A Web-Based Platform To Build Advocacy Campaigns

New/Mode serves a network of non-profit organizations and social impact investors so that those organizations can focus on the issues that their communities truly care about. Evolving Web has been involved in an ongoing collaboration with New/Mode since 2019 to improve the user experience and underlying technology of their online platform, which helps advocacy organizations launch campaigns and embed them in their existing websites. 

We collaborate with the New/Mode team to conduct user research to better engage grassroots supporters of activist causes as well as campaign organizers, funders and other key backers. We’ve worked with the client’s product team to work towards a redesign of the onboarding process for organizations creating campaigns. We also provide continuous improvement to the technology stack behind the platform, particularly the Drupal features underlying the multi-channel technology stack.
 

New/Mode is a multi-channel advocacy and civic engagement platform used by organizations and activists. Founded in 2016, it is supported and owned by a network of non-profit groups and social impact investors and aims to empower real people and communities by helping the world's most important causes activate grassroots support, reach decision-makers and win campaigns on the issues.

New/Mode currently operates across North America, Europe, and Australasia, but their tools can be used everywhere that participatory democracy exists. With New/Mode, users can access the most robust and accurate database to reach decision-makers at every level of government or add their custom datasets of targets. Users can then create different types of campaigns, such as targeted emails, petitions, personalized calls, and social media storms. Calls for supporters to act can be either embedded on the organization’s website or launched with New/Mode's built-in landing page.

All our projects together have worked towards a simpler, more user-friendly campaign-generation platform geared towards individual activists and small grassroots organizations, keeping the Drupal technology stack secure and up-to-date, and leveraging integrations with third-party tools efficiently. We’ve also worked on product strategy with New/Mode with the specific goals of increasing the organization’s role in building connections between campaigners and their supporters and inspiring New/Mode’s core usership.

The scope of the project expanded considerably from the original goal of upgrading the platform from Drupal 7 to 9, with New/Mode deciding to move from a strictly sales-oriented business model to a product-oriented model centred on a sleek, user-friendly campaign-creation platform.

One challenge was striking a balance between a solution that provides wide-ranging functionality and a more stream-lined product that focuses on key features for campaigners. The original platform was more “developer” oriented, offering a range of options for campaign design that, while useful to many organizations, ran counter to the objectives of a simplified platform.

Evolving Web has worked with New/Mode to provide continuous improvement to their advocacy platform. We upgraded the platform from Drupal 7 to 9. We’ve helped New/Mode make their platform available to a much wider audience by providing enhanced localization and subscription features, user experience improvements, among other updates and changes. We’ve also conducted research with advocacy organizations, individual activists, and small grassroots organizations to gather their needs and requirements.

Our work has included:

• A new dashboard experience where the user can easily access and filter through all their active, draft and closed campaigns
• A user interface with consistent placement of the onboarding tips and tricks that can be toggled on and off
• A brand new flow for creating new campaigns, wherein the user can now see an overview of all the steps they will need to take to launch their campaign and easily navigate through each step and return to their campaign overview at any time
• An easy drag-and-drop page builder
• The ability for users to review their campaign with peers and send test emails pre-launch
• Address-based lookups that use data from shapefiles and csv files to make it easy for clients to target federal agencies
• Calls to action designed to incentivize users to explore the next steps in creating actions and experience the value that the platform can bring, thus maximizing the chances of conversion to paid subscription
• A full rebranding with a rebellious, provocative design for marketing purposes on the front-end and a calm, friendly interface for the interior platform
• Improvements to user workflows around company accounts and subaccounts
• Chargebee integration to allow for seamless customer subscriptions
• Integration of the New/Mode API with the Parsons platform so that apps can easily connect with and consume data from New/Mode
• A data scraper that gathers information about Canadian municipalities and make this easily available to the New/Mode network
• A product feature to facilitate social outreach for member organizations
  Integration of increased pricing options for members
• Multilingual support
• Integration of automated testing feature (Cypress-based E2E testing) to reduce time for manual testing for QA for the development team
• Development of a roadmap for expansion, doing market research and proposing potential product directions to simplify the default campaign creation experience for most users, while providing more advanced features to users 
• UX recommendations to provide users with the necessary “nudge” to create an account and support users before, during and after the creation of their online campaign
• Design of a new flow for the creation of advocacy campaigns that is easy and fast, while offering advanced functionality and providing statistics about campaign results
   

The current New/Mode platform is the result of an ongoing partnership with Evolving Web and continuous improvement. The result has been a very sharp-looking, smoothly functioning and easy-to-use platform that gets campaigns off the ground quickly while gently nudging users towards paid subscriptions by way of a wider range of offerings. Our market research work has led to new insights into New/Mode’s competitive landscape and potential development of new features and platforms. Our team at Evolving Web is proud to be part of New/Mode’s work to support mission-driven organizations.