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Managing an Online Grassroots Movement

Friday, May 14th, 2010

You’re probably familiar with CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) solutions like Salesforce.com, Blackbaud Sphere, and even Convio.  These systems are great at storing contact info and great at managing a process like sales, but we’ve found they don’t really give nonprofit organizations the tools they need to:

1)Mobilize Supporters into Action
2)Manage their progress
3)Measure results in real time

The first problem we decided to tackle was the supporter database.  From our experience working with political campaigns and nonprofits, we realized that most organizations don’t need all of the features that bog down the leading CRM technologies and make them hard to use.  Another problem results from the chaos of supporter data across multiple lists and databases.  Add to that all of the new ways supporters expect to interact with your organization… like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you’ve got a real problem with supporter lists becoming fragmented and difficult to manage.

So we set out to build what we call SRM (Supporter Relationship Management), which redefines how a nonprofit can manage large groups of volunteers and supporters as they’re peforming actions both online and offline.  We’ve built a technology called Wildfire Platform that aggregates and connects all of these databases and social sources into a single platform that you can access from anywhere.

With other solutions, they’ve added integration with social network as an afterthought.  The social web is fundamentally changing the way nonprofit organizations interact with supporters.  The Wildfire Platform was built from the ground up to harness the power of the social web.

Posted in Company, Product, Social Media, Technical, grassroots, nonprofit | View Comments

Fundraising Widget Integration Screencast

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Below is the transcript from our Fundraising Widget Integration Screencast.

Hi, I’m Robert Dyson, a developer here at WeTheCitizens. I’d like to take a few minutes to show you how to integrate a fundraising widget into a website, be it your homepage or an external site. To set up a widget you’ll need to have a Fundraising Action Kit set up, which we went over in our last screencast. Check it out if you need a hand setting up your Fundraising Kit.

Let’s say your organization is conducting a fundraising drive, and you want all donations made on your website to be recorded in Wildfire… and you want your Wildfire supporters to receive Personal Impact when they make their donations. Integrating a fundraising widget allows you to do this.

Before beginning, you’ll need someone with basic HTML-editing skills in order to integrate the fundraising widget into your website. He or she will also need a basic text editor (I’m using a free code editor for the Mac called TextWrangler, but you can use a program of your choice, whether it’s Dreamweaver, Textmate, or even Notepad). Open the page that you want to embed your fundraising widget into. In this example, we’re going to call the embed page ‘donate.html’, and we’ll be integrating it into the landing page of one of our demo sites, Arcticause.

The first step is to include the Wildfire Service javascript in your web page. You can find the URL of this script by going to HQ > Admin > External Integration > Widgets/APIs. Under Javascript Widgets/APIs, you’ll find your unique Wildfire Service URL. Copy this URL and include it in the head of your webpage as you would any other Javascript URL, like so.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”*your wildfire-service.js url here*”></script>

Now, we need to insert the donation form into the page. First, we’ll need the ID of the fundraising kit you created. This can be found by going to HQ > Mobilization > Action Kits and clicking on the fundraising kit you want to create a donation form for. Copy the Kit ID. Back in the webpage we just created, set up a new widget tag, like so:

<wf:fundraising-form kitId=””></wf:fundraising-form>

You can find more information about widget tags, including Fundraising Widget tags, on our Support Wiki.

Paste the kit ID you just copied from HQ, and we’re done! Save the file, upload it to your webserver, and take a look. This fundraising form is now fully functional – donations can be made, they will be tracked in Wildfire, and impact will be awarded to supporters. You can have a designer style the widget as you wish, and add content above and below the form. Once you’re happy with the way your page looks, you can link to it from anywhere. Here we have a donation page on Arcticause using the Fundraising Widget. I’ll submit my donation, and observe that my action was recorded in HQ.

For more details on integrating widgets and if you have any questions or suggestions about this or any other feature, check out our support documentation at wildfiresupport.com and our Uservoice page page. Thanks for watching.

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Wildfire Platform v2.28 Released

Friday, September 25th, 2009

logosWe’re proud to announce that the 2.28 release of our Wildfire Platform went live last week. This release is focused on expanding upon and refining the existing features of the platform. Here are seven of the most exciting improvements you’ll find in v2.28:

  1. Team Auto-Join by Geography – Rather than relying on supporters to join their local team after signing up, they can now be automatically joined to teams based on their country, state, county and more.
  2. Simplified Mobilization Interface – We’ve implemented a more intuitive email-like interface for mobilizing supporters from Wildfire HQ, and have also added new filtering for mobilizations. You can check out a screenshot of the new interface above.
  3. Targeting Based on Action Kit – In addition to targeting supporters based on the types of actions they’ve completed, staff can now target based on completion of actions for a particular kit.
  4. List Opt-In – Staff can now indicate that a supporter list is an “opt-in” list when importing, eliminating the need to have supporters who have already opted-in for email communications do so again.
  5. Event Improvements – The Events section now has its own top-level navigation tab in the community. We’ve added a nicer browse events view, and we now allow any user to create an event in the community (there is also an option in HQ to disable this).
  6. HQ Performance – We spent some time optimizing the analytics and actions sections in HQ and made some drastic improvements here, including implementing an infrastructure for gathering statistics in real-time that will help make future analytics more up-to-date.
  7. Simpler Media Management – We simplified the media interface to make adding media to your community quicker and easier.

Check out the full v2.28 release notes on the Wildfire Support wiki.

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Wildfire Platform v2.27 Released

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

logosThe 2.27 release of the Wildfire Platform went live early yesterday morning. The focus of this release was almost exclusively on social media integration, from both the supporter mobilization side and a more general sharing approach. There’s a lot of great stuff in this release; here are some high points:

  • Post on Facebook and Post on Twitter Actions – Mobilize users to get your message out by asking them to update their Facebook or Twitter status to a suggested message.
  • Attend an Event Action – Core event functionality has been converted to use the Action infrastructure, allowing you to mobilize users to RSVP for, attend and pass-along Events.
  • View Website Action – Drive users to sites that are important to your cause and ask them to pass-along to friends.
  • Invite and Pass-Along via Facebook – Invite your friends to join and pass-along Actions using Facebook.
  • Share via Facebook, Digg, Twitter and more – Share Events, Media and Bulletins on you favorite social media sites using the AddThis widget.
  • Facebook Connect Improvements – Facebook profile information is now automatically pulled over on connect, and users can now update their profile picture from Facebook. Also, the login and signup flows have been tweaked to better handle connecting Facebook to existing Wildfire accounts.
  • Mobilize by Activating a URL – Actions can now be mobilized and tracked by using special URLs generated by Wildfire that can be posted anywhere on the web.
  • Signup API Method – Users can now be created via Wildfire’s REST API, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Wildfire signup into forms on any site.
  • UserVoice Integration – Wildfire HQ and the support wiki now include a UserVoice feedback widget to help you make your suggestions heard. You can also visit our UserVoice site directly at http://wildfireplatform.uservoice.com/.

In addition to these new features, we started adding the back-end infrastructure for our upcoming Fundraising Action during the past sprint. The Wildfire Support wiki has grown by leaps and bounds over the past month, as well. You should also check out the new demo video on the Wildfire Platform main page!

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Wildfire Platform v2.26 Released

Monday, July 20th, 2009

logosOur focus for this release was to create a unified interface for presenting Actions to the user, as well as enabling the user to easily share Actions via email from this interface. We also spent time polishing some of the rougher edges of the new Mobilization interface that was introduced in the previous 2.25 release. Here are some of the highlights from the new 2.26 release:

  1. Action Canvas – Most Actions are now presented in a unified interface that gives users a more intuitive view of the tasks at hand. It includes a progress meter, a list of items to complete and an Impact meter that is updated in in real-time to reflect the anticipated amount of Impact earned. This unified presentation of Actions also facilitates rapid development of additional Actions by the WTC team. The following Actions have already been converted, with many more slated for the next release:
    • Do External Action
    • Make Phone Calls
    • Recruit Friends
    • View/Download Resource
    • Door-to-Door

  2. Pass Along – Actions can now be easily passed along via email to friends both in- and out-of-network directly from the Action canvas. More methods of passing along are coming soon, including via Facebook and via embeddable links.
  3. Firebar – When performing External Actions, users now have a Wildfire toolbar (“Firebar” for short) at the top of the external page to provide context and enable them to log in or create an account, as well as to pass the current Action along to friends.
  4. HQ Mobilization Improvements – Pass Along activity is tracked alongside Mobilizations of the associated Actions, allowing staff to assess not only how their own mobilization efforts are progressing, but also the number of supporters who are sharing Actions with friends. We’ve also given some performance TLC to the Action Kits, Active Mobilizations and Action History screens.
  5. Update Profile from Facebook – Users can now update their profile information from Facebook at the click of a button.
  6. Improved HQ Create/Edit Screens – You can create Groups, Teams and Events much more easily using the new, simpler interface. The Action Kit creation screen now also allows default mobilization emails to be customized at the Kit level, and allows creation of Make Phone Calls and Go Door-to-Door Kits with no survey for those times when you just want to get the message out.

Last, but certainly not least, we have a shiny new support wiki: “Wildfire Support”. It already provides extensive documentation of the Wildfire Platform, and it’s growing all the time. If you haven’t checked it out, have a look: http://wildfiresupport.com/

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