears. ControlShift makes it easy for you to provide your supporters with a guide to hosting events during the creation process.
Get on the phone: Calling supporters or sending text messages asking them to host an event can be another great option, especially for your more committed supporters. If you have supporters who have hosted events on your behalf in the past, or who have been especially active in other mobilizations, a personalized ask can convert them to hosting. If the supporter agrees to host an event during your conversation, ControlShift’s host recruitment feature can make it easy to quickly get their event onto your map without needing them to fill out the event form.
Host recruitment events: Hosting a recruitment event requires more planning than other strategies, but it can be a powerful way of presenting your mobilization plan to your supporters and converting them to hosts. Zack Exley and Becky Bond refined this “barnstorm” tactic while organizing with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign (as described in their book Rules for Revolutionaries). Instead of trying to recruit event hosts from your email list directly, recruit supporters to attend a few big events led by your staff. (While for the Sanders campaign these events were in-person, the same tactics can also be taken online.)
At each event, tell the story of how the work done at every member-led event will add up to a big overall win. Essentially, use each staff-led event to recruit dozens of event hosts for your mobilization. Our friends at Getup! in Australia have had success replicating this model to massively increase the number of events that are created versus traditional event host recruitment over email. A good overview of this tactic was also written up by Micah Sifry in the Nation.
Partner up: For each of these tactics, remember to bring in your partners – usually these organizations will have their own lists of supporters that can be recruited using the same tactics above. Sharing your templates and workflows among partners can make recruitment easier for both parties and ensure consistent messaging across the coalition.

Support Hosts

When recruiting hosts, be sure to plan for how you’ll support your hosts and what materials you’ll provide. A well-written toolkit or quick videos are a great start and can allow hosts to peruse materials asynchronously, while also being easy to update as FAQs emerge.

A kickoff call with information for hosts who have already signed up can help get people excited for their event and allow them to ask questions and receive quick support from staff and other supporters.

Having an organizer or trusted volunteer call or text through your list of hosts to confirm the details of their events, answer questions, and walk each host through what you expect of them requires more time than other support options, but is often a great choice.

Depending on your audience of supporters, setting up a Slack channel, Discord, or WhatsApp group can also allow hosts to get support easily in advance of and during the event.

Again, be sure to bring your partners along when supporting hosts. Partner organizations may have recommendations for things to include in materials, suggestions for different ways of explaining events, and additional capacity to help manage one-on-one communications.

Recruit Attendees

Once you’ve recruited some hosts, the next step is to recruit attendees.

Map it: An easy-to-use, searchable map of upcoming events is essential in allowing supporters to find events near them while also demonstrating the national or global scale of your events campaign. ControlShift’s local organizing map tells the story of your mobilization, makes it easy for attendees to find events near them, and is embeddable on external sites.
Rolling emails: Like recruiting hosts, emailing your list is often the easiest way to recruit event attendees. To make this tactic work well, there are a few tweaks to make:
1. Use mail-merge or dynamic content features to include each supporter’s closest event in their email. If possible, allow them to one-click RSVP from the email – without needing to enter their contact information into the RSVP form. This increases conversion rates significantly.
2. Tell the story of how the activities at each event and their attendance will be key to winning the overall campaign.
3. Help the recipient imagine how the event will unfold and what it will be like – people who don’t know what to expect are less likely to RSVP.
4. Once you’ve sent your initial email, use click and RSVP data to refine and segment your list. People who have not RSVPed should continue to receive recruitment emails with updated content – let them know how many new events have been created and how many people have already RSVPed. If you have other updates about the campaign, include the updates in future recruitment emails. When possible, tell the story of how this member will be missing out if they don’t attend.
Call and text: Peer-to-peer text messages and calling people who have attended events previously are two of the most effective ways to recruit supporters to events. Some organizations ask event hosts to do this work, but others have a centralized volunteer “texting team” that handles this task across all of the events that supporters have set up. (Our sister company DaisyChain makes it easy to distribute the work of texting potential attendees and tracking each of the conversations across a texting team.) Again segmentation and personalization is key – if you know where the supporters are located, send them their closest event without requiring them to search for it.
Mirror events on Facebook: Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes native event content. Events from your organizing toolset that are replicated as native Facebook events will grow faster than if you simply share a webpage with the event information on Facebook. Facebook ads promoting native Facebook events also generally have a lower cost per attendee.
Run local ads: Facebook ads that match events with a local Facebook audience can be a great way of finding new supporters near an event. Creating a separate ad campaign for each local event can be time consuming, but it can have a big impact. One tip: when choosing an image for your ads, using a local and easily recognizable landmark – even if it’s not immediately applicable to your event – can help grab your ad targets’ attention.
Partner up: As with event host recruitment, bring your coalition partners into the process of recruiting attendees. Each of the tactics above can be replicated by a partner, who likely has their own lists of supporters. Leveraging those lists, and the relationships your partner has built, increases your attendee base.

Report Back

After the events, ask both the attendees and the event hosts to report back about their experiences. Many organizations ask participants to rate their experience while also providing qualitative feedback. You can use those ratings to identify problematic hosts and ways to improve the host or attendee experience for your next events mobilization. Sharing the learnings with your partners can be a good way of demonstrating your commitment to the partnership and to build best practices among your peers. Soliciting feedback from the partners themselves can also make your future coalitions run more smoothly.

We’re excited to roll out these updates to partnerships and calendars. The new features will unlock different ways of organizing events and ensure that our tools can be used regardless of your coalition’s configuration. If you have any questions or if you want help setting up your mobilization, get in touch!

Scale Your Organizing With Partners and Coalitions

2023-03-17T14:10:55+00:00

Few organizing wins have happened because of a single organization, and strong organizational allies can be the key to a successful campaign. ControlShift’s partnerships feature is a great way for organizations to deepen relationships with peers, find new supporters, and demonstrate a broad base of support for their campaign issues.

We’re excited to announce that with our recent updates to the partnerships feature, we’ve now added support for coalition campaigns with multiple partners.

Both single partnerships and coalition campaigns allow for organizations to work together on shared petitions and events – opening up new opportunities for collaboration:

You can bring together local organizations across the country to work on a national initiative. Each local partner can co-sponsor the campaign in their area. (This could also be paired with our efforts tool.)
You can work with the leading organizations on an issue to run a single petition campaign, with each organization helping to recruit petition signers.
You can cohost a training session with other organizations to share campaign strategies and plan next steps for a campaign.
You can organize a day of action with multiple partners, with each partner recruiting events and attendees.

While working with partners, you have full control of how supporter data is shared. Regardless of how complex the politics of your coalition is, you can share opt-ins with key stakeholders and grow each of your audiences. Once invited to collaborate, each partner receives special access to various tools to help them organize their supporters. You can also combine partnerships with our themes feature to create special branding for partner actions so that they feel distinct from the rest of your work.

Best Practices for Partnerships

If your organization is interested in expanding your partner work, we have some best practices:

It’s organizing too: As with the rest of the ControlShift tools, supporting the most robust and vibrant partnerships requires active relationship building and organizing. In many ways, partner organizations are just like regular petition creators – they need to be reminded that they can create petitions and events on your site and need to know what value will be added by partnering with you. Building and nurturing relationships with peers is vital in ensuring that your partners turn to you when there’s a campaign opportunity.
Reach out: For organizations that you know you want to work with, direct outreach is the way to go. Keep an eye out for campaign opportunities in that organization’s issue area. When you spot one that’s a particularly good match, ask them to collaborate and post a relevant petition or event on your site.
Have an open door: In addition to recruiting new partners, having a way for potential partners to find you is also key. Creating a marketing page that explains your partner program and the benefits of partnering with your organization is a great way to find new potential partners, while also being a page you can send to the organizations you’re recruiting.
Set clear expectations: The technical support and strategic help that organizations provide to their partners can vary a lot. When you’re onboarding a partner, be sure to lay out exactly what they can expect from a partnership with you. Will you be creating petitions/events on their behalf and helping them craft messages to supporters? Will you cross promote their petitions/events to your full list? Or will you just be providing the technology to host their actions? Setting clear expectations can help prevent headaches or disappointment down the road.
Be generous: ControlShift’s partner tools allow for elegant signature sharing, whether you’re working with a single partner or a coalition. Allowing partners to collect opt-ins for their shared petitions and events encourages the organization to create actions on your site – this is a key benefit that you can use when recruiting a partner.
Keep it going: A single petition or event is a great way to kick off a partnership, but winning a campaign and creating a lasting impact requires deepening the partnership beyond list sharing and joint recruitment. The more collaborative the relationship, the more you share in planning additional actions – like events, demonstrations, campaign pushes, etc. – the better your chances of winning a campaign.

If you’re interested in strategizing your use of partnerships or coalitions, we’d love to help! Send us an email, schedule a call with our team, or join one of our office hours.

Better Images for Petition and Event Pages

2023-03-02T18:58:30+00:00

An issue we commonly hear from organizations is that campaigners and event hosts are often not choosing images for their campaigns/events, are choosing low-quality images, or are choosing images that have been copyrighted.

At the same time, our testing has shown the benefits of a good campaign image: petitions with images typically receive three times as many signatures compared to those without. Choosing the right image makes petition and event pages look better and more inviting, while also improving the appearance of social shares.

To help leaders choose better quality images, we’ve integrated with a free image library that has over 3 million high-resolution images to choose from.

After creating an event or petition, the leader will see an automatic prompt to choose an image for their petition or event page. They can then enter a keyword to see a selection of matching images and choose the one that best fits their campaign.

After searching for a keyword, users can select the image they’d like to use and it will be automatically added to their campaign or event page. We’ll also use the image in social sharing and petition/event list pages. If leaders prefer to upload their own image, that option remains available.

For admins, the image library is also available in the moderation queue. This allows moderators to easily ensure that all petitions and events have a good image without needing to worry about copyright claims.

Making it easy for leaders and moderators to choose great images for their campaigns and events is another way ControlShift tries to ensure that petition creators and events hosts have all of the tools they need for success. If you’re looking for strategies to help your supporters become more effective leaders, get in touch!

Protecting Customers Sites from Bots and Malicious Actors

2022-12-16T20:00:51+00:00

Successfully protecting ControlShift sites from bots and malicious actors requires multiple layers of protection. Many of these protections happen behind-the-scenes automatically. However, as online attacks increase, we think it’s important to remind organizations of the steps they can take to help protect their sites from malicious actors and keep member data secure:

Unique Passwords: One of the easiest steps for admins is to ensure that their ControlShift account is secured by a strong, unique password. Reusing passwords across various platforms makes accounts more vulnerable. Password managers can help to generate and maintain long, unique, and randomized passwords for various accounts.
Two-Factor Authentication: Two-factor authentication (2FA) is available to anyone with a user account. When 2FA is enabled, the user will need to enter a randomly-generated code after entering their password to gain access to their account. We strongly recommend that everyone, but in particular organization administrators and partner organization staff members, enable 2FA for their accounts to help prevent unauthorized access. Organizations can also require all administrators to enable 2FA via their organization’s settings.
Granular Permissions: Successful use of ControlShift is only possible through the work of organization administrators who provide strategic and technical help to petition, event, and group leaders, while also monitoring and moderating content. However, not every administrator needs access to everything in the platform. ControlShift allows creating teams of admins with specific sets of permissions, which allows organizations to limit the number of users with access to sensitive information.
Captcha: We recommend organizations enable captcha-based bot protections on their site’s public-facing forms. For many organizations, using Google’s free reCAPTCHA product is an easy solution. For organizations concerned about potential data privacy implications from using a Google product, we also we offer the option of integrating with hCaptcha. hCaptcha is a a paid tool that describes itself as a ”privacy-first” captcha. Both of these tools offer invisible-to-the-user protections for site forms.
Monitor Bounces: After completing ControlShift’s sender authentication process organizations can monitor email bounces in real time. While some bounces are always expected, a substantial increase in bounce reports can be an early warning that your platform is being targeted by spam activity.
Check Integrations: Admins with appropriate permissions can view all third-party integrations that have been added to their site. These integrations may include things like CRM systems and data analytics tools. While these integrations are less-likely attack vectors, ensuring that member data is only being sent to third-party tools that an organization is actively using is a good data privacy practice.

Securing ControlShift’s sites is our top priority. By working together with our customer organizations, and encouraging security best practices, we can help keep supporter data safe.

Best Practices for Event Hosts and Petition Creators

2022-10-28T20:16:21+00:00

Petition creators and event hosts are the lifeblood of ControlShift, and supporting these creators as they organize their communities is the biggest driver of success for our customers.

We’re excited to announce the release of new features aimed at helping petition and event creators to use ControlShift effectively.

The first of these features is a new and customizable training page included in the event and petition creator toolbars. Because this text can be customized, organizations can provide specific tips, tricks, and suggestions to their creators. We recommend organizations provide guidance covering the full lifecycle of a campaign or event: from building initial support, to engaging supporters, tactics to increase pressure on decision makers, and report backs after the campaign or event has ended.

Along with the customizable training pages, we’ve also released new banners to automatically share best practices with creators. These banners are shown to event hosts and petition creators as their events and petitions reach various milestones.

For petitions, the new banners will guide creators through different stages of their campaign, starting with basic to-dos – social sharing, adding an image, and choosing categories. Once the campaign has begun to grow, we’ll automatically prompt the creator to take additional actions, like sending an email to supporters, hosting an event, and providing campaign updates. The banners that a petition creator sees will depend on their campaign’s milestones, moderation status, and organization settings.

Similarly, for events, the banners will guide hosts through the stages of hosting a successful event. From choosing an image and sharing on social media, to sending an email to their attendees, and following up after their event.

We hope these new tools will encourage creators to run the best petitions and events possible. By guiding creators through the tools available to them and sharing best practices, we can ensure that these organizers feel well-supported and are able to successfully effect change in their communities.

European Data Center

2021-12-14T21:07:16+00:00

We’ve always believed that customers and their supporters own their own data. We are simply stewards of that information in service of helping to make our customers more powerful in the world.

We’ve also always been a very global organization: we initially got started in Australia, found our second customer in the UK, and now serve customers around the world in more than a dozen languages and on every continent except Antartica. As part of our work to support diverse data privacy requirements we’ve long offered a variety of product features to help customers comply with data privacy regulations around the world, including GDPR in Europe.

We’re excited to announce that we are now going a step further to give new customers a choice of data-locality and processing within either our existing North America (Virginia, USA) or our new European (Frankfurt, DE) points of presence when they sign up for a new instance of the product. This new offering, publicly available today, makes it easier for customers to meet the data-locality requirements of their stakeholders.

We are proud to be one of only a handful of political software companies who are able to offer data storage in Europe for those who need it.

While we are excited about the possibilities of this data hosting option for new customers, we unfortunately do not have current plans to provide the ability for existing customers to switch the data locality for existing accounts. Customers that started in our North American data center will remain there for the time being, and customers who sign up in Europe will not be able to change their mind and migrate their data to the United States.

It is possible for existing customers to “start fresh” in a new data center of their choice without carrying across historical data or accounts, but this is often a difficult and impractical task for organizations with lots of campaigns, activity, and customization. If this is an option you would like to consider, please be in touch to plan your migration.

If you’re a new customer, just choose Sign Up in the header, and you’ll be able to choose the right location for your new instance of ControlShift platform.

10 Years of ControlShift

2021-12-07T21:51:21+00:00

We’re celebrating a major milestone, as we wrap up the year. ControlShift is 10 years old!

For the last decade, we’ve held true to our commitment to be a different kind of software service provider: one that puts service to progressive movements at the center of what we do.

Looking back, I could not be more proud of what the ControlShift team has accomplished over the last decade:

Invented and popularized a new style of distributed, people-powered organizing for digital advocacy organizations.
Supported more than 100 million local leaders taking action for progressive change in their communities.
Partnered with some of the most effective and impactful advocates, political parties, and charities around the world.
Recruited a small but mighty team of some of the best engineers and organizers someone could hope to work with.
Built a product and institution that could go the distance and reliably sustain important infrastructure, while scaling to meet the biggest moments.
Kept our indie, bootstrapped, progressive, not-quite-economically-rational ethos of movement service alive.

We got started because of a confluence of lucky connections: two sister advocacy organizations, GetUp! in Australia and 38 Degrees in the UK, both realized they needed a new software product for turning their supporters into leaders and allowing for the distributed creation of campaigns. We leveraged early pro-bono support for that vision from IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, as well as OPEN (which did not quite formally exist yet) and the Citizen Engagement Lab. There are too many people from those early years of the adventure without whom none of this would have been possible. You can’t know how thankful I am for all of you.

Looking back it’s been quite a journey.

ControlShift at the beginning was such a small, fragile, precious idea. It’s a bit of an institution now. All of us here are thankful to have been able to play such a small part in so many critical struggles over the last decade. It’s been an honor to serve you all, and we’re looking forward to continue supporting your work for years to come.

Thank you,

Nathan, the rest of the team, and everyone else who has been part of the ControlShift story along the way.

Authenticate Securely

2021-11-22T16:50:23+00:00

We’ve improved the ways that customers can set up user account authentication within the ControlShift platform to support the requirements of the most sophisticated advocacy organizations.

Single Sign-On

Our customers use a wide a variety of organizing software products and need to make it as easy as possible for their volunteers to get involved more deeply in the organization. Requiring a cornucopia of different user accounts can lead to confusion and frustration as staff and volunteers navigate between the different pieces of software an organization might use to engage their supporters and put their volunteers to work.

Single sign-on allows organizations to configure a federated set of user logins and a unified sense of user identity across the tools that staff and volunteers use. Instead of managing logins and controlling access across dozens of tools, customers set up single-sign on platforms to allow their supporters to authenticate once with a single login that grants them access to all of the different toolsets they need access to.

In addition to ease of use, single sign-on also simplifies security administration tasks for staff by allowing the unified management of user login permissions as staff come and go.

At launch, we support single sign-on via either Microsoft Azure Active Directory or on-premises Active Directory Federation Services. If your organization uses a different single sign-on provider, get in touch and we’ll work with you to understand if an integration is possible.

Two-Factor Authentication Enforcement

We’ve long supported two-factor authentication as an additional security option for staff administrative accounts. With our latest updates, platform admins can choose to enforce the use of two-factor authentication across their organization as a platform-wide policy.

Two-factor authentication is a security feature that can effectively eliminate account phishing and other security risks associated with leaked account credentials because it requires users to enter a randomly-generated code, in addition to their password, when logging in. Learn more about two-factor authentication and how to set it up on your ControlShift account.

We have also added in-product messaging to encourage two-factor authentication adoption by admins even for organizations who have not opted into enforcing it. We recommend all of our customers use two-factor authentication across all of the products they use.

Improved Blast Email Experience

2021-10-26T21:00:55+00:00

We’ve been iteratively improving the interface that partners, petition creators, and event hosts use when they message their supporters over the last few weeks. We wanted to highlight all of the improvements as we wrap up the project.

Visual Editor

The redesigned and modernized visual editor for blast emails is designed to make email authoring and formatting easy for non-technical users. We’ve carefully curated this experience to make writing the most common sorts of emails easy, with limited formatting options.

New Template Interface The new template interface allows campaigners to quickly preview pre-written email templates to get started quickly. Campaigners can also use a blank template. This new interface for email templates replaces an awkward earlier design that many found confusing.
Add images and other files It’s now possible to quickly insert images and other files into emails. Inserted images are gracefully and responsively formatted into the email. We also make it easy to add image credits or an alternative description of the visual content for accessibility.
Add Social Share buttons It’s now possible to quickly add pre-formatted social share buttons into emails with a single click. These buttons can be inserted into any email and automatically have Share Click tracking appended. These buttons will continue to be enhanced with additional new features in the future.

HTML Editor

For more advanced technical users, we now offer a much more powerful code-editing interface for authoring custom HTML emails. The new interface is a much more elegant experience than the previous interface for your partners who have the technical know-how to author more bespoke email experiences.

Code Highlighting We provide HTML syntax highlighting that makes it easier to read the code markup used in emails.
Tag Matching A subtle visual indicator helps email authors see if HTML tags and other syntax are closed properly. This is especially helpful with the most complex emails.
Live Syntax Checking We now highlight certain types of errors as content is being written so that email authors can fix issues immediately – before malformed emails are sent out to supporters.

These new email editor improvements are also available to moderators while reviewing emails, so your team can make copy edits and other improvements while they are editing the message or insert social share buttons from the moderation queue.

We’ve intentionally kept the default visual email authoring interface focused on providing the most straightforward and simple interface for writing updates for the campaign. We hope that these refinements will help keep petition creators and event hosts focused on writing great messages to their supporters without the technology getting in the way.

🎨 Custom branding for partners, microsites, days of action, and more!

2021-09-30T19:25:34+00:00

We’re excited to announce a series of updates to ControlShift’s themes feature!

Themes allow organizations to control the look and feel of the platform by customizing the site’s fonts, colors, logos, and links. Previously, ControlShift supported only one theme at a time, meaning that all pages within the platform shared the same fonts and colors.

With our recent updates, we now allow organizations to create multiple themes, which can be assigned to different pages. This allows organizations to more fully customize their supporters’ journeys and create custom experiences for different types of petitions, events, and groups.

While there are many ways the themes tools can be used, there are a few use cases that we’re particularly excited to be able to support:

When a ControlShift organization is partnering with another organization, they can now create a custom partner theme for that partner’s hub, petitions, and events pages. The custom theme could include some of the partner’s colors, a modified logo, or header/footer links to the partner’s main site. By assigning the theme within the partnership’s settings, newly-created petitions and events in that partnership will automatically inherit that theme.
When an organization is running a day of action with its own brand, they can create a custom theme and assign it to the ControlShift calendar for the day of action. This custom theme can include the day of action’s logo, colors, and links to external toolkits. By assigning the theme in the calendar’s settings, newly-created events will be automatically be assigned that theme. This can be particularly helpful if the day of action has its own microsite or other web presences separate from your primary organizational identity. By keeping the brand consistent as supporters move from different sites into ControlShift, we can help ensure a seamless supporter experience.
Some organizations create microsites dedicated to specific types of petition campaigns – whether they’re templatized petition campaigns targeting local leaders or different types of petitions that target a specific issue. Organizations can now create a custom ControlShift theme that matches that microsite’s designs and links back to the microsite. Like with a day of action, this can help ensure a consistent experience as supporters move between different sites. We’re particularly excited to see customers use our efforts feature in combination with themes.
Organizations using ControlShift for both member-generated and staff-run petitions sometimes wish to separate officially-sponsored organizational campaigns from campaigns created by their supporters. These organizations can now create an “official campaign” theme that allows these special, staff-run campaigns to stand out and have a stronger organizational identity.
Some organizations have separate legal identities that each have their own brand. With the new themes features, these organizations can create a unique theme for each legal identity, and then assign it to petitions, events, or local groups accordingly. Because we also allow themes to be assigned to hostnames, these organizations can ensure that anyone viewing the site using a custom URL will see the appropriate branding.

We’re excited to be sharing these new features. You can learn more about themes in our help center. You can also learn more about themes at our office hours on October 7 at 10am ET.

Themes are a powerful feature because they allow campaigners to quickly set up self-service branded actions without needing to know any HTML, CSS or Javascript – while retaining our powerful optional functionality that offers customers the ability to engage our team to build truly custom experiences when that is the right fit too. We’re excited to see the ways that customers use themes alongside our optimized action pages and share experiences to power a wider variety of campaigns.

Using Supporter Led Petitions for Distributed Message Testing

2021-08-12T16:52:13+00:00

I enjoyed today’s XKCD comic which made the point that “experts in everything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field” and the same is as true for supporter-led petition platforms as it is for geochemistry.

We provide the white-labeled software-as-a-service platform that dozens of organizations around the world use to power sites where their supporters can launch their own petition campaigns. On the surface, these sites are about democratizing access to the tools used to create and run petition campaigns – opening up the tactic of launching a petition to local leaders, and supporting local activists with the tools they need to win their own fights.

Behind the scenes however, our most sophisticated customers are actually using their platforms for message testing, issue identification, and optimization. Supporter-authored petitions are a great tactic for getting out of the professionalized campaigner bubble and finding the issues, and the ways of talking about those issues, that are authentic and resonate with supporters.

Instead of staff writing a petition on an issue themselves, they instead might email dozens of their top supporters and ask them to write petitions in their own words on an issue of the moment. Those different variations in language, image choice, and angle are then tested against one another by emailing them to small segments of an email list to see which ones gain the most traction. Promising petition campaigns are then refined further before pushing them out to a wide audience.

Similarly, having an open process for creating new petition campaigns can also help organizations identify campaign issues that they might not have been aware of or might have dismissed internally.

Dave Karpf at George Washington University coined the term Analytic Activism to describe this process where advocacy organizations use A/B tests, analytics, and large digital audiences to “listen” to their supporters and rapidly respond to opportunities to either grow their audience, find issues to activate them, or find new ways to talk about the issue.

As an ethical provider of software for democratic participation and progressive power building, I do have some concerns about how far these tactics can be pushed and the ways that they contribute to the reduction of complicated policy issues into carefully optimized click-bait. On the other hand, these strategies are not fundamentally different than other “listening” tactics like opinion polling – they simply accelerate the speed with which advocacy organizations can test messages and transform them into public communications. The core insight is that by engaging supporters at scale, organizations can test more messages than they could possibly come up with as a paid staff. Whether the causes or the solutions that supporter-led petitions can generate are worthwhile or simply viral on social media is a question for organizations to answer, as is whether this sort of analytic activism can be used for persuasion. If there is nobody at the wheel but an algorithm the risk is that advocacy organizations become not much more than a newsfeed of causes organized by which ones drive the most outrage.

Focusing on scale, growth and optimization is certainly not the only way that supporter-led petition platforms can be deployed and managed (we have other customers with quite different strategies and intentions) but after a few recent conversations with practitioners who were mystified about what their peers were actually up to, it seemed worthwhile to give folks a bit of a peek behind the curtain.

Even if your organization is not interested in opening up petition creation to supporters and partners, the lesson that significant gains in viral growth are possible for advocacy organization by radically increasing the volume of different sorts of campaigns you’re testing is a worthwhile one. Staff teams can also be empowered to create and test lots of low fidelity petition language and image variations quickly rather than aiming for perfection each time the organization launches a campaign.

Sync ControlShift Events to Action Network

2021-07-14T14:57:19+00:00

We’ve added support to our Action Network sync to allow customers to integrate ControlShift Events and Calendars with Action Network Events and Event Campaigns via an API data sync.

It’s now possible to use ControlShift to organize member-led days of action, house parties, canvasses, phone banks or other sorts of events using our powerful distributed event tools, and have the data about those events and their attendees flow back into Action Network in real time. This replaces the need for staff to shuffle CSVs between the two systems and ensures that volunteers who attend an event immediately end up on your organization’s mailing list in Action Network.

The data sync mirrors ControlShift activity into native Action Network data types so you’ll see the data organized within Action Network as Events, Event Campaigns and attendee RSVPs, just as if the events were organized within Action Network itself.

Action Network customers organizing distributed event campaigns with ControlShift benefit from our beautiful organizing maps, powerful moderation tools for staff, and easy-to-use features that grassroots event hosts can use to plan their event, as well as the event features of our member-led petition functionality.

Existing customers who would like to enable the data sync with Action Network should contact ControlShift Support.

Learn more about all of the ways that Action Network and ControlShift can work together to make your advocacy organization more distributed and participatory in the ways it engages supporters.

Strategies to drive petition creation

2021-07-01T17:27:39+00:00

During one of our recent office hours we had the chance to show off our new petition creation flow. We also spent some time talking about the various strategies organizations can use to drive successful petition creation. For many of our organizations, petitions are the primary way that members become leaders, and we know that organizations are often interested in new ways to solicit new petitions.

Increasing the rate of petition creation will also increase the odds that your team will discover campaigns that resonate with your audience and grow quickly if list growth is one of your organizational goals.

We decided to catalog the ideas we brainstormed and share them to inspire ideas for your own organizing.

Getting Started

Before you dive into recruiting new campaign creators, you may want to first take a step back to ask some broader questions about your organization and why potential campaign leaders would want to create campaigns on your site instead of one of the other options available to them. What makes your organization special? Why should someone start a petition on your site, and what are you offering them in return?

Maybe it’s your organization’s expertise in a particular issue area that sets you apart. Maybe you’re the only platform that’s operating natively in your country/language. Maybe you’ll offer more organizing help to your petition leaders than the alternatives or you’ll connect them with a broader base of ideologically-aligned potential supporters. Perhaps you’re offering petition starters a curated template campaign on a specific and replicable issue for local leaders to adopt. Maybe your answer is “all of the above!” Regardless, thinking through your organization’s unique value to potential petition leaders is a good place to start, and your answers will likely inform your recruitment strategies.

Similarly, think through what your organization hopes to get out of your distributed organizing and member-led campaigns program. Allowing supporters to launch their own petition campaigns have many potential benefits:

they allow organizations to scale their impact and potentially expand into new fights or new issue areas;
they allow an organization to empower their members to become leaders and help prepare those supporters to take broader leadership opportunities;
they can drive growth by discovering new and authentic ways to talk about issues or discover new issues to campaign on;
they can provide new context or allow an organization to think and speak about an existing issue in new ways;
they allow an organization to find authentic stories from real people that are impacted by the issues we campaign on;
they allow organizations to test more content. By asking supporters to start petitions, organizations increase the volume of content they can test to discover what content supporters respond to positively.

Your organization may be interested in some or all of these benefits, but thinking about your specific goals for the member-led petitions you’re supporting should inform what your recruitment (and your ongoing campaign leader support) process looks like. Answering these existential questions is one of the most important and essential steps to figuring out a recruitment strategy that will work well for your organization.

Basics

While we’ve put together some more detailed strategies below, we’ve found it’s also important to remind organizations of the basics that sometimes get missed during more advanced strategic planning. The recruitment strategies will only work if it’s easy for a prospective campaign leader to find the new petition creation form.

Many of the recruitment strategies will also have longer-term results – someone who’s received an email about creating a campaign may not have an issue that they want to work on until weeks later. When someone decides to take action, will you make it easy for them? At the minimum, we recommend:

Avoid launching your petition platform with alternative branding that distances it from the brand that your supporters know and trust. Be sure to benefit from the brand equity your organization has built up rather than trying to build a new identity for distributed organizing that’s separate from the other work that your organization does. Using one consistent domain for your organization and distributed organizing platform can also have Search Engine Optimization benefits for your platform if your brand already has search engine authority.
Ensure that it’s easy to find the new petition creation form from your organization’s national or global homepage. If your supporters have a vague memory that your organization allows members to launch petitions, make it easy for them to find the option to do so when they return to your site. This can take the form of links in the header and/or footer that direct people to the new campaign page or it can be large, prominent call to action buttons.
Ensure that it’s easy to find the new petition creation form from your organization’s help or “contact us” pages. Supporters who are about to email you about a particular issue can likely be redirected to run the campaign on their own. Make it easy for them to take that step.
If a supporter does email you about an issue they’re concerned about, include the petition creation form and tips to run a successful campaign in your response. Depending on the volume of emails your organization receives, you could include the petition creation prompt in an auto-responder email and/or train the staff members who are responding those emails to remind supporters about the option of launching their own campaign.
Include a link to the petition creation page on any other action and informational pages that receive a lot of traffic. If someone’s viewing one of those pages, it may spark a campaign idea for them and including a link to the new petition creation form will make it easy for them to get started.

Broad Recruitment

Generally petition recruitment strategies are most successful when they’re targeted. However, some organizations have also found success with broader recruitment strategies, like running Google ads targeting ‘start a petition’ and related searches. This is a competitive set of keywords in English, but bidding on those sorts of keywords may be less competitive or expensive in other languages. Keyword advertising works well because it captures potential supporters in the moment they are looking for a site to launch a petition on, but the average quality of the campaigns that are created may be lower or not values aligned.

Soliciting Campaigns By Email

Often some of the easiest recruitment strategies involve recruiting petition creators who are already on your broader email list. Below are some email-focused recruiting strategies:

If you’re not doing so already, consider adding a small recruitment ask to the footer of all of the emails you send. This can be something as simple as “Is there an issue you care about?” with a link to your petition creation page.
Send rolling recruitment emails to your existing list asking them to create campaigns in their area. Asking a small percentage of your supporters to start a petition via email each week can help ensure a steady stream of petitions are launched.
Email your list asking them to sign existing member-led petitions. This is a great way to increase the reach of your member-led campaigns, while also modeling good campaigning. These emails work best when they tell the story of a petition creator who’s just like the reader, who decided to launch a campaign on an issue important to them, and now needs the reader to help their efforts by signing the campaign. You can then easily include a link for supporters to launch their own campaign. Some organizations even use a template that allows them to automatically create an email recruiting signers based on the content of the petition being linked to.
Do you see an issue in the news that would be a good campaign opportunity? Send a request to your list asking them to lead a campaign. Even if there is already a similar petition targeting the issue, this can be an interesting way to find new ways of talking about that issue, while also reminding your existing supporters that they can be leaders too. Some organizations have a meeting each morning where the team pitches campaign opportunities pulled from the day’s news.
Send a survey to your list asking them how much (1-5) they care about an issue or ask them a yes/no about whether your organization should campaign on that issue. When someone says that they care about the issue and/or think that your organization should campaign on it, immediately show them a petition creation ask. This allows your organization to get feedback from your supporters on what they care about, find out which segment of your list cares a lot about a specific issue, and also recruit new campaign leaders. (You can also consider collecting any campaigns that are generated into a Landing Page, which will allow people who care about the issue to quickly find other campaigns to sign.)

Organizing Approaches

Recruiting new campaign creators is often more of an organizing challenge than a simple sales pitch. Some of the tactics that we’ve seen work:

Take a ‘rolodex’ approach. For any issue, your team likely knows someone who’s working in that area in their professional capacity or who has previously run a campaign on that issue. When something hits the news or a campaign in that area seems timely, reach out and ask them to start a campaign on your site.
Recruit staff at partner or single-issue organizations to create petition campaigns. Using ControlShift’s partnerships feature to share list growth with those partner organizations can also be a good incentive for them to create a campaign on your site.
If your organization’s structure allows for it, ask elected officials to create petitions on issues they would like to champion.
Where appropriate, reach out to independent activists or those impacted by an issue by researching those interviewed in news articles about that issue.
Some organizations also monitor social media, especially Twitter, looking for people who are talking about the organization’s issue area. Organizers then reach out to these users with resources, including the ability to start a campaign on the issue that they’re talking about. This approach is most effective when it’s rooted in relationship building and organizing. The organizations for whom this works well are usually offering expert advice on the issues these users are facing and providing other resources – these interactions are generally not transactional or a copy/paste response.
When you get press requests about member-led campaigns, ensure that the story of the campaign is that of an ordinary person creating the petition through your site and using the tools and support you’ve provided. This can inspire people who read the press coverage to start campaigns on other issues. The links back to your platform from news sources also help to improve your site’s search engine rank. Using PR to place stories about petitions into local media is an effective strategy for driving impact on the petitions themselves, but is also an opportunity to tell the story of how someone used your site to launch a campaign. Ordinary people launching petitions are often more compelling messengers in the press, especially when they have a personal connection to the issue, than your organization’s institutional voice.
ControlShift’s Efforts tool is an easy way to take a national campaign and break it into many local petitions targeting local decision makers that are led by local supporters. It can also be used to manage a series of independent campaigns that share a common theme. Because the Efforts tool involves more admin input, it can be easier for someone who has not led a campaign previously to launch their campaign.
If you have a field organizing team, make sure they know about the platform and how to integrate it into their offline work in the community. As they’re having conversations with supporters in their local area, the distributed organizing platform can be one of the tools that the field team offers.
If you have a policy or research team, recruit them to write petitions on the issues they are writing policy papers on. Find ways to open up campaigning to the rest of your organization instead of having it siloed into the digital team.
If your team works with celebrities to promote your cause, an open petition platform can allow your team, the staff of the celebrity, or the celebrity themselves, to author and launch petition campaigns in their own authentic voice.
Finally, if you’re not sure where else to turn, start a petition yourself about an issue you care about.

Once you’re driving the creation of a consistent and steady volume of new petitions, the challenge shifts to identifying campaigns that should be nurtured by your team, and finding ways to grow their audience and invest in the leadership of the people who authored each one. We’ll tackle that challenge in a future blog post.