Online petitions

vbudnick

Our nonprofit needs to generate some citizen advocacy due to some recent events. At this time, we do not have the Convio Advocacy module.

Has anyone successfully launched an online petition or advocacy campaign using Convio without using the Advocacy module? If so, would you be willing to share with me either through this forum or offline how you approached it?

Vanessa Budnick

SPCA of Wake County

Adrian Cotter

Hey Vanessa,

We've done petitions before using surveys. We have the advocacy module as well, but if you don't need/want the results to be actually be sent directly and immediately to the target, then a "survey" form can work well. You could then collate the results and send it on.

Whether or not you would have the user registration fields in there is up to you (to sign them up for your site and whatever email newsletters you have). We've done one where we still collected names and email address, but they were the non-standard fields so people were not automatically signed up (this was for a campaign where we partnered with others, so there were issues around registering people as site users).

What are the goals of the campaign?

vbudnick

Adrian Cotter:

Hey Vanessa,

We've done petitions before using surveys. We have the advocacy module as well, but if you don't need/want the results to be actually be sent directly and immediately to the target, then a "survey" form can work well. You could then collate the results and send it on.

Whether or not you would have the user registration fields in there is up to you (to sign them up for your site and whatever email newsletters you have). We've done one where we still collected names and email address, but they were the non-standard fields so people were not automatically signed up (this was for a campaign where we partnered with others, so there were issues around registering people as site users).

What are the goals of the campaign?

Hi Adrian,

The objective of our campaign is to engage our citizenry to let the county know that they care about the animals in our community and how those animals are treated in the county shelter. I talked to another organization since posting this and they indicated a preference for utilizing a form letter that constituents can digitally "sign" and email to policy makers as opposed to a petition.

So, I now have a few follow-up questions for you: when you did the petition utilizing the "survey" tool, what did you require in lieu of the "signature" that was acceptable to policy makers? And, have you ever used Convio for a campaign where you provided a form letter that citizens could digitally sign and then submit to policy makers through your website without utilizing the Advocacy module? If so, how did you tackle it on the administrator side of Convio?

vbudnick

Adrian Cotter:

Hey Vanessa,

We've done petitions before using surveys. We have the advocacy module as well, but if you don't need/want the results to be actually be sent directly and immediately to the target, then a "survey" form can work well. You could then collate the results and send it on.

Whether or not you would have the user registration fields in there is up to you (to sign them up for your site and whatever email newsletters you have). We've done one where we still collected names and email address, but they were the non-standard fields so people were not automatically signed up (this was for a campaign where we partnered with others, so there were issues around registering people as site users).

What are the goals of the campaign?

The goals of the e-portion of the campaign:

to inform and influence the elected officials responsible for endorsing -- or not -- a new issue soon to come before them

to educate this elected body on the opinions of their constituents

Adrian Cotter

vbudnick :

Hi Adrian,

The objective of our campaign is to engage our citizenry to let the county know that they care about the animals in our community and how those animals are treated in the county shelter. I talked to another organization since posting this and they indicated a preference for utilizing a form letter that constituents can digitally "sign" and email to policy makers as opposed to a petition.

So, I now have a few follow-up questions for you: when you did the petition utilizing the "survey" tool, what did you require in lieu of the "signature" that was acceptable to policy makers? And, have you ever used Convio for a campaign where you provided a form letter that citizens could digitally sign and then submit to policy makers through your website without utilizing the Advocacy module? If so, how did you tackle it on the administrator side of Convio?

When you did the petition utilizing the "survey" tool, what did you require in lieu of the "signature" that was acceptable to policy makers?

Well advocacy doesn't really require a signature either. The signature is the address, and email. Address so that they know if the person is a constuent.

And, have you ever used Convio for a campaign where you provided a form letter that citizens could digitally sign and then submit to policy makers through your website without utilizing the Advocacy module? If so, how did you tackle it on the administrator side of Convio?

Yes I believe we have. Survey results are packaged together in reports, so that you can download it as a CSV file and bring it into EXCEL and format it however you want. A stack of letters could then be handed to the policy makers. So its less about flooding the policy makers email box and more making it into an event where you present the signed petitions.