When I first started volunteering with CCL in 2017, chapter leaders were provided with a monthly Action Sheet – a PDF of suggested activities that chapters across the country could engage in. Other than that there wasn’t much guidance around which specific actions would be the most valuable to work on.
However, for non-chapter leaders to know what to do, either they needed to be plugged into their chapter and monthly meetings, or they needed to be very self-directed.
Between our NPS surveys and user interviews, I could see this was a problem and it started from before people joined. In user testing, people loved the mission and values, but were left with the question of “but what do you actually do?” They’d join anyway hoping they’d learn more as they went. CCL offers ample training, but volunteers still needed to be able to see how to put that training into practice as well as how it tied back to the greater strategy.
Since joining CCL, I’ve helped to envision an ecosystem where volunteers have ample visibility into what are the most important and strategic tasks at a given moment. The starting point for this work was the Action Tracker as it provided a framework to think about actions and a hub for interacting with them.
Starting in 2021, like many environmental groups, we focused our efforts on ensuring impactful climate legislation made it into the reconciliation package. In our case, we were pushing for a Carbon Fee & Dividend policy and knew that if it was going to happen, our representatives needed to hear about it en masse.
And with that the concept of goals was born. We added Goals to the Action Tracker and people were able to see how their chapter and state were contributing.
Most recently, a goal helped us generate over 11,000 emails for the PROVE IT Act, a first step toward a Carbon Border Adjustment. Close to half of which were generated after a single day.
Goals were great, but they were also somewhat buried within the Action Tracker. So next, as I was redesigning the dashboard of our volunteer portal, I wanted to find a way to get that information front and center. After gathering plenty of feedback, actions soon followed as one of the top content blocks on the dashboard.
It’s not enough for us to inform volunteers about what actions they could/should take, we also have to support them through taking those actions.
Previously our page for contacting Congress looked something like this:
It provided a message and a means of sending it, but otherwise provided very little guidance and was not very visually appealing.
I’ve since redesigned it so that it can now provide people with more context. They can understand why an action is important, and if they want to know even more, we have the ability to provide an FAQ or even a supplemental video further down the screen.
Building on this, we saw an opportunity to offer folks additional actions after they’ve completed one. This led to the design of an action “hub”. We can offer a total of 3 actions, and after they complete one, the page prompts them to do another while eliminating the option that they just took. This page is sharable to the public and can be used by volunteers at tabling events or sharing with their friends.
All of this, combined with target emails and text messages, has given us a much stronger ability to mobilize our volunteers to take action.
After hearing repeatedly through user interviews that people needed more information about what we do, I had to figure out some way to address it. I saw an opportunity to design something simple on a page that I knew people would look at. It would be an easy short-term solution that we could implement without too much help from other teams.
I designed a set of bullet points for our Join page that provided a straightforward list of what our volunteers do, the support we provide and how much time it would take.
Since the addition of more information to the Join Form, participants in user interviews have had a better understanding of what we do.
Additionally, a combination of goals, public action pages and the action hub helped us drive 168,000 calls and emails to Congress and President Biden prior to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Most recently, a goal helped us generate over 11,000 emails for the PROVE IT Act, a first step toward a Carbon Border Adjustment. Close to half of which were generated after a single day.
