Volunteers, activists, organizers: whatever you call them, they’re at the heart of the Impactive community. Over the last several years, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have taken action on Impactive. In the last election cycle alone, Impactive volunteers contacted over 70 million Americans and sent over 150 million text messages, all in the name of positive social impact.
Given how vital volunteers are for building an active, impact-focused community, we’re thrilled to announce a refreshed volunteer experience on Impactive. Here are the new changes volunteers can enjoy:
We've released a clearer onboarding flow for new volunteers. When volunteers download the Impactive app, they are now required to enter a campaign code or search and select a campaign. This update should reduce confusion and ensure that every volunteer can begin taking action immediately upon downloading Impactive.
Administrators, note that the best way to invite volunteers to your campaign is to invite them by email or phone number directly from the mobile dashboard; after receiving that invite, volunteers will be automatically subscribed to your campaign.
Volunteers have sent millions of text messages to their friends and family, which has made a measurable impact on election outcomes. But we realize that texts are not the only way to reach out to your contacts; phone calls, emails, or DMs on social media make more sense for some relationships. That’s why volunteers are now able to select which form of communication they’d like to use to reach out to their contacts.
Administrators, you can designate different contact scripts for each channel (text message, phone, email, or social messaging) to ensure volunteers have the most effective messaging for each form of outreach. And don’t forget, you can now attach images to friends and family messaging scripts! (To send only an image, create an empty initial script.)
We greatly appreciate our “super volunteers,” those that join multiple campaigns at one time and make an impact for all of them. However, we recognize that the experience of being subscribed to multiple campaigns sometimes caused confusion, and made it difficult to find specific actions. That’s why we launched a redesigned action feed so volunteers view content from only one campaign at a time. (It's easy to switch between campaigns from the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.)
We went one step further by adding functionality to filter action types, search for actions using keywords, save actions, and archive them. Overall, it's much easier to choose exactly how to engage with campaigns: less time searching, more time making a difference.
Volunteers’ contact management system has been upgraded, so it's much easier to manage individual contact relationships, add contacts, and more. Volunteers are able to perform bulk actions with their contacts: send a bulk invite to download Impactive, or remove contacts in bulk. It's also easier to filter contacts according to contact status, voting information, and custom tags. Lastly, volunteers can add a new contact to Impactive without re-syncing contacts from their phone. Soon, it'll also be possible to send friends and family messages (or reach out through other communication channels) to contacts directly from contact profile pages.
Volunteers are often sending hundreds or even thousands of peer-to-peer messages in one text banking session, which can quickly clutter up the inbox. We’ve redesigned the conversation inbox in our web app with color-coding for new conversations, filters for “Unread” and “Needs Attention” threads, a clearer way to insert follow-up scripts, a simplified reporting panel, and more. This update allows power users to participate in text banks in their web browser with much less friction, and should allow them to focus on high-quality conversations with contacts. Volunteers can also archive conversations with a quick swipe left to simplify their inbox.
Our mobile inbox has also been refreshed in line with these improvements.
In a future release later this year, we’ll be adding the option to filter conversations based on custom tags or fields. We’ll also introduce “team chat” functionality, where administrators can facilitate an ongoing conversation with their volunteers.
Volunteering for campaigns is uniquely motivating when your team is competing to make the most impact. We made it easier for volunteers to check in on their teams and leaderboards; a new Leaderboard tab makes it easy to view and join top teams and view their stats. Teams also have a new location on volunteers’ profiles, making it easier to check in on teams’ progress.
Read our Help Center article here for a detailed view of the mobile app changes and here for web inbox changes.
We’re excited for volunteers to begin exploring these upgrades. We welcome feedback as we continue to improve our experience for activists looking to make a difference. Administrators, if you have questions on any of these upcoming changes, or need help communicating them to your volunteer teams, reach out to support@impactive.io.
