My name is Paul Hogarth, and I work on the activism team at Daily Kos. You may not have read my blog posts, but you probably get my emails.
As Chris Bowers explained, online petitions are essential to digital activism.
Not only can they supplement existing campaigns on the ground and pressure targets at strategic times, but they serve as a "sign-up" form for your organization—so that we can be powerful and effective at future efforts.
Campaign Action
The bigger our email list, the more emails and phone calls we can generate to members of Congress and other decision makers, the more volunteers we recruit for campaigns, the more money we can raise for candidates.
In other words, the more powerful we can be at fighting the Trump regime.
So even a petition with no clear "theory of change" (such as Sign if you agree: Donald Trump is a fascist) is important for the progressive movement if it helps us engage more people.
I have worked on the activism team since May 2013, and over time my job has evolved so that I focus on our organic list growth. When I started, we had about 600,000 people on our email list. We finally reached 2 million this summer, where it stayed for the rest of the campaign season.
And then the disastrous election happened and people turned to us for help. This petition to elect the president by popular vote went viral, and we jumped to 2.7 million people in a week. We are now at 2.817 million email subscribers.
Everyone on our activism team is responsible for this amazing progress, but I wanted to focus today on the three channels I work on to help push our organic list growth so that we are bigger and more influential: (a) ActionSprout, (b) petition embeds and (c) the splash.
ActionSprout: Converting Facebook audience to email
The petition to elect our president by popular vote (asking more states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact) allowed our list to grow by a third overnight—and most of these names came from Facebook.
We promoted the petition through a Facebook app called ActionSprout.
Rather than link to a petition page on our Facebook feed (which our social media team did pre-2014), ActionSprout allows Facebook users to sign by clicking on a link without leaving their feed.
And they are far more likely to be new to our email list than most other sources.
Each morning, I download our signers from ActionSprout and upload them into our email list. I then send out a "welcome email" to the list, asking them to sign a petition that had already proven to be effective. I repeat the same process over for other new organic names.
Since we started using ActionSprout in early 2014, over 800,000 people have joined the Daily Kos email list—of whom 667,046 are still subscribed.
That means ActionSprout now accounts for approximately one quarter of our list size, and our intent is to keep expanding upon this.
Embedding organic petitions into blog posts
Daily Kos is a political news site, and what the activism team does is help liberals go from "reading the news" to "making the news."
Did Donald Trump's latest atrocity make you angry, and you want to do something? Here's a petition on the relevant topic that you can sign.
Since 2014, we have had the capability of embedding petitions inside Daily Kos blog posts.
So now when my colleague Carissa Miller writes about the campaign against Jeff Sessions, we can embed a petition right in her blog post opposing Sessions as Attorney General.
If a blog post goes viral and gets a lot of new traffic, a petition embed can help us "capture" a whole new audience of online activists who had never signed one of our petitions before. Which is great, since we want to expand and diversify the Daily Kos audience and community.
Every day while at work, I have the following tab open in my browser from Chartbeat—a website that monitors and live-streams current traffic on Daily Kos:
Notice this configuration does not track all traffic on Daily Kos—but instead I zeroed in on "new" traffic (which Chartbeat counts as computers that have not been to Daily Kos for at least 30 days).
What I want to know is: what specific stories on Daily Kos are attracting this new audience, and do we have any petitions on the same subject that could be embedded in the blog post?
If it's a staff-authored post, I reach out to the author and ask them to have it embedded.
I also curate the Daily Kos Campaigns page—which features our top 10 petitions that we most want embedded.
Before you write your next blog post, be sure to check out the Daily Kos Campaigns page (which you can also access from the “Action” pull-down menu at the top of our website.)
If there's a relevant organic petition, please take a minute to embed it inside your post.
How do you embed a petition in your blog post?
Easy. Beneath the signature box on a petition's landing page, you should see some gray lettering that says "embed code."
Click on that, and the html code should appear in a box below. Then, copy and paste that code directly into your Daily Kos post.
Splashes, stripes and mobile creatives on Daily Kos
When you come to Daily Kos, you have probably seen many pop-up ads asking you to sign a petition. We do this for several reasons, in part because it is one of the most efficient ways at growing our list.
Over the Christmas/Hannukah weekend, for example, we got 13,422 new organic names on our list.
Nearly two-thirds of these emails came from just four pop-up "creatives" or "splashes" (our names for the combo of a photo and text that make up these pop-ups) on the site:
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4,393 came from the above splash urging Joe Biden and Senate Democrats to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
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Over 2,000 from a mobile splash of our petition urging President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Trump's ties to Russia (note: a “mobile splash” means it shows up when you're reading Daily Kos on a mobile device/smartphone)
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Another 1,000 from a desktop splash version of that same Russia petition
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Another 1,000 from a splash promoting our Electoral College petition
I spend a lot of time each day reviewing the effectiveness of our creatives that are promoted on three different "channels"
- our desktop splashes (which pop up if you are viewing Daily Kos from a standard computer),
- an orange/white stripe that appears horizontally underneath the Daily Kos banner
- mobile splashes that appear if you read Daily Kos on your phone
We test out different messages on splash/stripe/mobile for each petition, and let them duke it out to see which one is outperforming (similar to testing subject lines in an email).
And we test different organic petitions against each other to see which ones resonate more with a new audience, tempered along with which ones we really need to prioritize given the news cycle.
Not surprisingly, one message or petition may work better on the splash while another works better on the stripe, and a third works better on mobile—because they reach different people.
Beneath is a Google spreadsheet I use each day to track the effectiveness of competing creatives (green for desktop splashes, yellow for mobile pop-ups, orange for the stripe.)
There are two metrics that I look at to determine whether we are going to keep a creative up, or take it down: Click rate and NTL (new-to-list) rate.
A click rate means how many clicked on the splash divided by the number of times it appeared on a day ("impressions"). I get these numbers from DoubleClick—a Google app that runs our splashes.
DoubleClick also uses the click rates to determine how frequently a splash will run, so a lesser performing splash will appear less often. But I will also make judgment calls, removing some splashes to clear up more space for higher performing others.
A NTL (new-to-list) rate means how many new people joined our list because they signed a petition they saw from a splash—as a proportion of the total number of signers of the petition that sign through the splash. This rate is crucial, when the goal is organic list growth.
Before the 2016 election, a good splash had an 0.1% NTL rate (meaning most signers were already members of our email list). Now it's a lot higher.
Desktop splashes have a much higher click rate than mobile or stripe. But what these numbers don't tell you is that the people who click on mobile splashes & sign our petitions are likelier to be new.
The chart below is from Action Network (the CRM, or customer relationship management, database we use to run our email list and host most of our petitions), and shows where people who signed this petition came from.
If you scroll all the way to the right of the URL, you'll see a "tag" that looks like a strange code. That's how we track where signers come from.
For example, the tag 20161214sp1 means they signed the petition after clicking on a desktop splash, 20161213mo1 means they came from a mobile pop-up, and "widget" refers to a petition embed.
As you can see, we got roughly the same number of "new" people on our list who came from the splash sp1 as the mobile creative mo1. But the mobile creative had a higher percentage of new people if you just look at the people who signed (18 percent vs. 11 percent.)
That's because our mobile audience is less likely to be on our email list, similar to our Facebook audience.
Daily Kos only just expanded its pop-up creatives to our mobile site in October 2016, so it's still very new and untested. But I'm excited to experiment with this avenue as we aim to grow our list size and reach more populations to engage them in our online activism.