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