eCampaigning Tool Overview

The eCampaigning tool is a product for Plone that enables the use of online petitions and letter actions, email letter registrations etc. - the most common types of campaigning actions.

It is quite stable for small to medium size campaigning actions and has been used in production environments since June 2005 on the whiteband.org site. Unless you have very specific requirements, this tool as it currently exists will serve 90% of your online campaigning action needs.

The development of the eCampaigning Tool has been steered by an expert in eCampaigning (Duane Raymond of FairSay) to ensure it meets the real needs of campaigners and was suited to applying e-campaigning Best Practices (that even most e-campaigning services fail to achieve). This input will continue and grow with your feedback and/or improvements of this product.

Understanding eCampaigning

Most e-actions consist of the same core process:

• action form > store data > show thank-you page + send thank-you email + send letter to target (if relevant)

This process can also be used for newsletter sign-ups, e-cards, pledges and more. The code can also be relatively easily extended to allow other scenarios to be explicitly supported.

In the activism (issue campaigning or advocacy) world, actions are generally things people can participate in and they exist under the umbrella of a 'campaign'. However if you campaign on a multi-lingual basis, globally or over multiple political boundaries, then an action can have multiple versions (e.g. for different languages and/or targets and/or issues).

To deal with this, the following logical semantics are used for the eCampaigning package:

1. 'Campaigns' are simply a conceptual grouping of multiple 'Campaign Actions' contributing to the same end result
2. 'Campaign Actions' are something a supporter can participate in to support a 'Campaign' and can have multiple 'Action Editions'
3. 'Action Editions' are the individual implementations of a 'Campaign Action' relevant to a specific supporter segment by language, geography or other criteria as needed by a campaign/action. Generally these would all be asking for the same thing but to different targets (i.e European Union vs. USA) or in different languages.

How It Works

• Before configuring an Action Edition you need to define all the required action elements:
  • A Campaign Action (optional)
  • Organisation or Person Target(s)
  • An Action Message (i.e. petition statement, letter text to target)
  • A Thank You Page
  • A Thank You Email
• The action form is generated from the schema (data fields) you configure
• By default the supporter data is stored in the Zope database as Action Records but theoretically you can hook it to an external database
• The best way to access the data is to download it as a CSV file which you can do at the Campaign Action level (if used) for all related Action Editions or for each individual Action Edition