Environmental Action is an amazing organization with over 40 years of history. But they’ve only been working with PowerThru for a little over a year and their list, while growing exponentially, was much smaller than a lot of the other partner groups.

So when it came time to pull together as a movement and set a goal of sending over 1 million comments to the State Department opposing KXL, I was really having a crisis of confidence. Could I, or in this case, WE make a difference? The answer, you will be happy to know, is yes. As I write this we have exceeded our goal of 30,000 comments. And remarkably, out of more than 20 groups participating, we were smack in the middle in terms of total comments. Even though Environmental Action’s list is a fraction of the size of many of our partners, we were in the top-10 for actual signers.

How did we do it? Here are 5 answers, all of which add up to one simple point: Political effectiveness is not about the size of your list – it’s about the activity of your most ardent members.

1) Target! Like with any campaign, when we started asking for comments we didn’t know how members would react.  Sure, Environmental Action had history opposing the KXl pipeline. And we knew the members opposed Big Oil. But would they get why we were talking to the State Department, and not President Obama? Would they be convinced to comment on a report that was already fatally flawed and in favor of the pipeline? Happily the answer was a resounding “Yes!” But we would not have known that if we hadn’t sent to our dedicated climate activists first. Convincing this active and engaged segment of our list to take action first got us sky high open rates, and ensured a healthy base of support and social media conversation before we ever asked 70% of the email list –  which also had amazing response with open rates over 50%, and almost 3/4 of openers clicking through to comment.

2) Don’t be afraid to come back for more. Once it was clear that this action WAS a hit with members, we sent it again to non-action takers, and to people who have been inactive for a while, figuring if anything could get them back and active, this was it. Eventually, every member of the email list saw a message 2-3 times asking them to comment or share the action. This is important to remember if you’re nervous about our advice to never blast your whole list: if something is a real hit, you can still send it to everyone – it’s just essential to be smart about it, and only send content that’s already tested and effective.

Where did the people who signed our #noKXL action come from? This is where

3) Ask for what you need. We could have sent out an email every day: “Sign now!” “You didn’t sign yet” “How about now!” But at a certain point  it wouldn’t have been worth the cost in list fatigue: As you email more and more, you always see diminishing returns in open and click rates, as well as an increase in unsubscribes and inattention (both of which cost you dearly in terms of deliverability and audience). And of course there’s the opportunity cost of not being able to send a different email on another subject (Environmental Action has other pressing campaigns to save wolves, and tell people why Exxon hates their children). Instead of sending an email a day, we sent several blasts over the 4 week comment period – each one telling a new piece of the story about why to comment on Keystone this week. Some of them had breaking news like the Mayflower Spill in Arkansas. But a lot of them were planned weeks in advance, like my trip to a Delaware ’accountability’ rally (see below). Planning email campaigns (sometimes called Arcs) a few weeks in advance to include major story items and plot points is really important – and effective!

4) Keep track of the virality of your campaign. As good as this campaign was with existing members, it was not our best-ever email. But where the Keystone action truly shone was in how many people shared it on email and social media. Ultimately, while engaging your existing list is crucial, the higher goal is always to reach more people. We maximized shares by including easy tools as the after-action step in the daisy chain, and by repeatedly asking signers to tell their friends in an auto-trigger, and in follow up messages. Lots more good advice on how to use social media to boost your campaign is available here.

5) It’s helpful to do something IRL (in real life.) The first email of our campaign was good but not spectacular. When my daughter and I attended a Keystone XL rally, things really took off. Now I can tell you, with complete impartiality, that no one in the universe is as cute as my daughter, see? But even if you don’t have a cute kid, you can document things happening in the real world and to real people. When you do, you give members a compelling new reason to support you online. In fact that is one of the greatest aspects of online organizing, the way people can support you from afar.

This action renewed my conviction that a well-executed online program can make a bigger difference than a huge list or a bank account full of money (though those things are both important, and PowerThru can also help you build those). People have not given up on making change, and if we approach them smartly and respectfully, they will take action with us to do incredible work. You don’t need a million people on your email list to have a huge impact – you need the right people.

View the action, and leave your comment to get more great updates from Environmental Action!

The post The little list that could – Environmental Action appeared first on PowerThru Consulting.

Initially, we had created an aggregate scoring algorithm that would give a single value based on several different types of activities in Salsa – signups, actions, donations, emails, etc. That algorithm was configured as follows:

While this algorithm is good for simple targeting of the most active members, by lumping different types of activities together it doesn’t allow the NPA to do more sophisticated targeted, such as people who have taken many actions but have not donated. For that reason we recently implemented a system where we track scores on three different, separate algorithms for donations, actions and emails.

ACTIVISM ALGORITHM

This algorithm gives points for each type of action someone can take in Salsa and then degrades them after 1 year to ½ of their original value, but still keeps a residual value, allowing us to give more weight to recent action takers but still keep a pretty high value for past action takers.

DONATION ALGORITHM

This algorithm gives 10 points each time someone makes a donation as well as a point per dollar they donate. The goal here is to give a pretty high value to recurring donors who, while they may not have as high value of donation as some one-time donors, get 10 points each time their monthly donation is made.

EMAIL ALGORITHM

This algorithm is pretty simple – 3 points each time an email is clicked and 1 point each time one is opened, reflecting the relative importance of each activity.

Using these three algorithms, the NPA can target for fundraising those supporters who have a high activism and/or email score but a low (or no) donation score by setting up a query such as:

Supporters with Activism Algorithm > 10 AND Donation Algorithm = 0 OR Email Algorithm > 30 AND Donation Algorithm = 0.

Note that determining which scores to use for these queries is a little bit trial-and-error – we usually run them, see how many people we get back in the query results and them tweak the numbers to get an appropriately large universe.

We also use these scoring algorithms to produce two types of monthly reports for the NPA. One gives a breakdown of the number of supporters who have a particular score range that month and how that compares to the month before. For example (note – real numbers changed):

The second gives the score for each supporter on each algorithm, allowing them to see people who could be ripe for fundraising solicitations who have high activism or email scores but low donation scores.

Another great use of Scoring is to create an “embargo” group for new supporters receiving a welcome series

The National Physicians Alliance also wanted to implement a best practice for their new signups to their email list – start by sending them a series of emails introducing them to the organization before starting to send them the general stream of communication. Putting that in place involved a few steps:

-      Creating a set of email reply triggers with a condition of “Is New == 1.” That way only people who are new signups to Salsa will receive those messages.

-      Configure one of those triggers to be an immediate reply, and the other two to go 1 week and 2 weeks later, respctively.

-      Adding those three email triggers to every signup, action, donation, etc pages that they create

-      Creating a scoring algorithm that would give people 14 points when they first signed up and depreciate that value down to 0 after 14 days.

-      Add a condition to their email blasts of “AND Welcome Series Embargo Score = 0” to only capture those people who’s score had degraded to 0, thereby indicating that they had been in the database for at least 14 days.

That scoring algorithm looks like this:

WELCOME SERIES EMBARGO

Have more questions or need help making this happen for your organization? Contact PowerThru.

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They wanted to create eye-catching donation pages, by allowing the supporter to add a personal image and have the ability to embed a video.

PowerThru created:

PowerThru created a custom page creation workflow that enabled supporters to add the image and video embed code on the initial page creation step, and created custom Salsa script TAF and donation pages to display the extra content. We created a scripted leader board to display the top ten fundraisers with links back to their pages. To tie everything together, we also created a custom page manager so the supporter can log into the system and edit and update their fundraising pages.

Here is the first page in the workflow.  A supporter comes to the pages and signs up to create their own fundraising page.

After signing up, the supporter is able to add their custom content including their story, a personal image, and possibly embedable video code.

Once all the content has been added to the page, the supporter is redirected to a custom TAF page with social media sharing tools. The URL of the page which was just created is inserted into the content of the email message. The URL is also used for sharing on Facebook and Twitter.

The supporter is then taken to the donation page they created. This page is created with Salsa script in order to display the image, embedded video, and to insert the description, title and image into Facebook OG tags to enable enhanced sharing.

Located on this donation page are links to the custom TAF with sharing tools, a link to log into the system to edit and update the page, and a link to create a new fundraising page.

Once a donation has been made, the donor is directed to the leaderboard page. The leaderboard allows people to see the top fundraisers and to view their pages with their personal story.

Finally we created a way for fundraisers to log into the system using Salsa’s login feature to manage, edit and update their donation page.

Interested in buying, or to find out more? Send us an email today.

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So they brought in PowerThru to help brainstorm ideas that can electrify members, social media advertising campaigns that recruit followers, and tech solutions and strategies that make it all as simple as a mouse click. And the best part is – it’s already working. Since we started working together their email list has doubled again and again. And their Facebook fans went from ~3,000 to over ~10,000 within two weeks, then doubling again the following month to over 20,000 fans.

How did we do it? To grow social media to email conversions, we built a customized welcome tab with email signup in Facebook. We also designed and executed an initial two week Facebook ad campaign, driving traffic to the page – resulting in a significant burst of new fans and new email signups. We then switched our focus to list building, running periodic Facebook ad campaigns around whichever hot issue they’re focusing on.

To increase email to social media conversions, we also worked with RootsAction to message their list and ask their existing supporters to join the social conversation. We helped design signup pages in Salsa that included auto-triggered welcome emails for new people customized based on HOW they joined RootsAction’s network – one version for people who sign up on the website, and one for signups via Facebook, for example. We built some custom sharing pages in Salsa using our Tell A Friend tool (available on Salsa Marketplace) to help members recommend RootsAction’s work to their friends and family online with the push of a button – right after they’ve signed up. To boost engagement, we always include tell a friend “thank you” sharing pages for after a supporter completes an action (see example here) or makes a donation, to help spread the word via social media too.

We’ve also helped RootsAction grow their list via strategic partnerships with allies on hot issues, and worked with great progressive organizations like Change.org and Democrats.com. RootsAction is well on their way toward their membership goals for this year, and making a difference online and offline.

The post Online List Growth for RootsAction appeared first on PowerThru Consulting.

We worked with their team on the ground to develop the messaging for their website and email list, and set up mass emails and actions as needed. We also created unique tools for their members to use – from finding the nearest office to volunteer at, to thanking the candidates for running.

To enhance social media conversions, we created a customized welcome tab with email signup in Facebook and maximized cross-promotions between social media outlets. And we built some custom sharing pages in Salsa using our Tell A Friend tool (read more about our PowerTools suite of apps and how to purchase) to help members recommend WAW’s work to their friends and family online with the push of a button – especially right after they’ve signed up, taken an action or made a donation.

To boost engagement, we also helped design default action and signup pages in Salsa that included auto-triggered welcome emails for new people customized based on HOW they joined WAW’s network – one version for people who sign up on the website, and one for signups via Facebook, for example. And to boost volunteer action we synchronized data in Salsa, ActBlue and the VAN so that organizers on the ground had the best information about who had volunteered, donated or pledged to vote both online and off.

To increase donations, we built several ActBlue pages at specific key moments of the campaign – and leveraged their email list and social media to fundraise online. With the use of multiple tracking codes, we were able to tell what worked and what didn’t, to adjust on the fly.

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