Notes to the slides from the December 8th, 2015 joint webinar conducted by Change.org and NationBuilder.

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Time Slides Presenter Content
5m
Olivia Part One: ​Introduction
30s
Olivia Welcome and introduction (all presenters)
Olivia ­ Heads up change.org’s work with organisations across Australia.
Army ­
30s
Olivia ● We will focus stories of effective supporter growth first.
● Then nationbuilder will focus on empowering those supporters
● We will take questions at the end, so please do drop them into
the chat.
30 s
Scaling impact can build power
At change.org, we do growth and scale well. In the past year, another
million people have joined change.org from diverse
backgrounds. They are passionate on particular issues and
values and thousands join organisations every month.
Nationbuilder are experts at empoweing deep organising. So the
reason we started a conversation with the Army and the team
was because we could see the incredible potential of
transforming the scale of support our users are showing for
organisations, combined with Nationbuilders ability to find
leaders among those to conduct deep distributed organising.
And since we share a lot of clients who’ve learned a huge amount
about how to get the most our of change.org and nationbuilder,

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we wanted to bring organisations together to share some of the
successes and learnings and hear a little from you.
10
sec
Change Our mission is to empower people everywhere to create the change they
want to see.
30
sec
Change Change.org is bulding people power around the world.
Globally we have over 122 million users, and have seen victories in 196
countries. Someone somewhere is experiencing a victory every hour.
But we are just getting started. Our team are busy b​uilding more tools
and ways to ​reach​ and ​empower people in​ all parts of the world.
In Australia, ​we host the biggest group of action takers on the
Internet, with 3.4 million user​s (over half of which return every month
to take action)
30 s
Change We’ve also seen many organisations take to our free and paid platform to
start campaigns and grow the kind of new support that helps them win,
and fund their missions.
The NSW Aboriginal Legal service used the free petition tools to
campaign to save funding for one of its services.
We’ll hear more on ACF’s wins later.
10
sec
Before we dive into ways to build power, I want to talk about how
organisations we work with set goals.
We all want to know if the work we do is making a difference.

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30 s
Metrics such as list size and page views can seem impressive, but don’t
always contribute to mission. They are often called vanity metrics for this
reason.
An example from a recent MOB LABs report which many of you may
already be well across really struck me.If you haven’t, check it out.
It illustrated that an the better metric than list size for an environmental
justice organisation that makes change through court cases and
legislation was the number of volunteer lawyers they could recruit.
On the other hand, list size and engagement is critical for some
organisations for whom scale is vital to mission.
20
sec
To this end, it is critical to have a deep understanding of what role
your supporters play in driving your mission.
For example, supporters are not just donors or action takers, they can be
both as well as advocates, influencers, offline organisers.
1m30
So to summarise effective goal setting, there’s 3 main takeaways.
1. Organisation wide goals often need imperfect aggregate
metrics.
What we mean is a metric that is contributed to by a few other
smaller metrics.​ ​Brevity and clarity of the big goals is key.
What behaviours do these metrics incentivise among staff?
Are those behaviours contributing to mission? If not, pick others.
At change.org we have 2 organisation wide goals.
As a company, we lasered our focus from 5 to 2 major metrics this year.
The results have been seismic and it’s fueled our teams work better
together and gain better results.
2. Split short term (email performance metrics, donation, action
asks) and long term goals (ongoing supporter engagement,
campaign wins, lifetime value of donors)
3. Don’t pigeonhole your supporters. Provide pathways for them.
Mission and belief
NB Our mission is to provide software for leaders. It’s on our home page and
we speak about it often. There a lot to unpack there and the following 5

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points illustrate why we care about leadership and trying to change the
status quo.
NB 1. We believe that everyone has something unique they are meant to
contribute to the world and that most of us can’t do it alone. Find what
you love, find the others who love it too, and do it for the greatest cause
you can imagine
2. The internet makes it possible to communicate many­to­many which
means you can build a movement. You don’t need permission to do
something great.
3. Democratizing leadership means opening up the NationBuilder to
everyone.
4. We serve leaders and are committed to helping our customers do the
thing they’re trying to do in the world.
5. Stop asking permission and become leaders. Buckminster Fuller once
said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
From company mission to
practice
NB Tie creator to leader into community organizing.
What does software for
leaders look like?
NB Tying together your digital presence so you know who your supporters
are and how best to engage them.
15s
Grow your community and
lead them to action — at
any scale
NB

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2m Principles of Leadership NB Introduce principles of leadership
● It’s all about people
● Engaging people with paths of engagement
● Identifying and developing leaders
Goal setting ­ engagement
NB Engaging your universe in the way they want to be engaged. Meet your
supporters on their level of engagement.
18m
Part 2:
Growing and engaging new supporters
1m Change Growing supporters is one potential way to build power, but not in and of
itself.
Many organisations we work with come to us with a similar problem, or
opportunity. Depending on how you see it.
They’ll often share they have a core group of supporters who are very
active, may donate, attend or organise events and act on behalf of them.
But to grow their political or community influence, they want to recruit
new passionate supporters.
so change.org is one way organisations can attract the right new
supporters ​– organisations are able to in­turn mobilise these people in
the ways they want to be involved. For example, to take other actions, to
donate and often most importantly to ​win help big, long­term
campaigns.

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10 s
Change So let’s talk about how, as an organisation, you can grow your
supporter base,.
30 sec
Change For those of you who like to work chronologically and with visuals or the
process, we’ll share how the ‘growing supporters’ on change.org starts.
Active change.org users who sign campaigns started by people will often
be shown sponsored campaigns from organisations that align to their
interests and past behaviour on the site.
They can choose to sign or opt in or skip or say they are not supportive of
these campaigns.
If they do want to opt in, they pass on their contact details to the
organisation. Then the organisation has full control over the journey they
take these new supporters on.
So how organisations are doing this effectively is what’s likely to be most
interesting.
30 sec 1. Recruit the right new people at the scale you need.
So who is the right person for your organisation or campaign?
Do you just want people who care about workers rights, animinal rights or
protecting our environment?
or do you actually need to shift the needle on an issue that cuts across
the political spectrum to recruit people who are undecided or even
conservative in their views?
change.org can be channel to recruit all of those people. It is the values
and personal stories that are most effective at attracting new diverse
supporters.

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30 sec What we can share about our research with a large portion of change.org
users is this one statement “ I’m not an activist, but”. People who care
about and frequently act on particular issues, but may not consider
themselves an activist…….yet!
1 min So once you have decided on your target supporter type, before you
have started recruiting them think about 4 things:
1. What are the campaign goals?
Not just 10,000 supporters.
What can they get involved in?
Are their particular fundraising goals?
What’s the long term goal?
2. Pledge or petition e..g with a decision maker as the target, or
asking the public to get behind something.
3. What value(s) are you activating with your message?
Skip the policy detail on the first date. Values motivate people to
act. Is it fairness? transparency, ethics? do you need the values
to cut across the political spectrum?
4. The tone of the ask
what do you want people to do? sign, join are obvious. Beyond that?
Think about tone ­ demand, congratulate, endorse, ask.
2 mins Change Amnesty thought this through very deeply when they launched their
Indigenous Youth Justice campaign.
Amnesty wanted to reach and engage a new audience in addition to their
base: people who hold conservative values. They knew if they could shift
the narrative among these people, that it valuable for the campaign. So
they started by recruiting 3000 people in both conservative and
progressive electorates.
They chose a pledge instead of a petition because they wanted the public
to get behind their campaign rather than petition a decision maker so
early in the campaign.
They split tested motivating people on hope, family, empowerment and
outrage.
The tone of their ask was tested too. See in the headlines: Pledge
commitment to stop removing versus keep families together.

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So let’s do a poll.
Here are the two headlines Amnesty was testing,
Place your vote in the poll box on which headline which drew the
strongest response from people in conservative electorates.
(30 seconds)
Okay, so actually negative messaging “ stop removing” won out overall
among users from progressive and conservative electorates. There was
no significant difference in conservatives response to positive versus
negative messaging. So message testing is still a priority for this
campaign.
1 min Change So once you have recruited this new potentially large group of people,
how do we figure out what 20,000 people are interested in quickly, their
capacity to donate etc. Nationbuilder has incredible tools to create
pathways for people, but how do we segment the list quickly.
In that first period, inviting people to act on online campaigns can help,
especially to bond new and existing supporters
2. Wide mobilisation can apply pressure and bond people
1m
Change A good example is Walk Free, an organisation working globally to end
modern slavery.
Last year, they uncovered that FIFA workers in Qatar had died working in
50 degree temperatures. Given FIFA’s high profile they understood that
this petition you can see was broadly relevant across potentially new and
existing supporters. They were right. More than 94,000 new people
signed on change.org and many more on Walk Free’s own petition
platform. It applied some of the necessary pressure to FIFA and it
bonded their new and existing supporters with a win.
1m Change Once you have recruited the right new people, and potentially broadly
mobilised them, a another way of building power and ensuring survival, is
to raise money.
For example, if like political parties, the number of active supporters is
connected to the often a time bound campaign result, when you get an

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influx of new supporters, you need to quickly figure out who will donate
and how to support them to do it regularly.
Most supporter acquisition also costs something, whether on your own
site, via facebook, change.org or other channels. So it needs to at least
pay for itself. Finding, rewarding and empowering donors is therefore
vital.
Fundriaisng a challenging and exciting task that increasingly,
campaigners, communicators and the like are taking on. It’s exciting to
see it’s not just a job for someone with fundraising in their title anymore.
To us, this makes sense, campaigners write good emails. Good emails
drive donations. Donations, especially regular ones, sustain the
organisation, its service delivery, staff and campaign escalation.
30 s Digital is a growing channel for small and large organisations to fundraise
at scale with lower costs than traditional channels.
In 2014 globally, online giving grew 9% in 2014 compared to 2% overall
growth. But it takes work. You can’t easily outsource it and you wouldn’t
want to. It’s The organisations that are doing this well are those that have
invested in the talent.
Change
The Australian Conservation Foundation is one of those organisations.
ACF came to change.org recognising the increasing scarcity of
opportunities to fundraise face to face on the street.
They wanted to diversify fundraising channels and recruit activists at the
same time.
They had two big wins.
The first was in converting 8.5% of email supporters into monthly donors.
The second was doubling their existing list by recruiting 20,000 new supporters
­ who were ready to be mobilised on climate change campaigns.
How did they do this?
1 min

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1 min
4 big learnings
● Make contact with new supporters fast.
within 10 minutes versus 1 hour increases open rate by 100%.
(Now made possible with a realtime API connection change.org
has set up Natiionbuilder ­ email me later if you are interested)
● Concentrated on building a base of regular givers and activists.
Not just one of the other.
● Tested, tested and tested. Email content, different asks
● We’re not afraid to ask for money, a few times.
1m Change The bit that often trips up organisations is the welcome series. We want
to share our learnings from the past year of helping organisations with
this every single day. The advice is simple.
The best way to engage new supporters is through a structured email w
elcome series.
The purpose of the welcome series is to
● reinforce the first action the supporter took to get to your
organisation (e.g. signing a petition on change.org)
● engage them in your mission and impact
● guage what people are interested in such as issues, locales,
donating, education etc to bring insight to the pathways to
provide for them down the track
1m30
Keep it simple and short.​ Make sure you’re speaking in layman’s
terms. Not everyone reading your email will have the same level of
understanding around an issue. If you can’t fit your email into 700
characters, it might be too complex for one email.
Stick to a single ask.​ Don’t overload the email will mutiple asks. Chose
a clear call to action and repeat it several times in the email.
Make your subject line count.​ On average people receive 76 emails
per day. You need to stand out. A question, a personalisation or
surprising statement are the primary ways organizations add intrigue to
their subject lines.
Tell a story.​ Tell a personal narrative. Whenever possible, it’s ideal to
share a personal story about a supporter of your organization.
Be relevant.
● Does the welcome email link back to the original reason the
supporter found your organisation (e.g. change.org petition).
● Does the email help your organisation reach it goals?
● Does it touch on something timely (e.g. media or public) for

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maximum impact?
● reach our goal of XX?
60% of change.org users predominately use ​mobile ​to view content.
69% of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile.
1m
Be clear. ​Don’t use complex policy language or organisational jargon.
No acronyms!
Too busy. ​Multiple links to multiple asks will reduce click throughs and
readers will become disengaged. Short paragraphs are better. Use a
simple font and keep body text sized at about 14­16 pixels
Include actions. ​An engaged audience wants to be able to take action.
So make sure you include one. Otherwise it is a wasted opportunity.
Organizations need to​ test​ out different messaging, asks, subject lines,
donate buttons, donation pages to see what works for them and their
audience.
The one caveat about the advice on welcome emails is that once an
online technique is codified as “ the right way of doing things”, it tends to
feel increasingly rigid and ineffective with supporters.
So above all, always be testing.
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sec
EXAMPLE
The Australian Marine Conservation Society have seen some great
results this year from a simple and effective email welcome series.
Their emails perform 1.5 to 2 x that of Australian email benchmarks for
all emails including actions, engagements and fundraising asks
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sec
Why were their emails so effective?
● AMCS brought supporters across on a specific issue then
introduced them to the broader work of the organisation.

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30 s
● Their theory of change was clearly articulated throughout.
● Use of social shorthand, an amazingly simple way of building c
compelling story about the organisations with pictures and
joining one liners.
15 s
● The call to action was clear and repeated throughout the email.
● The layout and text of the email was clear.
30s
● The reacted and made the most of media moments (e.g. change
in Prime Minister)
● They paused their planned welcome series and responded to the
relevant moment.
1m It’s like navigating the space between dating and a relationship.
You don’t generally suggest moving in after the first date, but you
definitely test the waters with new ideas, activities and asks in
the first few months.
● Think of it like 3 to 5 dates (emails)
● Be interested and interesting. Tell and invite the stories of
the people,ideas and things that move you.
● Be yourself. Minus the details they may not understand
right at the start.
● Be the first to give something back, but don’t be afraid to
ask for what you need (money)

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7m
Part Three: ​Empowering Supporters with Nationbuilder
x Deepening
relationships thru
targeted engagement in
NationBuilder
NB NationBuilder deeper dive into targeting and levels of engagement:
● Examples:
○ ACTU
○ Labor
○ Oaktree
Goals
What are you shooting for in the short and long-term?
Traditional vs new model
The traditional model focused on scattered micro-engagements.
Required several touches and large budget to find and grow
supporter base.
● Example ask: “Can we count on you for a $50 donation
today?”
● List building practices focused on quantity, not quality of
the list
● Unilateral goals - support our cause
With access to more data than ever before, organizations can
spend far less money to engage with the right people in the
right way to further their mission.
● If you like what we’re doing, your network of friends
might too
● We want you to do what you’re comfortable doing, and
we’ll only ask you to go that far
● If you want to go further, we need local leaders to help
spread our message
Tie traditional/new model to principles of organizing
Principles of organizing People come first
What would you like them to do that furthers the organizational
goals
How can you give back ownership of the mission to the

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community
People first
Identify willingness, capacity and ability
Deepen dedication
What you should know What are some baseline data points you should know about
supporters before you reach out?
● Age, gender, location
● Email and phone number
● Have they donated before? Have they volunteered?
● What are the interests they’ve shared with social media
● Do they prefer to be contacted by phone or email? Do they
prefer not to be communicated with on weekends?
Ladders of engagement
Not a one-size fits all ladder of engagement.
● constantly engage
● deepen capacity and responsibility over time
● continue engaging
Know which ladder of
engagement to choose
Identify willingness of your supporters to go down that path with you.
A donor might always want to be a donor and that’s fine. That might
be how they fitting
Create new universes of
potential leaders based
on your goals
Ask people who have donated recently to become fundraisers
Ask petition signatories who have a high Klout score and then share
on social media

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Empowering leaders
Provide infrastructural support to encourage supporters to take
action
● Social share prompts
● Personal fundraising pages
● Supporter created events, content
How to think about your
engagement
Challenge 1: Who are your
supporters
Challenge 1 - Knowing your supporters
Principle 1 - Put relationships at the center
Practice 1 - Consolidate your data and personalize your outreach
Consolidate your data
The data exists, pull it together to get the most use out of it.
Segment your community
Create multiple searches based on the type of engagement
someone has had, where they are located, who they are
connected to, and what their preferred method of
communication is.
Target your outreach
Then engage them for that specific thing.
ie: ListA cares about tax reform, ListB cares about global
warming so focus your outreach to ListA to tax reform and move
them up the ladder for that specific thing.

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Challenge 2: How to
continually engage your
supporters
Challenge 2 - Effectively and continuously engaging your
supporters
Principle 2 - Create various ladders for taking actions
Practice 2 - Every action gets an appropriate follow-up
Make it easy for them to
move themselves up the
ladder
● Social share
● Redirect to next action (ie: volunteer signup redirecting
to donation page)
Every action deserves a
followup
Challenge 3: Leverage
your network
Challenge 3 - How do you leverage the full potential of your
network
Principle 3 - Empower leaders at different levels
Practice 3 - ID your influencers and equip them
● Empower recruiters
○ Recruiter ID emails
○ public profiles
○ ownership over their part of the cause
Identify your champions
Ex: Oaktree

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Ask for them to help
Empower local leaders
Ex: Oaktree (Set goal of 368 new Community Leaders, ended up
with 868 by focusing on their supporters).
7m Takeaways
1. Set short and long term goals that clearly reflect the role your
supporters play in your mission
2. Recruit the right new supporters in the right channel with the right
message
3. Welcome series gauges interests in large numbers of people
4. NB
5. NB
6. NB + change
Part Five: ​Closing - Next Steps
1m
All Additional Resources
● Change.org
○ Start a campaign
○ Other webinars
○ Check free tools
● NationBuilder
○ Start a trial
○ “Build a giving campaign that lasts” course

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Thank you!
Questions?
Contact Details
Resources list (to be considered for inclusion in follow up email to attendees):
Change.org:
Change.org ­ start a sponsored campaign: ​advertise.change.org
Change.org ­ free tools overview: ​http://go.change.org/gettingstarted
Change case Studies:
http://go.change.org/PETADE
http://go.change.org/Oxfam
Welcome Email Series Gallery: ​http://www.charityemailgallery.com/
Campaign Metrics Toolshed: ​http://www.mrss.com/toolshed/
Greenpeace Labs Beyond Vanity Metrics Report: ​http://www.mobilisationlab.org/mobilisation­tools/beyond­vanity­metrics/
Full length video of Sarah Wolf and the Able Act campaign: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTwO3YgIoEU
Nation Builder:
Start a 14 day trial: ​www.nationbuilder.com/create
NationBuilder’s pricing page: ​www.nationbuilder.com/pricing
Who is using NationBuilder: ​http://nationbuilder.com/who
NationBuilder feature comparison: ​http://nationbuilder.com/feature_comparison
NationBuilder Case Studies: http://nationbuilder.com/case_studies