Improving Communications Between Supporters
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.
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.