MyActionCenter® was created to reinforce the NationBuilder ecosystem of tools available for organizations that need to capitalize on the full potential that emerges from actively engaging their supporters.

To that end, we have two principal goals:

 

1. Offer the best possible organizing web app for supporters completing actions for our clients in terms of experience, set of tools, usability, etc.
2. Harness the strength of NationBuilder’s powerful tools by taking them to the next level and making them the most accessible and effective that we can for our clients.

 

We’ve developed MyActionCenter with NationBuilder because we believe that these two tools, used together, are immensely effective in three key scenarios:

 

• Political parties that want to organize massive support.
• Activist organizations that want to organize amplified impact campaigns.
• Large foundations, NGOs or unions that want to build a community of members/volunteers highly committed to their organization(s).

 

Using NationBuilder in conjunction with MyActionCenter works because of three fundamental principles:

 

1. It’s a smart, simple, and necessary app concept:

Establish a digital headquarters to organize, engage, and supercharge your support daily.

 

2. It’s an easy, attractive, and gamified user experience that motivates users to return to the app weekly and strengthens their commitment as supporters:

Users log in, see their personalized dashboard of weekly actions, complete the actions implementing online/offline tasks, win points and badges to progress to the next user level and enjoy being part of the growth of the organization they support.

 

3. It’s an intelligent and effective use of NationBuilder’s powerful technology to provide organizations with a wide range of possibilities when launching different action flows, customizing communication, and maximizing the automatization of the work needed to feed the application.

 

We’d like to specifically address principle #3--how to use NationBuilder to help your clients accomplish amazing things in MyActionCenter.

With MyActionCenter, you can roll out a wide range of activities, from interacting in diverse ways with your supporters to monitoring their progress as activists. But, of course, everything in MyActionCenter is centred around the actions you launch as an organization and what you want your users to complete. Below you’ll see an extensive field of available possibilities in terms of action types and their relationship with NationBuilder elements.

 

 

Actions from NationBuilder page types.

In NationBuilder, many of the page types available are actually calls to action to mobilize supporters. In MyActionCenter we can convert these types of pages directly into available actions for users, so administrators of the app can continue to use the tools with which they are accustomed to working on in their nation, but with a significantly better response ratio. We are building engagement daily and delivering an experience totally gamified and incentivized, so the level of motivation and the willingness of supporters to take action is really high, increasing the likelihood of success.

 

Action types from giving new uses to some NationBuilder page types.

With the aim of trying to add as much value as possible, in MyActionCenter you can go a little further and create new types of actions derived from other NationBuilder page types. For example, the "Share Your Story" action type uses a Blog page type of NationBuilder. With this type, you can release actions in the app that allow the user to share stories with you and requests their consent to reshare their stories on social media profiles of your organization. The resharing feature is an excellent source for content creation for any organization. 

In addition, we have created a "Read a Story" action type, using basic page type. Through “Read a Story”,  an organization can track its supporters to see if they have read an important publication and can encourage them to reshare the publication on social media and/or to comment on them. This is a really useful tool for sharing important information with supporters, for example, on how to act in determined situations, or what your positions are on key campaign issues.

We also use basic page type to create special actions on social media. The integration between NationBuilder and Facebook and Twitter allow for ease of use in creating actions on social media, for example, "Like our Facebook page", "Follow us on Twitter", etc.

Another very special MyActionCenter action type using the basic page type is "Self-Reported" actions. Through these, you can generate a limitless number of actions to complete any online/offline task. You can launch actions of very different natures, such as "Tell your friends how we’re fighting for this cause", "Comment wherever you see there is fake news about us", "Put our sign in your yard", etc.

And what’s more, any action in MyActionCenter can automatically concatenate with any other creating specific action flows to achieve better self-reported organizing. For example, concatenating a “Share Your Story” action after the “Self-Reported” one allows users to share a story about the action they've just completed.

 

Actions using basic page type and saved filters.

Despite the complex internal processes that we’ve set up for a seamless user experience of  MyActionCenter, its final logical running is very simple. Any completed action in MyActionCenter ends up automatically assigning a tag with the name of the action to the user. In order for points to be assigned, badges to be earned, and for the action to appear on the dashboard as completed, the user must have been tagged with the name of the action. This system offers multiple possibilities when using NationBuilder as a backend because the handling of tags is something that works impressively well in it.

Similar to how any filter that you create provides the option of assigning a tag to anyone who matches the conditions of the filter now or in the future, you will have that any combination of filtering that we save will be susceptible of being an action to be completed in MyActionCenter. Here’s an example of how it works:

Say you want your publications on Twitter to have more reach. You can launch the action "Retweet 3 of our tweets" following the process of creating actions in MyActionCenter to create an action of this type.

 

 

Once the action is created and before launching it publicly, you can save a filter on our NationBuilder backend that tags anyone who has retweeted 3 of our tweets:

 

 

That way, when someone has reached the designated number of retweets, the action will appear as completed in their dashboard and will be assigned the corresponding points and badges.

 

 

Action types generated using NationBuilder custom fields.

MyActionCenter aims to help organizations create the perfect platform to organize highly active support forces. With this in mind, we want the app to be the perfect space to organize those supporters close to the organization who are willing to champion the organization by recruiting new people for the movement, signatures for petitions, endorsements, donations, etc.

To that end, in MyActionCenter we have created actions that establish weekly recruitment goals to regularly encourage and reward activity. With actions of the type "Recruit 5 friends this week", "Recruit 10 signatures for our requests this week" or "Recruit 2 new donors this week" you will be able to create and share recruitment links so the actions will appear as complete when the goal is reached. To do this, we internally use new custom fields that we create and "liquid", to complete the entire process of assigning tags, points, etc. In addition, you can grant special badges for supporters who reach a certain number of recruits.

Actions promoting initiatives on any other website of your nation.

As MyActionCenter is fully integrated into the nation of your organization and they share the user base, you can promote the launch of any initiative of any of your public websites from MyActionCenter.

If, for example, you launch a petition on the public website of your organization, you can easily convert it into action within MyActionCenter so that your supporters can sign and share it. You can even create action flows so that once they sign it, a self-reported action that encourages them to share the petition with their co-workers or any other action that we find interesting to chain.

 

Actions derived from integrations with New / Mode and Callhub.

Client organizations that have an account in New / Mode and have generated the integration of the same in their nation, can take advantage of the full potential of this application to extend the reach of MyActionCenter, allowing for the seamless launching of several types of actions, including:

 

• Emailing decision-makers
• Calling decision-makers
• Tweeting @ decision-makers
• Sending letters to editors of local publications
• Pledging support for an issue or candidate

 

Each of these actions substantially increases the potential impact of your supporters.

With respect to Callhub, the idea is the same, but, unlike with New / Mode with which integration is fully available, we are still in the process of development with Callhub and will soon make it available to our clients. Giving clients the possibility of creating actions in MyActionCenter allows them to take advantage of the full potential of this impressive voice broadcasting technology.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless when it comes to organizing coordinated activity movements and engagement strategies among your supporters and even more so if you start to draw slightly more complex flows of action and take into account the possibilities of personalization and segmentation to implement even more advanced strategies. We’ll discuss that in Part II of this article.

 

In the meantime, we invite you to request a personal demo with our product coordinator to see a live run at www.myaction.center/contact.

Finally,  we’d like to remind you that if you are a NationBuilder architect, you can ask for our special referral fees in case you think that MyActionCenter might be of interest to any of your clients.