CCL Action Tracker

The Problem

Previously to this project, we had a form that volunteers could fill out to tell CCL about the actions their chapter took each month. Once the form was filled out, it essentially went a black hole until the end of the month when they were tallied and emailed out in a spreadsheet. This lack of visibility meant that volunteers couldn't edit actions, couldn't see if they already entered an action (or if someone else entered it). There was also no way of associating an action to a volunteer, so our ability to measure volunteer engagement was very limited.

The Process

Scenarios

• Howard is a CCL volunteer group leader. He's a busy guy with a full time job, so he only has a few minutes a month to track the progress. He wants each of his volunteers to be able to log their actions as they do them, or automatically if possible, so that he can review them once a month. He wants to be able to compare the progress of his chapter over time at a glance.
• Ellie, who's Howard's State Coordinator wants to be able quickly review the actions taken (or not taken) by each of the chapters in her state so that she can thank them for her work and recognize which chapters are struggling.

Workflow

Since the new system would be more robust than the existing one, documenting the workflow allowed us to have more critical conversations about the process and what was needed and not needed.

Final Product

The resulting product allowed any volunteer to log their actions, view all of the actions for their chapter and add and remove themselves from actions. State and Regional Coordinators were given the ability to view stats and actions for their states and regions as well as individual chapters in those areas.

The Action Tracker has open up ways to present volunteers with goals and actions outside of the Action Tracker, as well as measure various engagement strategies.

Impact

Metrics

• After a year of implementing the new system we grew the average number of actions reported monthly from 2,000 up to 8,000
• In the previous system our annual page views were 13k, in the new system we saw 66k in our first year.

Volunteer Feedback

"I love the new tracker - bravo to the whole team! It is absolutely fun to use! Just used it on a field report and also loved it for submitting lobbying minutes."

"This is a great tool, and I think my chapter is beginning to appreciate it more and more. I demo a little bit of it at each meeting."