In 2020, we accomplished one of our biggest goals to date: helping Joe Biden and other progressive and Democratic candidates get elected to office. Nearly 1,000 partner campaigns and organizations used Outvote to send over 15,000 million messages to voters during the 2020 election cycle.
But our work didn’t stop there — in the past year and a half, we’ve continued working with a variety of partners to help promote the COVID-19 vaccine, advocate for stronger voting rights, and more. We’ve made a number of product improvements to evolve into a more versatile and advanced tool to better serve our clients.
As we enter another pivotal election season and welcome back familiar faces from around the movement, we thought it would be helpful to provide an overview of how Impactive has improved since 2020. If you loved Outvote in 2020, we think you’ll love Impactive in 2022 even more!
Here are a few of our key updates since 2020:
Enjoy a smoother volunteer experience.
One of our foremost priorities is an easy, accessible volunteer experience. As organizers and volunteers ourselves, we know that a seamless volunteer experience is non-negotiable for scalable mobilization. Therefore, we simplified our campaign and actions feed to improve the volunteer experience on both our mobile and web apps.
Previously, volunteers had access to one feed that displayed actions from every campaign they joined. However, that structure was sometimes confusing for “super volunteers” who were part of multiple campaigns. Now, volunteers access a streamlined action feed that displays content from only one campaign at a time. Volunteers can switch to another campaign using the drop-down navigation at the top of the screen.
To look for a specific action, volunteers can filter by action types, search for actions with keywords, save/archive actions, or view featured actions at the top of their feed.
Read more about our refreshed volunteer experience here.
Manage volunteers and contacts management more easily.
Successful organizing relies on smooth volunteer management. So, we’ve improved the way administrators organize their volunteers with two key updates:
New and Improved Teams 2.0
In 2020, we found that the ability to create teams and track success on leaderboards motivated volunteers to take more action. Volunteers created their own teams on Impactive to participate in friendly competition and rise up the leaderboard.
So, we expanded our teams functionality to better serve the needs of our clients. Now, campaigns can create teams of staffers and/or volunteers in whatever way that works best for them. Create volunteer teams based on location, shared affinities, or issue focus with dedicated team leaders. Then, send targeted actions to specific teams.
With this update, campaigns can also:
- Send announcements, encouragements, or calls to action to an entire team via push notification, broadcast text, or direct message.
- Encourage team members to interact with each other using team chats, a team-specific group chat within the Impactive inbox
- Track performance and individual volunteer engagement by team
- View and download data like total messages sent and reports filled for each team
Interested in learning more? Watch our recorded demo of Teams 2.0 here.
Advanced Filters for User and Contact Management
Enjoy more comprehensive filters on Impactive to segment users and contacts effortlessly.
Within the user management tabs, you can use improved filters to segment users by lists, roles, and tags. We’ve also added new AND/OR options so campaigns can filter with greater specificity and search through specific universes of users. Plus, organize users with a new tagging functionality, which allows you to tag users individually or in batches.
Within our contact management tabs, campaigns can build contact lists directly on Impactive without jumping back to their CRMs. Updated filters like is/is not, received/not received, and has/has not facilitate easy segmentation.
Learn more about user filters here and contact filters here.
Experience unprecedented advancements with the release of our new Phone Banking tool.
With all the insights we gathered from building powerful organizing tech, we reinvented one of the most essential outreach tools: phone banking. We launched the first phone banking tool with full functionality on web and mobile, and our predictive dialer offers ease of use like never before with key features like:
- An intuitive user experience that guides volunteers through the phone banking process
- A user-friendly script builder with no complex IF/THEN setups to create dynamic scripts
- Real-time performance tracking with the ability to edit scripts without pausing a phone bank
- Campaign-led call queuing, eliminating any bottlenecks due to third-party calling agents
Built entirely in-house, our phone banking tool syncs to our Broadcast Texting and Peer-to-Peer Texting tools so you can continue the conversation via text.
Read more about the full functionality of our dialer here.
Text millions of subscribers at once with our streamlined Broadcast Texting tool.
Expand your SMS outreach activity on Impactive with Broadcast Texting. Import existing broadcast lists to Impactive and start texting supporters right away!
Our Broadcast Texting tool is supercharged with features for seamless communication, including options for:
- Two-way communication after an initial text, just like Peer-to-Peer Texting (campaigns can designate specific volunteers or staff to respond to these messages)
- Follow-up scripts for quick responses to broadcast message replies
- Filling reports on broadcast recipients, which can be synced back to your CRM
- Custom automatic responses for specific opt-in forms or keywords
- Performance tracking with metrics on all messages sent, link clicks, response rates, follow-ups, and opt outs
Any broadcast message responses will appear in the same Impactive inbox that houses peer-to-peer and relational messages. Also, our Broadcast Texting tool is linked to our opt-in form functionality, which allows supporters to subscribe to broadcast messages in just two clicks. Read more about Broadcast Texting on Impactive here.
Access expanded performance reporting and data-driven insights in minutes.
Significant updates to our reporting features provide campaigns with greater visibility and insight into their outreach and engagement efforts.
Track engagement on links within and outside your Impactive campaign.
This year, we released trackable links functionality, making it easier for campaigns to measure engagement on their links. Campaigns can leverage two distinct link types:
- Generate any non-Impactive URL into custom links and track clicks to your websites, event links, or landing pages.
- Share automatically generated Impactive links to invite people to your campaign or specific actions.
With trackable links, you’ll be able to view and export link performance across actions, users, contacts, and more.
Learn more about trackable links here.
Export custom and pre-built reports.
We’ve rolled out templated reports so campaigns can focus on metrics most important to their work. Previously, exported CSV files revealed a full overview of performance metrics (which may have been too comprehensive for some campaigns). Now, campaigns can download simple and templated reports that provide information on:
- All contacts
- All types of actions
- All user engagement
- All engagement on links
- And more!
Each of these reports can be further filtered for greater specificity before export. Learn more about all the ways you can export data here.
Some things never change: we’re still the leading relational organizing tool.
Relational organizing remains our top priority, and we’re committed to increasing accessibility for relational organizing in 2022 and beyond. It’s the most authentic way to build power; we also know that it’s incredibly effective.
That’s why we partnered with The Analyst Institute and Community Change Action during the 2020 elections to measure the power of relational organizing. This study found that outreach from a friend or family member via Impactive makes a contact 6.5x more likely to sign a petition and 8x more likely to opt-in to an organizing event. Plus, results from our largest-ever relational organizing study with the Columbia Data Science Institute indicate that relational organizing is the most effective way to GOTV.
We look forward to helping campaigns replicate this success with our ever-improving Friends and Family Messaging suite.
Once again, we face a crucial election season that will significantly impact the future of our democracy. We're grateful that so many partners joined our community in 2020, and we look forward to welcoming you back. We know that organizers are hard at work to drive sustained progress, and we're confident that our all-in-one platform delivers the reliability and scalability required for this vital work.
Returning partners that want to get started with Impactive right away can reach out to support@impactive.io to reactivate their accounts. Otherwise, feel free to schedule a demo of our newest improvements here.
