At ClientCon 2020, I ran a presentation called “10 More Features Every Client Should Use,” intended to help clients get the most out of ActionKit.
This is the second in the series, continuing from “10 Features Every Client Should Use” I originally ran in 2019.
In both of these presentations, I wanted to highlight a handful of different features that every client would find useful and wanted it to be a good mix — some things quick and easy, others that would take a little more time to set up fully. Here’s a brief overview:
Tag your Pages and Mailings
Tagging your pages and mailings allows you to create robust reporting on the performance of your pages and mailings by category. Tagging is especially useful when using prefixes, like topic-immigration instead of just immigration, as this allows you to group similar tags together.
It’s also never too late to go back and tag old pages and mailings! Not only will your page tags be applied to action takers retroactively, but our advanced search and bulk edit features make tagging old pages and mailings a quick job.
Re-engagement
Setting up a re-engagement process is one of the best ways to boost your open, click, and action rates — as well as your deliverability.
Avoid getting pushed into the spam folder or promotions tab by only sending to your most engaged supporters — and letting the old email addresses go.
New ActBlue Sync
A few long-time ActionKit clients are still using the legacy ActBlue sync, which has a few problems: it erroneously treats recurring donations as multiple one-time donations, refunds don’t show up correctly, and sync failures aren’t recorded.
We built our own ActBlue sync to solve these problems, and almost everyone has happily switched over.
If you’re still using the legacy ActBlue sync, file a support ticket and ask about moving over to the new ActBlue sync!
Always use HTTPS
Web browsers will display warnings in the URL bar for sites that are not using HTTPS. This can cause your visitors to pause and ask themselves “What does it mean that this site isn’t secure? Should I not sign this petition? Does this mean I shouldn’t make a donation?”
We can turn on the “Always use HTTPS” feature for you to prevent these types of warnings, but before we do, you’ll need to make sure all of your images, CSS, Javascript, and any other assets are being loaded using HTTPS, not HTTP.
Once you’ve made these updates in your templatesets, we can flip the switch on our end. Just open up a support ticket and we’ll do the rest!
Review Staff Access
It’s always a good idea to periodically review staff accounts that have access to your ActionKit (or any other system, really) and disable the ones you aren’t using anymore.
The Staff query type in the Query Builder can help you make a quick report of your staff users, who has what access, and when they’ve last logged in.
Just be careful not to disable admin (that’s us!), or any other users that are used by your integrations like ActBlue.
Custom Page Fields
Custom page fields allow you to make big and small changes to your pages without needing a lot of ongoing code changes. This year, we focused on how to add custom Javascript code on a one-off basis.
Timed Sends
Timed sends allow you to deliver mailing to a user in their specific time zone. In other words, if you’ve found that 10:00 am is the best time to send for your users, you can make sure they receive your mailing at 10:00 am — no matter where they live.
Custom User Fields
Custom User Fields allow you to store information about a user like their employer, occupation, membership level, and so much more.
You can also target your mailings based on what’s stored in these custom fields, and we’ve added a new feature to imports that allow you to import data into custom user fields lightning fast.
Cross-site prefill
Cross-site prefill uses a cross-client shared pool of user profiles in order to pre-fill known user data into your form and boost action rates. This is similar to, but different than user recognition based on AKID.
Stop Spam with Recaptcha Challenges
ActionKit has built-in protection against spam bots, but if you find that spammers are still getting through, you can add a Recaptcha challenge to your page.
It’s also possible to configure Recaptcha site-wide and use a custom page field to disable these on a one-off basis for your pages if needed.
To learn more about setting these up, check out the video 10 More Features Every Client Should Use — and file a support ticket if you have any questions or have difficulty setting these up!
Interested in scheduling a demo with ActionKit? Let us know!