Organization-Led Events and Petitions

The heart of ControlShift is and has always been distributed organizing where local supporters take the lead. However, our organizations are also increasingly interested in running official events and petitions – sponsored by the organization itself – on ControlShift. To support that work, we're rolling out a new feature: organizational identity for events and petitions.

Organizational identity makes it easy for organizations to set up these officially-sponsored events and petitions – and keep them visually separate from your distributed organizing work.

What are organization-led events and petitions?

These events and petitions are officially sponsored by the organization. They're not publicly tied to an individual creator, but are instead associated with your organization as a whole. They are likely to be visually distinct (in terms of branding) from the distributed events and petitions created by supporters. When organizational events are created by staff members who also have moderation privileges, moderation of these events will not be required.

How do I configure our organizational identity?

You'll find the configuration options in your org admin > Settings > Options > Staff-Led Campaign Settings.

From here you can configure some basic settings that will be used with organization-led events and petitions: 

• Display campaign creator section: If this option is unchecked, we'll hide the campaign creator section of the event and petition page. If the option is checked, we'll use the information in this section to fill the campaign creator section.
• Campaign creator's name: Because these events and petitions are sponsored by the organization as a whole, you can set the name you'd like us to use in place of the campaign's creator. If you've chosen to display the campaign creator section, the name you set here will be used on the event or petition page. If you've hidden that section, the name you set here will be used in place of the campaign creator's name in things like emails.
• Campaign creator's profile image: This would normally be your organization's logo and will take the place of the campaign creator's image or avatar in the campaign creator section and on lookup pages.
• Campaign creator's reply-to address: If you'd like replies by email to be sent to a different email address you can configure that email address here. This could be used to send notifications about replies to a shared address.
• Theme: If you'd like these events and petitions to use different colors, fonts, logos, or links than the other events and petitions on your site, this is where you can configure that setting. You'll need to create the new theme first and then select it in the settings here.

Who can create organizational events and petitions?

Org admins with the new "Create staff-led" permission can create organizational events and/or petitions. Members of the Owners team will be given this permission automatically along with any teams that grant "Events:Everything", but any other teams will need to be updated to include this permission if you'd like the members of that team to have that ability. 

What does the setup of organizational events and petitions look like?

The set up process is the same as other events and petitions. The only difference is that admins with the appropriate permission will see a staff-led toggle that can be used to designate the newly created event or petition as staff-led.

Once the event or petition has been submitted, it will be sent to the moderation queue like any other event or petition. However in the moderation queue, we'll show a note that the object is set up to be an organization-led event or petition. The staff member who created the event or petition will be included in the moderation queue too.

Is this all available now?

No, we're rolling out the creation of organization-led events first, with additional features to follow. Admins with the appropriate permission will see the option to create organization-led events in the coming days. Here's what's still to come: 

• Organization-led petitions: This will be the mirror feature, allowing for 'official' petitions that are sponsored by the organization itself.
• Conversion to organization-led: This will allow admins with the appropriate permission to convert existing events and petitions to organization-led versions via the event or petition's admin Settings page. 
• Upload of organization-led events: When uploading a list of events via CSV there will be a new column allowing the uploader to designate these events as 'official.'
• Moderation not required: We'll be changing the way that moderation works for events and petitions. When events or petitions are created by a staff member with moderation privileges, we'll no longer require that the content be moderated. This will affect both organization-led petitions and petitions created under the moderator's identity. Our goal is to make the admin experience as easy as possible.