CONTENT
In this step you can add images, text and video to make your petition compelling and persuade people to sign it.
Think about where people will be coming from (email? Facebook? Your website?) and consider what they already know or don’t know about your campaign. Don’t take it for granted that people will just sign up - remember to explain the issue properly, and make the case for why signing your petition will make a difference.
Language
If your Impact Stack only has one language, then you can ignore this setting. Find out more about translations in Impact Stack here.
Related Campaign
A ‘campaign’ in Impact Stack is used to group actions related to a same topic. If you have a lot of actions, this can make it easier for you to find and organize your content. If you only want this petition to stand alone, you can leave this field blank.
Title
The title will be displayed at the top of the page and it will be used by default to create the URL alias (the link) of your petition. We recommend to keep it short and simple!
If you change the title of your action, Impact Stack will also create a new URL, and automatically create a redirect from the old one. If you want to change the URL to a shorter one, you can control this in ‘advanced settings’ lower down the Content step.
Large image or video
This field on the right side gives you the possibility to upload or pick an existing video or image to be displayed on the petition. If you prefer, you can also choose to display a video from Youtube or Vimeo by simply providing the link. By default, this image will be used in teasers and it will have a special design. For a better rendering, we recommended the image format to have a width-to-height ratio of 1.6 to 1.65. More about the images in Impact Stack here.
Body
Place your main content here - make sure you explain your action properly: who their message will be sent to, why they should take the action etc.
You can edit the summary of your body field if you click the small link "Edit summary" beside the title of the field. The content of this field will be used by default by Google, Facebook and Twitter teasers. If you leave this preview text blank, Impact Stack will help you out and just take the first few lines of the body text.
In your "body" you can add copy and format it using the WYSIWYG editor, or paste in HTML by clicking on the "source" button in the editor. You can also add pictures in the body area using the "Media browser" on the top right of the field. For more help on the options for formatting text, you can have a look here.
NB If you bring in copy from Word, remember to paste it into a plain text editor such as Notepad first, otherwise you’ll bring lots of unwanted formatting with you, overriding the custom fonts you’ve set for your Impact Stack.
Social proof: counter
Showing that your action is being taken and making progress towards a real goal can encourage people to take part. Activate the counter to display a goal for your action and display progress - you can edit the targets and the copy to make your action more compelling. More about the counter.
Social proof: recent supporters
Activate the "Display a recent supporters block" checkbox to show a list of names of people who have recently signed. In "Recent supporters advanced settings" you can control the maximum number of displayed supporters, let them cycle or choose how the names, and countries should be displayed. More about recent supporters.
Advanced settings
In general, these advanced settings can be used to configure how your action integrates with the rest of your Impact Stack. The most important settings here are:- URL path settings: where you can create a nicer URL alias for your petition
- Autosegmentation: where you can control the tags added to the supporter records of people taking this action.
- Open Graph meta tags settings where you can configure your share options for Facebook and Twitter.
Click on "Next", top right, to set up your form.
FORM
On this step you can set up the form to collect the information you need from your supporters.
When you create a new action, it will automatically include the fields set up in your action template for this action type during the onboarding process. Once you've created your action though, you can remove or add any fields you want.
NB If your needs change, you can change your default template so that future new forms contain the fields you need, or to create additional templates. Find out more about action templates here, or ask support for help.
In general, always ask for the minimum amount of data you need - as well as being good data practice, people are much less likely to fill in a form field if they’re not clear about why you want the information. And every additional field will increase the amount of time it takes to fill in the form, so keep it simple: short forms will lead to more people taking action!
For an effective petition though, you need information that demonstrates that there’s a real person filling in the form. As a minimum you would want first name, last name and email address.
NB Remember to be careful if you edit a form after an action is live. If you delete a field from the form, you'll also delete all the data it has collected so far. So, if you want to remove a field, just configure it to 'hidden'.
There's more help here on building your form, and capturing supporter data, and on capturing opt ins via your forms.
Once you've created your form, click 'next' to move on.
EMAILS
When a supporter takes an action Impact Stack can be set up to send the following emails:
- Confirmation emails (double opt in): Activate this option if you want your supporters to confirm their petition signature via email. The supporter will get an email after filling out your form with a link to confirm their signature, and their participation will not be counted until they have clicked on this link.
- Thank you emails: This option is used to send an automatic acknowledgement to the supporter after they fill in the form.
- Notification emails: If you enable this option, an automatic alert will be sent when the form is submitted. You're unlikely to want to use this for a petition, but if your form is an event registration, or a volunteer sign up form, you might want to alert someone in your organisation about a new form submission.
Now to decide where your supporters will land after they filled out the form. Click 'Next' for the 'Thank you' step.
THANK YOU
This step lets you choose where people end up after filling out a form.
- Redirect supporters to a URL after the action allows you to send supporters to any web page - this could be another Impact Stack page, or form, or any page on the internet.
- Create a new thank you page allows you to create a default landing page for this action. You can add a title, a large image and a summary, just as you did in the content step.
The most common content for a thank you page is a share block, giving supporters the possibility to share the petition with their friends, family or in their social networks.
First, open the Share block, and switch the "Display a share block" on. By default, the URL (link) to be shared will be this petition. If you want people to share a different page, then specify the URL in the "URL to be shared" field. More details on setting up your share options.
NB If you want to change the order of the share options, please contact support, who can do this for you.
Conditional thank you pages
You can also direct supporters to different thank you pages based on their responses to questions in the form, or other criteria you've set. Find out more about conditional redirects/conditional thank you pages.
When you've finished setting up a nice Thank you page for your supporters click "Next" and you'll end up on the confirmation screen.
CONFIRM
This final step is a chance to review your content, your form, your emails and your thank you page. Click on "Publish now" to confirm the changes and publish your petition or click on "Save as draft" to keep it unpublished or to unpublish it.
Testing
In draft form your petition is only visible to logged in users. It will accept data and generate confirmation and notification emails, but Facebook and Twitter shares won't be updated until the action has been published. It's wise therefore to fully test your action again after publication, but before you launch it, in order to check that share copy and images are appearing the way you want.
Good luck with your petition!
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