A Web-Based Platform To Build Advocacy Campaigns

Evolving Web has been involved in an ongoing collaboration with New/Mode since 2018 for the purpose of improving the user experience of their online platform, from onboarding new users to letting them launch impactful advocacy campaigns online.

The goal of this redesign is to create the most efficient and painless flow for New/Mode’s users to create advocacy campaigns in no time, with no effort. Our team at Evolving Web felt fortunate to be part of such a meaningful mission.

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, Tweet storms etc., which can be either embedded on their website or launched with New/Mode's built-in landing page.

Evolving Web and New/Mode worked together to create a simpler, more user-friendly campaign-generation platform geared towards individual activists and small grassroots organizations while migrating the New/Mode platform from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9.

Client priorities for the new platform design included:

• Switching from a developer-oriented layout to a design that inspires New/Mode’s core usership
• Providing users with the necessary “nudge” to create an account
• Supporting users before, during and after the creation of their online campaign
• Offering a new flow for the creation of advocacy campaigns that is easy and fast, while offering valuable functionalities to the users
• Providing the user with statistics to inform them how their campaign is doing

While the goals set out by New/Mode were clear, the path to achieving those goals evolved as the project progressed. 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.

Another challenge was striking a balance between the wide-ranging functionality of the original with the sought-after simplicity and ease-of-use of the new version. Although the original platform was more “developer” oriented, it did offer a range of options for campaign design that, while useful to many organizations, ran counter to the objectives of a simplified platform.

It became clear early on that two different products would be needed: a simplified, fast-action-oriented campaign creation workflow and another more complex platform that retained the more flexible options and features of the original. In the short term, the original version will continue to exist alongside the new version for those organizations that need the option of social media campaigns and other types of multi-channel campaign functionality. Eventually, these features will be folded into the new platform in the form of a paid tier, with the stripped-down version of the service being offered free-of-charge.

Much attention was given to creating a quality user experience. New features added to the platform have 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

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.