Finding the Best Events
Nathan Woodhull
on September 14, 2020
Whether your movement is fighting for racial justice, a Green New Deal, or a fair workplace, there can be an overwhelming number of ways for volunteers to get involved and get to work locally. These opportunities may also be spread across allied organizations or siloed in different event tools.
ControlShift makes it simple to pull all of the events your movement is organizing into one map and recruit attendees across all of your allies and partners in a technology-agnostic way.
Your digital team might ask supporters to organize their own events using ControlShift, the field team may be using VAN or EveryAction for staff led events, while your partners might use MobilizeAmerica. We pull everything together into one unified experience for both admins and supporters, while making sure your data is always automatically shuffled to the right destination via API without any manual or cumbersome steps.
We’ve kept on working to make this wide-open front door for your supporters more powerful: we now intelligently sort upcoming events by an algorithm that weighs the distance supporters will have to travel to an event along with how far in the future the events are happening. This change is a particularly notable improvement when organizations have a mix of virtual and in-person events for supporters to sort through.
Another new option allows your team to feature certain events. Featuring events causes them to rank higher and is a great way to promote national organizing calls that all supporters should attend or national gatherings that local volunteers might travel to. We even automatically feature events in ControlShift when similar toggles are set in the tools we integrate with like MobilizeAmerica.
We’ve also made it easier for your supporters to filter the events list to find the ones they are most interested in attending. Your team can also link to pre-filtered lists to make it easier for supporters or you can build an embeddable map that only has a subset of events. Powerful filters can be combined in complex ways to restrict the events that are displayed.
The ecosystem of tech used for organizing keeps on getting more complicated, so in addition to aggregating events from other platforms like Mobilize America and VAN we also integrate tightly with mailers like ActionKit and Blue State Digital. Through these integrations we can automatically recognize your users when they arrive on the platform. You can also embed personalized event information directly into your emails so that your supporters can RSVP instantly without filling out a cumbersome form.
We’re passionate about applying engineering innovation to optimize every step your supporters take, pushing your action rates even higher.
We’re rolling out more updates each week to make your organizing more powerful as we count down the final 50 days to election day in the United States. We can’t wait to share the next improvements we have in store. If you’d like to deploy the platform for your movement, get in touch.