Partnership Updates: Announcing Coalitions

Over the past few weeks, ControlShift has been working on a series of updates to the partnerships feature. We’re excited to announce our first round updates! Our updates were informed by feature requests we've received from customers and conversations with organizations using the partnerships feature heavily – we hope these updates will open up new organizing opportunities for you and your allies.

We're excited to announce that with our recent updates to the partnerships feature, we've now added support for coalition campaigns. This change allows for bigger and more advanced collaborations.

• You can bring together local organizations across the country to work on a national initiative. Local partners can co-sponsor the campaigns in their area. (This could also be paired with our efforts tool.)
• You can work with the leading organizations on an issue to run a single petition campaign, with each organization helping to recruit petition signers.
• You can cohost a training session with other organizations to share campaign strategies and plan next steps for a campaign.

Coalitions

When running a coalition petition or event, each admin-added organizations will be shown in the Partners section of the petition and event page.

Adding Coalition Members

Once a petition or event is created, you can start adding coalition members to the page. To do so, go to the event or petition page > Admin > Add to Partnership in the Associations section.

This section will show all existing partners, and partners can be added or removed at any time by org admins with the appropriate permissions. 

Please note: Petitions and events cannot be created directly within a coalition. At the time of creation, a petition or standalone event can be associated with only one partner. Once created, an org admin will need to manually associate these petitions and events with additional members of the coalition.

Signature Sharing

Each coalition member has its own partner parameter that allows them to collect signups – the partner parameter is the same as the partnership's slug which is the end of the URL when viewing their partnership hub page. For example, for the partnership at: https://demo.controlshiftlabs.com/partnerships/frack-free-moon, the slug is frack-free-moon.

When viewing the petition signature or event RSVP page, supporters will see no, one, or all partner opt-ins depending on the URL that's used:

• If the promote URL is used (e.g. https://demo.controlshiftlabs.com/promote/petitions/we-want-more-parks-houston) then no partnership opt-ins or disclaimer will be shown, only your organization's opt-in.
  
  
• If a partner parameter is present (e.g. https://demo.controlshiftlabs.com/petitions/save-the-moon?partner=frack-free-moon) then only the opt-in and/or disclaimer from that partnership will be shown. (This parameter will also move the partner's logo up the page so that it's displayed prominently next to the petition creator as well as being included in the coalition list.) 
  
  
• If no partner parameter is present, the supporter will see the opt-ins or disclaimers for all coalition partners and your organization. As an organization, you can choose the display of these opt-ins (from Settings > Options > Partnerships). By default we'll show each of the partner's opt-ins separately on the form. If you choose, you can set a 'roll-up' opt-in that allows the supporter to opt in or out from all coalition partners at once. The rolled up opt-in can be expanded to see each individual partner's opt-in.
   

Only partners who have been listed as members of the petition or event coalition will have their opt-in shown on the form. If the partner parameter of another partnership (even if it exists on your site but is not collaborating on the specific petition or event) is used in the URL, their opt-in information will not be shown. Instead we'll show the 'no partner parameter' view. 

An org admin's view of a particular signature or RSVP will now reflect all partner opt-ins that were shown to the user and whether they opted in or out of each. If a user subscribed to multiple partnerships, each will be listed in the org admin's signature and RSVP CSV exports. 

Better admin experiences

We’ve also updated experiences for both org admins and partners staff.

• For org admins, the list of partnerships now has filter and sort controls to make it easier to find a particular organization.
• We've also updated the org admin list of petitions in a partnership to have the same filter and sort controls as other petition lists. 
• For partner admins, we’ve added a new Settings page, which allows them to update their organization’s name, description, and logo.
• Partners with export privileges can now also perform exports by date – allowing them to only export their newest supporters.
• We've also streamlined the columns included in the partner export of subscribers – removing some information that wasn't helpful for partners. 

This is the first round of partnership-focused updates, and we have additional changes in the works. If you're not already subscribed to our mailing list, subscribing is the best way to ensure that you receive regular updates about new features.