Action Network is in constant development, with new features, fixes, and updates released every few weeks, if not more often. Notes on these updates are available below, newest first.

If you’d like to be notified of notable changes, click here to sign up to receive release announcements we send out.

June 3, 2024

This release adds new email received filters, new email statistic options, new two factor security options, other fields for custom questions, easier button creation in emails, and more.

Email Received Filters

• You can now target activists by the number of emails they’ve received from your group in a date range you select.
• This option is available on email and mobile targeting, queries, and ladder decisions.

New Email Statistics

• One hour after sending, a “snapshot” of an email’s statistics is taken and displayed on the email’s manage page, showing you what the statistics were one hour after sending.
• This is useful to quickly get a sense of email performance in a regularized way, allowing you to make decisions about rolling out the email further to other portions of your list.
• You can also see email statistics by popular recipient domains (ex: Gmail and Yahoo), allowing you to understand email performance by domain quickly.

Two Factor Method Enforcement For Groups

• Groups can now choose which two factor methods they will allow when turning on two factor enforcement for group admins.
• Groups can allow any method (phone, app, or hardware key), just app or hardware keys, or just hardware keys.
• Administrators who try and access a group (or a group’s resources, such as sponsored actions) without having the appropriate two factor methods on their account will be forced to set up those methods to continue.
• As part of that process, non-compliant methods will also be removed from their account, leaving them with only compliant methods.
• Note that this process only happens when an administrator tries to access the group or group resources. Administrators who never log in and attempt to access the group will not have their security upgraded until they do. If you change this setting, you should reach out to all administrators to get them to log in and access the group to make sure they are compliant with this change.

Other Options For Questions

• When adding checkbox, dropdown, or radio questions to forms, you can choose to add an “other” option.
• If added, activists filling out the form will be able to choose from the available options or choose “other” and enter their own option.
• For dropdown and radio questions, the value entered by activists when choosing “other” will be stored in the custom field that question uses. Checkboxes will use the question’s custom field value with “_other” appended as the custom field name, and the data the activist entered as the value.

Pre-Built Buttons In Visual Editor

• You can now insert pre-built buttons in the visual editor, under the “More” menu.
• You can make a button where you choose the text, colors, border radius, and link. You can also insert social media link buttons as a block, with built-in logo images.

Additional MMS Options

• You can upload audio as well as images in MMS, with a playable preview of your audio before sending.
• You can also now send an MMS message without any media attached, useful for longer messages that are cheaper to send as MMS.

Page Wrapper Testing

• Page wrappers can be A/B tested on actions, by setting multiple wrappers you want to test on the action’s manage page.
• You will see statistics around the number of actions taken by activists on each wrapper version, and be able to stop a test and declare a winner at any time.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Call campaigns now skip asking for address when built in targets that only require ZIP/postal code are being used (such as Senators).
• You can now sign up to be notified when emails or mobile messages are delayed from sending for too long after they are supposed to send, or when they are stopped, in group settings.
• You can now see statistics of brand new subscriptions vs. resubscribed activists in action statistics on manage pages.
• Ladder wait times can be hourly or daily instead of just daily.
• You can now remove administrators from the current group and optionally all children.
• You can now no longer target emails, reports, and mobile messages while targeting is currently running, preventing race conditions and inadvertent overwrites.
• Bulgarian (bg), Lithuanian (lt), Czech (cs), Catalan (ca), Slovak (sk), Croatian (hr), Norwegian (no), Greek (el) and Romanian (ro) are now an available languages for front-facing actions.

February 27, 2024

This release adds custom reminders for events and ticketed events, exports to Google Drive, new donation clips and clip options, and more.

Custom Event Reminders

• You can now add an additional custom reminder to events and ticketed events, to remind your RSVPers at a custom interval before the event that it is coming up, such as an hour before it starts.
• You can turn the feature on from the event or ticketed event’s manage page, by setting a date and time and email text for the reminder.
• The reminder is sent at the date and time you specify to all current RSVPers or ticket buyers.

Google Drive Export

• You can now optionally export to a folder in Google Drive instead of downloading CSV files when exporting from reports and action.
• You can turn on the option to export to Google Drive from your group’s API & Sync page. You will need to share a specific email address we give you on a folder where you want exported CSV files to show up.
• After setup, you will have the option to send CSV files to Google Drive instead of downloading the CSV file after they are generated in reports and action manage pages.

New Donation Clips and Clip Options

• There are new liquid donation clips you can use in emails and mobile messages to personalize text with donor history, including average donation amount, count of donations, total donation amount, first donation date, and first donation amount.
• This is in addition to the existing clips for highest previous contribution, latest donation amount, and latest donation date.
• In addition, all of these donation clips (new and existing) can now take a date range argument, so if you only want averaage donation amount in the last year, you can specify that when writing the clip into your email or mobile message.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now easily target by mailbox provider (such as Gmail or Yahoo) when selecting email address in form field targeting. Just click to insert the correct regular expression.
• There are new system-wide default email layouts for the drag and drop email builder for common scenarios like action or fundraising emails. These can be used directly or duplicated and then customized.
• You can now append or replace ID targets over the API. See the API docs for more details.
• If you use HTML mode when writing an email, the email will load in HTML mode on page refresh.
• Our add new upload modal has been redesigned for clarity and ease of use.
• Our select targets modal on letter and call campaigns has been redesigned for clarity and ease of use. This new design also allows you to more easily add targets, such as all Democrats in Tennessee, via the provided options.
• There is a new clip to easily prefill fields on forms by entering the field name and value in the URL as arguments.
• ActBlue sync setup is now easier: You start from ActBlue’s interface and are redirected back there at the end of setup, with all settings in place, no more copying and pasting!
• You can now optionally backfill Briteverify statuses for all subscribed activists when you turn on the Briteverify integration.
• Romanian (ro) is now an available language for front-facing actions.

January 10, 2024

This release adds the Anonymized Target Booster, BriteVerify sync, and more.

Anonymized Target Booster

• You can now use the Anonymized Target Booster to help re-engage activists who haven’t been active with your group recently by collaborating with the progressive movement, while lowering your deliverability risk.
• After your group joins the Anonymized Target Booster, you will be able to target activists subscribed to your email list who have opened or clicked emails sent by other groups who have also joined the Anonymized Target Booster, thus giving you access to more data about activists on your list, so you can target them effectively.
• No personal information (such as email address) is shared, only anonymous email open and click data.
• You can opt in on your group’s settings tab, or when targeting.

BriteVerify Sync

• You can automatically remove invalid emails that subscribe to your group’s list using the new BriteVerify sync, which you can set up in the API & Sync section of the Start Organizing menu.
• After signing up with BriteVerify and entering your API key in Action Network, any new activists who subscribe to your email list will be verified by BriteVerify approximately every 30 minutes, and activists with invalid emails unsubscribed automatically.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can set a custom registration close date for events and ticketed events, and a custom registration close message, if you’d like to close off new RSVPs or ticket sales before the event start date.
• We will now flag if share options haven’t been edited on the sharing tab of actions, so you can customize them if you want.

December 14, 2023

This release adds seed list targeting, ID targets over the API, and more.

Seed list targeting

• You can now make sure to include seed lists when sending email, by choosing the option at the bottom of the targeting screen.
• To send to a seed list, you choose one or more tags when targeting. Any activist that is subscribed to receive email and has one or those tags on their record will receive the email, even if they were excluded by other targeting.
• This allows you to make sure an inbox placement testing seed list receives the email even if they wouldn’t typically be targeted, for example. Just give them a tag and use that tag in the seed list section when targeting!

ID Targets Via API

• You can now view, create, and delete ID Targets via the API.
• These ID targets can be used when targeting email, reports, or mobile messages, in the ID targets filter section, allowing you to target just that list of activists specifically.
• ID targets cannot add new activists to your list or alter their data. Rather, their use is to allow you to target activists by ID via some offline process (say, the SQL mirror) and then use that target list for targeting in our interface easily.
• Existing activists in skipped wait steps wait for the normal amount of time before moving on.
• Activists entering skipped wait steps that branch will take the yes response branch.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Emails and mobile messages in the group manage page are now sorted by scheduled and sent times.
• A new clip for language preference is available in emails and mobile messages.
• Ladder triggers that reference a specific item (such as an action or an email) will now link to that item’s manage page when managing the ladder.

November 21, 2023

This release adds targeting of verified and unverified opens, optional disclaimers on all action types, permanent unique ID target uploads, full editing of published ladders, and more.

Targeting By Verified and Unverified Opens

• You can now target activists based on whether they have opened your group’s email in a verified or unverified way.
• A verified open means we are reasonably sure a human opened the email. Unverified means the activist has privacy protection active and we cannot tell whether they or a machine opened the email.
• An unverified open DOES NOT mean the activist did not actually open the email, it just means we cannot tell.
• You can target using the engagement, email open count, and opened a specific email filters, selecting all opens, or just verified or unverified.
• All other areas of the interface that used to count “machine opens” are now counting verified and unverified opens.
• All opens that happened before this new feature was deployed are categorized as “unverified”.
• Most other things that don’t have to do with targeting (such as ladder triggers) work on any open type.
• The API and the SQL mirror have been updated with these new types as well, refer to their documentation for more details.

Ladders

• You can now fully edit published ladders, including adding and removing existing steps and triggers.
• If you delete a wait step, any activists in that wait will immediately be exited from the ladder without reaching further steps.
• You can also now optionally choose to skip wait steps, which means new activists entering that wait move directly on to the next step.
• Existing activists in skipped wait steps wait for the normal amount of time before moving on.
• Activists entering skipped wait steps that branch will take the yes response branch.

Action Disclaimers

• All action types now have an optional disclaimer that can be added to the bottom of the page. (Previously, only ticketed events and fundraising pages had this feature.)
• To add a disclaimer to an action, click the option at the bottom of the page when editing your action and add your text.
• You can add text and basic HTML to the disclaimer box.
• If added, the disclaimer will appear at the bottom of your action page or embedded widget.

ID Targets

• You can now upload lists of activists by unique ID (pulled from the SQL mirror or reports) for targeting in the ID Targets section of the Details menu under Start Organizing.
• You can give your upload a name and upload a list of IDs. Even lists that are millions long will upload in seconds.
• These ID targets can be used when targeting email, reports, or mobile messages, in the ID targets filter section, allowing you to target just that list of activists specifically.
• ID targets cannot add new activists to your list or alter their data. Rather, their use is to allow you to target activists by ID via some offline process (say, the SQL mirror) and then use that target list for targeting in our interface easily.
• This feature replaces the previous ID targets option to upload a list of IDs within the targeting interface. Now, you can upload ID targets in a more permanent way (as opposed to one-off per targeting option) and re-use them across contexts.
• All previous one-off ID target uploads have been migrated to the new interface for backwards compatibility.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now invite multiple users to be an organizer of your group by entering multiple email addresses, separated by commas, in the administrators tab of your group manage page.
• You can also promote multiple organizers to administrator and set permissions for more than one administrator at once by using the bulk options in the administrators tab.
• If you have a default reply-to set for your group, it is now harder to edit on a per-email basis, to help prevent inadvertent changes to your defaults.
• Groups can now select one or more queries to be default included or excluded in standard targeting, as well as one or more reports. They can also have different defaults for email and mobile message targeting, all available in the group manage page, settings tab.
• Child groups (and ad-hoc connected groups) now have their reports show up in the list of reports when targeting, allowing a parent group to include or exclude activists on their list that are targeted by a child group’s reports.
• We now warn you when you are targeting email to your full list, which is a deliverability risk.
• If your upload encounters an error, we now email you with the error message and some suggested next steps.
• We now log who downloaded reports results and when in the SQL mirror, for auditing purposes. See the SQL mirror documentation for more information.
• Lists of custom fields and tags are now sorted by date created, newest at the top.
• You can set a group default to use kilometers for geography targeting instead of miles, in the settings tab on the group manage page.
• You can create more than one tag at a time by separating them with commas. Tag names also no longer allow characters beyond letters, numbers, underscores, and dashes, for compatibility.
• Liquid syntax is now highlighted along with HTML when using the HTML editor.
• Hebrew (he) has been added as an available language for activists and front-facing action pages.

October 2, 2023

This release adds speed improvements, hardware keys for two factor authentication, ladder history for activists, and more.

Ladder History

• Ladder history is now displayed in activist records.
• You can see when an activist entered and exited a ladder, as well as that ladder’s current status (published, stopped, etc…).

SQL Statements In The Interface

• After you run targeting for an email, report, or mobile message, you will see a SQL statement representing that targeting query in the interface, on the targets tab of the manage page.
• This SQL statement can be used on our SQL mirror to recreate the targeting you just ran.

Speed Improvements

• We have made email campaigns faster, allowing you to add hundreds of emails to them without slowing down page loads.
• Activist records have been sped up, with each section loading separately, drastically increasing the speed that these pages load.
• Editing, managing, and saving ladders has been sped up as well.
• And the process to generate a list of child groups in networks has been sped up, improving many pages when using a large network.

Hardware Keys For Two Factor Authentication

• You can now register hardware keys as your method for two factor authentication.
• Hardware keys include dedicated tools like Yubikeys, as well as phones and other devices.
• Hardware keys offer the best protection for your account by far, as they are unphishable, and we highly recommend setting them up for your account.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• In the network tab on a group manage page for a group in a network, you will now see who the parent group is (if one exists) and be able to click to go to that group’s manage page if you have permissions.
• There is a new permission for administrators in groups which allows access to the API & Sync section for that group (and thus API keys, webhooks, and sync settings). All current administrators with the settings permission have been given this new permission as well, but going forward it can be given to administrators independently.
• CSV downloads from reports and other functionality will now have more clearly named files, designating what type of file it is, what group and function it came from, and the date is was generated.
• The SQL mirror will now automatically incorporate new child groups for networks every night.
• When using call campaigns with US-based targets, activists will have the option to enter their zip code on the keypad as well as speak it.
• When sending by timezone to large lists, a warning is displayed that sends may be delayed as timezone data is processed each hour.
• Administrators will need the advanced upload permission to download CSV files from the uploads page going forward.
• You can now send multiple tests of your mobile messages to a comma separated list of phone numbers.
• You can change the default for your group to always refresh targeting before sending scheduled emails or mobile messages if you’d like, on the group manage page, settings tab.
• Translation of our administrative interface into French is complete! Note that going forward, the interface is a continually moving target and thus you may see new features in English while translation is worked on.

June 21, 2023

This release adds an highlighted reports for groups, option to update targeting before sending scheduled emails and mobile messages, one click event campaign RSVPs, and more.

New Collect & Store Steps In Ladders

• We have updated how collect and store steps work in ladders to more easily allow you to validate input and handle responses.
• You can now add validation rules for incoming mobile messages from activists waiting in a collect and store step, and send them a custom mobile message back if they respond with invalid input.
• Collect voter address and store polling places also has similar functionality, with a custom invalid response message sent back if the activist’s address they sent in is invalid.
• In addition, these steps now have two paths branching off of them. If an activist does not respond with a valid response in the selected wait time they will proceed down the no response path to further steps in the ladder. If they do respond, they will proceed immediately down the yes response path.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now target activists who are newly subscribed to the email or mobile list in a given time period, instead of just activists who are subscribed or resubscribed in that time period.
• You can order your email or mobile message to send from east to west, which is useful in situations where you want your communication to go out to activists in the same order.
• You can now prevent ad-hoc question creation via the drag and drop form builder from the group manage page, settings tab.
• Liquid errors in emails and mobile messages now show up on the preview page as well as the writing page, and do not prevent tests from sending.
• We have added estimated segment counts to mobile messages to help you better understand your costs with Twilio and the telecom carriers. They appear as part of the mobile message statistics download on the mobile messages tab on your group manage page.
• If you are sharing your shortcode or toll free number, your keywords page now shows your own group’s keywords as well as shared keywords from other groups in a separate tab.
• We have sped up a few crucial pages, such as ticketed event manage pages, targeting pages, and mobile inbox pages.

April 27, 2023

This release adds an highlighted reports for groups, option to update targeting before sending scheduled emails and mobile messages, one click event campaign RSVPs, and more.

Group Report Highlights

• You can set up to six reports as highlighted reports for your group, on the group manage page.
• Highlighted reports show up prominently on the group manage page with their most recent count of the number of activists they target.
• This allows you to put important reporting numbers front and center on your group manage page.

Update Scheduled Targeting

• When scheduling an email or mobile message, you now have an option to update targeting before sending.
• This way, you can automatically include everyone who has RSVPed for an event, for example, before sending a scheduled event reminder.

One Click Event Campaign RSVPs

• You have the option of turning on one click event campaign RSVPs on your event campaign settings page.
• If on, activists who are recognized will be able to RSVP to one or more events in your event campaign with one click, without ever leaving the event campaign map page.
• Note that this setting will bypass collecting custom information on event RSVP pages like name or custom questions, and it will bypass the sponsoring group’s opt in settings.

Ladder Skip Days

• You can now set skip days for your ladders.
• During a skip day, ladder waits will not process, allowing you to pause ladder operations on a schedule.
• This can allow you to not send ladder emails after waits on holidays, for example.

New Mass Operation: Set Custom Field Value

• A new mass operation is available on report results, allowing you to set custom field values for all activists targeted by that report.
• You can set a given custom field to any value you enter, or leave blank to clear out values in that custom field for all targeted activists.

Restrict Access To Child Groups In A Network

• You can now restrict access by administrators to child groups in a network by editing that administrator’s permissions on the parent group.
• Administrators with this permission turned off will no longer see their permissions on the parent group inherit to child groups.

Updated 2-Factor Authentication System

• We have updated our 2-factor authentication system.
• You can now set up multiple authentication methods separately, including SMS via your mobile phone and any TOTP compatible authenticator app such as Authy or Google Authenticator.
• You can set up and manage your authentication methods in your profile, using the menu in the upper right corner after logging in.
• Accounts who had SMS enabled as an option for 2-factor authentication before this change were automatically migrated to the new system using the mobile number on file.
• Accounts who did not have SMS enabled will have to manually register a new TOTP application or mobile number. You will be prompted to do this next time you log in.
• We strongly encourage you to set up 2-factor authentication to protect your account, and review your settings after this change to make sure you can still log in.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• If you have not edited the email autoresponse for an action, that is now highlighted on the action’s manage page.
• You can now use action only fields in ladder decisions for ladders connected to that action via a took action trigger.
• Virtual events and ticketed events will now display their start and end times in an activist’s local timezone when they view the event page.
• We have fixed a bug where emoji was not showing up in the mobile inbox. ☺️
• You can now optionally hide activist information like full name, email address, and mailing address from the automatic signoff we add to letter campaign messages sent to targets.
• A new integration with the Email-Voter API is available, allowing you to match your activists back to the voter file to append additional information.
• Latvian (lv) is now a supported language for front-facing actions and embeds.

February 9, 2023

This release adds an email deliverability dashboard and targeting option, mobile auto-responses on all actions, new call campaign features, and more.

Deliverability Dashboard And Targeting

• A new deliverability dashboard is available on group manage pages, in the emails tab.
• The dashboard shows you a quick overview of your email stats from the last seven days, including total sent, open rates, click rates, spam rates, and the like.
• Click each statistic to get a more detailed graph of that statistic by week, which can be broken down by common recipient domains like Gmail and Yahoo, over custom date ranges.
• Statistics and graphs come with handy coloring to show you at a glance whether each statistic is within recommended ranges for good deliverability, and each statistic comes with tips and links to our deliverability guide to help you improve.
• In addition, we have a new targeting option that’s great for deliverability, called “Engagement,” which targets activists who either subscribed to the email list, took an action, opened an email, or clicked on an email in a certain number of days or a date range that you select.
• This new targeting option can be used when targeting emails, mobile messages, or reports, in queries, and in ladder decisions.

Mobile Auto-Responses

• Actions that can have keywords where activists can text to join (petitions, events, and forms) now have optional mobile auto-responses, which can be sent back to activists after they take action.
• If an activists takes action via keyword, they will get a mobile auto-response. If they take action via the action’s web page, they will get an email auto-response.

Call Campaign Improvements

• Call campaigns now have separate auto-response mobile messages that can be sent back to activists who are subscribed to your mobile list or not subscribed yet, allowing you to ask non-subscribers to subscribe (perhaps by replying back with a keyword connected to an action) while thanking subscribers separately for taking action with you again.
• When using the click-to-call feature, the targets an activist is calling will now be shown on the thank you page, allowing you to use the custom description section for a script that activists could use when calling those targets.

Throttled Sending

• You can now send emails and mobile messages with a throttle, meaning only a certain amount of emails or messages will be sent each hour, useful for slowing down delivery.
• When you choose to send with a throttle you enter in the number of messages you’d like to send each hour.
• That number of messages will then be sent at the beginning of each hour until no more messages are left to send to activists who were targeted to receive that email or mobile message.

Recurring Mass Operations

• You can apply tags or remove tags from activists who are newly targeted by a report automatically each time that report’s targeting recurs.
• For example, you can set your report to recur daily, and automatically add a tag to every new activist who appears in the report’s results each time that report runs.

Email Link Parameters

• Optionally add text that’s appended to every link in your email as a URL parameter or argument.
• For example, add a source code in the link parameters box when writing your email and that source code will be automatically added to all links in that email. No need to add it to every link individually!
• Clips and liquid work here too, so you can personalize and customize the URL parameters.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• HTML code highlighting is now available when creating and editing email wrappers, page wrappers, and snippets.
• Clips and snippets are now available in HTML mode when writing emails.
• You can click the view icon to preview a query’s parameters that you’ve included or excluded when targeting emails, mobile messages, and reports, in the targeting preview section before sending emails and mobile messages, and on manage pages of emails, mobile messages, and reports. In that preview you can click the edit button to open up the query’s edit page and make changes.
• A targeting note can be added when you make an email, mobile message, or report in query mode that is shown in the targeting preview section before sending emails and mobile messages, and on manage pages of emails, mobile messages, and reports, helping you communicate what your query is doing more clearly.
• We now track when users are editing things like actions, emails, and the like, and warn you if you enter an edit page that someone else is also editing, to help prevent two users from editing at the same time and overwriting each other’s changes.
• For added security, we now require you to enter your current password to make changes to your account such as changing the password, changing the email address, or adjusting 2-factor settings.

December 7, 2022

This release adds new reporting options, security notifications, keywords for call campaigns, administrative languages, and more.

New Reporting Options

• A source code report is available on the group manage page. This report gives you counts of how many activists have that source code, subscribed to the group’s email and mobile list due to that source code, the lifetime value in donations of those activists, and the number of recurring donations they set up, giving you a sense of which source code is performing best.
• Reports made from the start organizing menu now can have random limits, allowing you to create randomized report universes for long-term testing and other uses.

Security Notifications

• If you change your password, change the email address on your account, or update 2-factor authentication settings, an email notification is sent to your account’s email address.
• This can help notify you of changes in your account that you did not make.

Keywords For Call Campaigns

• You can now attach keywords to call campaigns.
• If an activist texts in a keyword, their phone will ring and they will be put into the call campaign, allowing them to make calls to their elected officials.

Administrative Languages

• The administrative interface of Action Network (everything you see after you log in when using the toolset) is now translated into languages other than English.
• To start, we are supporting French and Portuguese. More languages may be added later.
• To set your administrative language, edit your profile.
• Please note that translation of the administrative interface is still a work in progress. Expect to see portions in English for a while as that work continues.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Actions can be scheduled to be unpublished at a future date.
• When you go to resubscribe someone who is bouncing or spam complaining in their activist record, we will check to see if they are on the global block list. If they are, you will see a notice that they must be removed before you can continue. If they are not, you will be able to resubscribe right away.
• Filters involving geography and radius (zip codes, cities, and event campaigns) now take a number entry instead of a dropdown (so you can set 8 miles instead of choosing between 5 and 10 options), and are available in kilometers instead of miles if chosen.
• Emails, mobile messages, and ladders now can be sorted by status for easier management.
• A reschedule link is provided for scheduled emails and mobile messages on the manage page for easier rescheduling.
• You can schedule actions to unpublish at a future date.
• We have sped up various pages and functions, including the group manage page, the uploads page, and targeting emails, mobile messages, and reports.
• New integration with Smartraise, a fundraising tool that process payments in over 130 currencies.
• New integration with Daisychain, a CRM and organizing tool that allows you to automate data flow while building authentic connections.

September 17, 2022

This release adds email, ActBlue, and miscellaneous improvements.

Email Updates

• Implemented the List-Unsubscribe header in emails, to enable safer unsubscribes and improved deliverability.
• Made improvements to speed up email sending speeds.
• Made improvements to speed up the loading time of the targeting page.

ActBlue Updates

• On transaction reports, the initial donation of a recurring donation series can be differentiated from ongoing donations in that series.
• Donations refunded on ActBlue are now reflected as refunded on Action Network.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added the ability to export RSVPs to all events in an event campaign.
• Added the ability to filter the mobile inbox by keyword used to take action.
• Added the ability to skip all ladders when you upload.
• Administrators who sent invitations to sponsor an action are now informed when the invitee accepts or declines the invite.

July 21, 2022

This release adds event campaign updates, a new targeting page design, machine open statistics, wrapper syndication in networks, polling place lookup in ladders, copy and paste steps and sticky steps in ladders, and miscellaneous improvements.

Event Campaign Updates

• Public event campaign pages have a new look! They come with a map and a list of events by default, with new search options to find events by date, virtual events, and the like.
• You can toggle whether the map is visible on your event campaign in event campaign settings.
• Event campaigns can also now contain virtual events. Virtual events can have optional location information associated with them. Virtual events without any location information will only show in the event list, not on the map. Virtual events with location information will show on the map (but with their location hidden, since the event is virtual).
• This change also comes with a new widget version for embeds. When you update your page wrapper, new widget versions will then be shown. Until the update, you will see old widget versions, without things like the new search and list of events.

New Targeting Page Design

• Our standard targeting page has gotten a big redesign!
• The new design features easy-to-use sections, so filters are grouped by common usage. The sections open and close, to help simplify the amount of information on the page. And your selected targeting is now previewed in the right sidebar, to allow you to understand your selections more easily.

Machine Open Statistics For Emails

• Email statistics now include machine opens, to help you get a count of opens that are triggered by machines vs. humans, such as those that happen with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP).
• Emails will show a total open count and rate as well as a machine open count and rate going forward.
• Due to how machine opens work, the machine open statistic does not mean a human didn’t also open the email, and is not deduplicated. Rather, it’s meant to help you get a sense of machine opens vs. overall opens on your list.
• You cannot target activists by machine opens, only overall opens as before.

Wrapper Syndication In Networks

• Email wrappers, email layouts, and page wrappers can now be syndicated to child groups in networks.
• A syndicated layout or wrapper cannot be edited by the child group, but edits made by the parent group will automatically show up on the child.
• To go along with this, a new {{ GroupName }} clip is available, including for use in page wrappers, that outputs the group’s public name, so you can customize the wrapper for each child group.

Polling Place Lookup In Ladders

• A new ladder step is available, which waits for an address via mobile message from an activist, then uses that address to look up polling place, early vote, and ballot dropoff information for a voter, and stores that information in custom fields.
• The new step uses the iWillVote API to perform the lookup.
• This allows you to ask an activist for their address via mobile message, receive their response, look up their voting location, store that information in custom fields, and return that information to the voter via another mobile message or some other delivery mechanism.
• This feature only works in the US, and only in certain states and for certain elections as the data becomes available over time. Consult our documentation for updated information on what data is available.

Copy And Paste Steps And Sticky Steps In Ladders

• You can now copy and paste existing steps in a ladder to a new place in a ladder while editing your ladder.
• Click “Copy Steps” to enter copy mode, select steps you want to copy (they must be contiguous), then click “Paste” and choose an exit to paste your steps in that section.
• Ladder decisions and randomizer steps are now also “sticky” and will scroll with you down the page as you edit your ladder. This helps you understand where you are in nested decisions or randomizer paths more easily.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added autocomplete for custom field names when making new questions via the drag and drop form builder.
• Added support for actions in Arabic (ar).
• Tags can now be removed over the API.
• The network email/mobile report can now accept an optional date range of up to 90 days.
• A list of all source codes on an activist can now be exported as a report data column.
• When making questions in the drag and drop form builder, the custom field name now offers autocomplete of existing custom fields, to help you avoid making extra custom fields you don’t intend.

May 18, 2022

This release adds many SMS inbox updates, action only fields, event and ticketed event updates, keyword listings, Canadian letter and call targets, and miscellaneous improvements.

SMS Inbox Updates

• The SMS inbox how has an “organizer view” which allows multiple administrators answering SMS inbox conversations to work through unread messages simultaneously. Click “Start my queue” in the upper right of the SMS inbox to get started.
• Once in organizer view, you will be presented with one unread conversation at a time, and be able to respond, make any other adjustments needed (such as unsubscribing the activist), and then either mark that conversation as flagged (which means it needs further review) or move on to the next unread conversation.
• Multiple administrators can use organizer view at the same time without being given the same unread conversation to handle, allowing lots of administrators to make short work of many unread conversations.
• The SMS inbox also now allows you to “flag” a conversation for further review. You can see all flagged conversations in a list and flag or unflag specific conversations.
• The SMS inbox allows you to create saved responses (such as standard unsubscribe instructions) that can be easily used to respond quickly to repetitive conversations. Click the “Manage Saved Responses” link when viewing a conversation to get started.
• You can now filter conversations based on what mass mobile message each activist received. For example, you can view all inbox conversations only from activists who received your latest blast message.
• You can now view and edit which tags an activist has when viewing a conversation with them in the SMS inbox.

Action Only Fields

• You can now create action only fields, by checking the appropriate box when making ad hoc questions in the drag and drop form builder when making an action.
• Unlike regular custom fields, action only fields do not store data on activist records. Rather, they store data when that activist takes that action, on that action.
• This is useful for fields where you never need the data outside of the context of that action, for example, collecting a dietary preference for an event.
• You can report on this data from the action’s built in report, available on its manage page. You can also pull it as a column in standard reports if you include just one action in the includes section when targeting.
• Like custom fields, data will be overwritten if someone takes action more than once.
• For administrators in networks with locked down custom fields, they will now be able to use the ad hoc section of the drag and drop form builder to create questions on their actions that use action only fields exclusively.

Event And Ticketed Event Updates

• Virtual events and ticketed events can now have an optional virtual event link (like a Zoom link) that is emailed to RSVPers after they RSVP, in the 24 hour reminder email, and is placed in the add to calendar link.
• Events and ticketed events can now be optionally marked as accessible, and be given optional accessibility text to explain how they are accessible.

Keyword Listings

• A list of all of the keywords attached to actions to allow text to take action is now available, in the Start Organizing menu, details tab.
• This list will show all of your active and inactive keywords, plus links to the actions they are attached to and any ladders that trigger off of them.

Canadian Letter And Call Targets

• Letter and call campaigns now feature Canadian elected officials as built in targets.
• Options include Federal Ministers, Senators, the House of Commons, Provincial Ministers, and Provincial Legislators.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added support for actions in Vietnamese (vi).
• Added support for integration with SpeechifAI.
• New integration with CivicShout.
• New integration with N8N.
• You can download a report showing all the tags in your group and how many activists have that tag on their record, at the bottom of the tags page.
• You can download a report showing all the custom fields in your group and how many activists have a value in that field on their record, at the bottom of the questions and custom fields page.
• You can now subscribe to the mobile list in ladder steps (including children, if in a network).
• You can now record a message for your call campaign directly in your browser, or upload an existing .mp3 file as before.
• Source codes can now be added as a column when doing uploads.
• You can now filter events by start and end date over the API.

March 2, 2022

This release adds paused statuses for ladders, carrier data for mobile numbers, custom scripts, and miscellaneous improvements.

Paused Status For Ladders

• Ladders can now be paused, in addition to active, closed, and stopped.
• While paused, activists will enter a ladder and proceed until they hit a wait step. All activists in wait steps will not move forward until the ladder is moved to active or closed.

Carrier For Mobile Numbers

• You can now turn on carrier data for mobile numbers, in your group settings tab, if you have mobile messaging set up.
• When activated, a mobile number’s carrier will be appended, allowing you to target email, reports, mobile messages, queries, and ladders by carrier, as well as download that data via reports.
• Carrier append incurs an extra cost, added to your mobile message bill. When activated, all currently existing mobile numbers will be backfilled with carrier data.

Custom Scripts On Actions

• You can now add custom scripts or arbitrary HTML content to the head of an action page, in the sharing and tracking tab of the action’s manage page.
• This is useful for adding custom tracking javascript or other HTML you want included in the header of the action page.
• This is a partner-only feature, requiring the movement plan or above.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Group administrators without the contributions permission can no longer view or download group transactions, manage or edit fundraising or ticketed event pages, view an activist’s donation history and recurring donations, make reports with fundraising data in them, or manage or download reports with fundraising data in them.
• You can now count the number of activists targeted by a query, without pulling a report, by clicking “Save & Count” when editing your query.
• When giving access to reports via report access, you can allow the invited user to optionally refresh the report results to bring in fresh data.
• We now support Canadian electoral districts (federal and provincial ridings). You can target email, reports, mobile messages, queries, or ladders based on this data, view it in activist records, and download it on reports.
• Added support for actions in Polish (pl).

December 9, 2021

This release adds tag columns for uploads and miscellaneous improvements.

Uploads

• You can now use a column of tags when uploading activists, allowing you to add one or more different tags to activists on a per-row basis, instead of adding tags to an entire upload file.
• To use, tags should be included as a column, comma separated within the column, in your upload CSV file.
• Tags in your column are matched to already existing tags in your group by name, exact matches only.

Reports

• A record of mass operations is now available for reports, in the mass operations tab.
• From this new tab you can run mass operations (such as subscribe or add tags to all activists targeted by the report), see what operations are currently running, and see the history of previous operations.
• Note, operations history is only available going forward, not for operations done before this feature was added.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added email statistics broken out by popular sending domains, so you can see opens for gmail, yahoo, and the like per email, from the email statistics download on your group manage page, emails tab.
• Added support for Canadian Provinces akin to current support for US states.
• Added the ability to remove pending invites to multiple sponsored actions.
• Added support for Italian, Serbian, and Slovenian languages.

October 22, 2021

This release adds custom domains, 2-factor enforcement, and miscellaneous improvements.

Custom Domains

• You can now set up custom domains or subdomains for actions and mobile short links.
• For example, instead of your Action Network actions living at actionnetwork.org URLs, you can have them live at act.my-organization.org URLs.
• Similarly, instead of having links shortened with actn.et when sending mobile messages, you can use your own domain such as txt.my-organization.org.
• Custom domains come with the same features as built in domains, including source codes, tracking, and the like.
• This feature does involve an extra cost per domain. Email join@actionnetwork.org for more details.

2-Factor Enforcement

• You can now enforce 2-factor authentication for all group administrators (optionally including child groups if in a network).
• The setting can be managed from the settings tab on your group’s manage page.
• When you turn on enforcement, administrators without 2-factor turned on will be required to register before they can continue managing group assets.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now duplicate actions on the action’s manage page.
• A new filter is available for email, report, mobile message, query, and ladder decision targeting: Donated X times in Y days, which allows you to target activists who donated 3 times last year, for example.

September 15, 2021

This release adds personalization datasets, mobile snippets, and miscellaneous improvements.

Personalization Datasets

• You can now upload personalization datasets from the Start Organizing menu, Details section, to allow for easier personalization in email and mobile messages.
• Personalization datasets allow you to match a certain field (say, state, or a custom field) to a certain value with Liquid clips.
• For example, if you wanted to address all activists in California as “Californians” and all activists in New York as “New Yorkers,” personalization datasets would allow you to do this without complex Liquid if/then logic or uploading a custom field to every activist’s record.

Mobile Snippets

• You can now create mobile snippets, just like you can currently create email snippets, in the Start Organizing menu, Details section..
• Like email snippets, mobile snippets are bits of commonly-used text that you can subsequently insert into your mobile message with one click.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now trigger webhooks based on a specific action. See webhooks documentation for more details.
• Mx. is now available as a prefix for US House members (thank you CWC for approving this)!
• The President and Vice President of the US are now available as built-in targets for letter campaigns and call campaigns.
• You can now preview ladder emails and mobile messages as a specific activist.
• Letter and call campaign goal counts have been changed — a count will be added for each letter sent by activists to targets.
• You can now easily see which numbers are already in use with which call campaign when creating or editing call campaigns.
• We continue to improve speed for various page loads and operations, including report and email targeting, group manage, and activist view pages.

August 4, 2021

This release adds ladder triggers and miscellaneous improvements.

Ladders

• Adding a tag to an activist record can now trigger the activist to enter a ladder.
• Ladder emails can now have optional administrative titles.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• When an activist texts in a keyword to take action, they are now recorded as having used the source code “keyword:[keyword name]” on the action. (ex: If they texted VOTE, they would have the source code “keyword:VOTE”.)
• We’ve improved the speed of a various operations, such as viewing your list of uploads, viewing email/report/mobile message targeting pages, and adding tags via report results.
• The VAN sync functionality has been removed, due to their removal of the VAN OSDI API.
• You can now select a date range for email and mobile message reports.
• Creating an email based on an action will use the action’s administrative title for the administrative title of the newly created email, which you can then edit as normal.
• The numerical ID for actions is now shown on the action manage page’s sidebar, for ease of use with our SQL mirror.
• Many new tables and columns have been added to the SQL mirror. See the SQL mirror documentation for specifics.
• The Zapier integration has been updated to include the ability to add RSVPs to events, signatures to petitions, and create fundraisers and donations.

June 24, 2021

This release adds email campaigns, click to call, miscellaneous improvements.

Email Campaigns

• Collect multiple emails together in email campaigns!
• An email campaign can be made from your group manage page, or on the manage page of an email.
• Email campaigns will display aggregated statistics of all emails they contain, as well as a list of the emails, allowing you to easily view each email’s stats, test results, and the like.
• Easily add emails to an email campaign from the email campaign or email’s manage page, remove them, make duplicates, pick test winners, and remove emails from an email campaign.
• Reports are also available, allowing you to download the statistics of all emails within an email campaign, or the statistics of all email campaigns.

Click To Call

• Call campaigns can now optionally have click to call turned on.
• If active, click to call will make an action page available at a URL. Activists fill out their information (including phone number) and receive a call on their phone. After picking up they are connected to targets based on their address.
• Click to call action pages come with all the functions you’d expect from Action Network action types — embeds, source code and referrer tracking, custom questions, etc…
• Call campaigns can also now accept activists dialing in directly who are not currently on your mobile list. For new activists, we will ask them to speak their address via voice prompt so we can connect them to targets.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The mobile message inbox can now be searched by phone number or text of the incoming messages.
• You can now more easily use emojis when writing emails and mobile messages using the emoji picker.
• Twilio error code 30003 is now treated as a bounce when we receive it back after delivering a mobile message.
• Alt text for accessibility is available on action banner images.

May 24, 2021

This release adds new widget versions, shared shortcodes, and miscellaneous improvements.

New Widget Versions And Letter And Thank You Updates

• A new widget version (version 4) is available for embedded actions. Older widgets (version 3 and below) are now officially deprecated and will no longer receive updates.
• Version 4 embed code is served by default on action manage pages and thank you pages, as well as via oEmbed and over the API.
• Pages using custom page wrappers that have not been updated since May 19, 2021 will continue to use older widgets (version 3) until they are updated, then they will server version 4.
• The changes in version 4 are minor in most cases, but may be breaking for some users. Please test with your page wrappers to make sure they look how you expect them to look.
• Specifically, letter campaigns step 2 (writing a letter to a target) is now one column instead of two, and thank you pages no longer use a green background for the heading section, but rather use a transparent background to pick up the colors of the underlying page.
• You can learn more about this transition here.

Shared Shortcodes And Toll Free Numbers

• Affiliated groups in a network can now share a shortcode or toll free number.
• Keywords for texting to take action are shared — groups sharing can not both use the same keywords.
• Similarly, toll free numbers or long codes for call campaigns are shared — groups sharing can not both use the same toll free number or long code for their call campaigns.
• Unsubscribes are global — if an activists replies STOP to unsubscribe, they will be unsubscribed from all groups sharing the numbers or shortcodes.
• Similarly, the inbox is shared — when an activist replies to a message we will put them in the inbox of the group who most recently contacted that activist.
• Shared shortcodes and toll free numbers can be set up by our partnerships team. Email us at join@actionnetwork.org to begin setup.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Notifications when someone posts a new event in an event campaign now work more like other notifications (meaning you can inform one or multiple administrators) and can be found now on the responses tab on the event campaign’s manage page.
• New custom fields can be created when making a wait for reply and store step in ladders by clicking the plus button next to the custom fields list.
• More dropdowns for custom fields are searchable, including the dropdowns in queries, ladder decisions, and query mode emails and reports.
• You will now receive a warning if you are making a ladder triggered by an action that already has a ladder triggered by that action set up.
• The API has a new background queue option to speed up processing and throughput. More details in the API documentation here.
• You can clear report fields when choosing data to download in a report.
• Title will now be included in the salutation to targets on letter campaigns.
• New integration with ThruText via BlueLink.

April 7, 2021

This release adds MMS messaging and miscellaneous improvements.

MMS Messaging

• You can now send MMS messages as well as SMS to your mobile list!
• Toggle your message to MMS when writing and add an image to make it an MMS.
• Testing is available for MMS images too, add more than one to set up a test!

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Upload speeds have been improved.
• Setup for mobile messaging has been changed, with Action Network handling your Twilio account and number purchase and rebilling you for telecom fees.
• You can now collect mobile opt ins from ActBlue and have them added to your Action Network mobile list by setting up our ActBlue sync.
• You set up a mobile message template for your group that automatically loads up when you create a new mobile message or ladder message, in group settings.
• New liquid filter to only output valid US state names.
• New integration with CallHub’s FastClick Dialer, a TCPA and FCC complaint dialer for mobile phones and landlines.
• New integration with DonorBox via Zapier, a fundraising tool.

March 4, 2021

This release adds keyword texting to take action, scheduled sending by timezones, new filtering options for date ranges, better liquid error messages, phone-only activists and other API upgrades, new integrations, and more.

Keyword Text To Take Action

• You can now assign keywords to actions if you are using our mobile toolset. If an activists text that keyword to your phone number(s) or shortcode, they will take that action.
• For example, you can attach the keyword “JOIN” to a form, and if someone texts JOIN into your phone number(s) or shortcode, they will take that action and join your mobile list.
• Activists who take action in this way are subscribed to the mobile list. They can also join with just a phone number. (Though we’ll match them to an existing record by phone number if we can.)
• You can then do further processing or have conversations with them in ladders, with new options to only trigger into a ladder if someone took action via a keyword (vs. on the web), and a new option to ask for and store email address in a ladder conversation, to append email to a phone-only record.

Scheduled Sending By Timezones

• You can now schedule emails or mobile messages to be sent at a certain time that’s local to your activists, based on their timezone.
• For example, you can send your mobile message at 12:00pm local time, and your activists will receive it the next time it is 12:00pm in their local timezone.
• Timezones are based on an activist’s location. If we have no location information for an activist, they will not have a timezone set.
• Activists who have no timezone will receive the email or mobile message with the first group of activists who do have a timezone. So if you schedule your message for 12:00pm and it is 11:45am Eastern Time right now, then activists without a timezone will receive your message at 12:00pm Eastern Time, with the rest of the activists who have Easter Time set as their timezone.
• This means that your email or mobile message can potentially be sending for a full 24 hours before it is finished, if you have activists scattered around the world, as the local time you have scheduled it for works its way around the globe.

Filtering By Date Ranges

• You can now filter by date range on donation activity, action activity, email open activity, email click activity, mobile message click activity, subscribed to email, and subscribed to mobile filters.
• For example, you can target activists who took at least 1 action between February 1, 2021 and March 1, 2021.
• This new date range option is available in email and mobile message targeting (both standard and query mode), queries, and ladder decisions.

Better Liquid Error Messages

• If you have an error in your liquid coding for clips in emails or mobile messages, we will highlight the error when you save your draft, with more understandable error messages.
• Errors we catch include invalid liquid tags, unclosed liquid tags, undeclared variables, non-existent custom fields or Action Network tags, and non-existent letter campaign, call campaign, or event campaign links.
• You will not be able to move on to next steps in email or mobile message sending until liquid errors are fixed.

Better Liquid Error Messages

• If you have an error in your liquid coding for clips in emails or mobile messages, we will highlight the error when you save your draft, with more understandable error messages.
• Errors we catch include invalid liquid tags, unclosed liquid tags, undeclared variables, non-existent custom fields or Action Network tags, and non-existent letter campaign, call campaign, or event campaign links.
• You will not be able to move on to next steps in email or mobile message sending until liquid errors are fixed.

API Upgrades

• Phone-only activists are now supported on the API.
• Mobile subscriptions are now supported as well.
• Call campaigns are now available over the API, as advocacy_campaigns along with letter campaigns.
• Phone numbers, mobile subscriptions, and call campaigns are now supported in webhooks.
• See the API documentation for more information.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Notification banners have been redesigned.
• Email and mobile message scheduling has been reworked to be more accurate.
• When viewing an activist record you can now view their mobile message conversation history, in the mobile messages section.
• Dropdowns with many items (like field selection on step two of reports) are now searchable. We plan on continuing to make more of these types of dropdowns searchable over time.
• New integration with Apollo Artistry to manage your candidate or organization’s website.
• New integration with Ballot Ready that provides tools for voters.
• An updated integration with Campaign Deputy, a fundraising CRM, that includes self-service setup.
• New integration with Humanitru, a cloud-based, Supporter Engagement Platform and CRM.
• New integration with Integromat that allows you to automate repetitive tasks that transfer data between systems.
• New integration with Strive Digital, a broadcast texting service.
• New integration with Tatango, a broadcast texting service.

November 25, 2020

This release adds ladder templates and shortcuts, mobile inbox improvements, support for mobile-only activist records, and more.

Ladder Templates And Shortcuts

• When creating a new ladder you will be able to choose from various templates to help you get started with common ladder designs.
• Actions, emails, and mobile messages also have shortcuts to enable creating a ladder with that item as its trigger easily.

Mobile Inbox Improvements

• You can now see mass mobile messages and ladder messages in the conversation view in the mobile inbox.
• You can also now easily mark your conversation as unread, mark all conversations as read, and filter between viewing all and just unread conversations.

Mobile-Only Activist Records

• Instead of requiring email address, now email OR mobile number (or both!) is required for activists, which means you can create activists with only a mobile number.
• Activists are still deduplicated with email address and mobile number. As before, if a duplicate mobile number is added on another activist and both have email address, the mobile number will be removed from the old record. But if the duplicate mobile number is on a mobile-only record, the activist records will be automatically merged.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The Organizers and Invitations tabs on the group manage page have been combined into an Administrators tab with both functions available.
• When you duplicate an email wrapper or layout or page wrapper, you can now rename it while you duplicate it.
• You can now drag and drop the order of report columns on step 2 when making reports.
• Mobile opt out options now appear on the email unsubscribe page.
• We have a new question type for forms, the HTML question type, allowing you to put code and text in between form elements (such as disclaimers).
• You can now target by actions that caused activists to be subscribed to the mobile list, as you can with the email list.
• You can now bulk remove actions from the action manage page for petitions, events, and forms.
• We have a new look! Buttons throughout the system have been redesigned to be easier to understand.
• We also have a new developers program! Click here for more information and to sign up!

September 17, 2020

This release adds smart logic for recurring upsells, and miscellaneous improvements.

Smart Logic For Recurring Upsells

• If you have the recurring upsell feature on for your fundraising page, we will now ask for a monthly contribution amount on the fundraising thank you page based on a smart algorithm.
• The idea is to ask donors for the right amount for a monthly contribution, not just to make the amount they just donated to you monthly, as is the current functionality. For example, a donor who donates $50 will be asked to make a $20 monthly contribution, rather than to convert their $50 donation into a $50 monthly one.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Emails and mobile messages now display the percentage sent while they are in the process of sending on their manage pages.
• Uploads now display the percentage uploaded, as well as counts of number of activists newly subscribed to the mobile list as part of that upload.
• You can now edit sharing options such as the Facebook share language on step two when creating or editing your action, as well as on the action’s manage page, “Sharing & Tracking” tab.
• Additional information such as modified date and creator displayed on group manage page tabs, queries, and ladders.
• A new lifetime value field is available for download on reports.
• Updated integration with WordPress that includes hCaptcha ability, shortcode buttons, and more! Thanks to Christian Norton at Concerted Action for this one.
• Updated integration with Resistbot that allows activists to contact their representatives, get ready to vote, and civically engage just by sending a text.

August 24, 2020

This release adds add to calendar buttons, mobile number and subscription support over the API, miscellaneous improvements.

Add To Calendar Buttons

• Events and ticketed events now have add to calendar buttons, to allow activists who RSVP or buy tickets to easily add the event details to their calendars.
• We support Apple, Google, Outlook, Outlook Web, and Yahoo calendars, and calendar entries will include the event’s title, location, time (in correct timezone if the event has no location), and link back to the Action Network event page.
• Add to calendar buttons will appear on event/ticketed event thank you pages (and widgets), thank you, reminder, and change notification emails (as a clip), and on the manage page.

Mobile Number And Subscription API Support

• The API now supports our built in mobile number core field, and mobile subscription status.
• These features can be used to view mobile number and mobile subscription status for activists, as well as store or update these fields via the API.
• These new fields are available on the /people endpoints using GET and PUT, as well as on the person signup helper and the various action helpers.
• More information is available in the API documentation.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• We are now attributing mobile unsubscribes via STOP keywords to particular mobile messages, based on the last message the activist received.
• New integration with SimpleTexting that subscribes activists on your SimpleTexting SMS list to your Action Network email list.
• New integration with VoteAmerica that subscribes activists who use the VoteAmerica embeds.

August 5, 2020

This release adds manual goals, a new start organizing menu, and miscellaneous improvements.

Manual Goals

• You can now set a manual goal in the progress bar for most action types. When editing an action, click the “edit” link underneath the progress bar to set a manual goal.
• Leave blank for our automatic goal setting, which updates to a new, bigger goal whenever your previous goal is reached.

New Start Organizing Menu

• The start organizing menu has been redesigned!
• The new menu is split between the different categories. Click on one to open it.
• The menu is also now “context aware” if you do not have a default group set. For example, if you’re managing an action sponsored by a group, the links in the start organizing menu will correspond to that group, making it easy to jump to that group’s list of tags.
• If you use a default group, the current behavior is not changing, though default groups are now better explained in various portions of the interface.
• The menu to go to a group’s manage page quickly has also been moved to the top right of the start organizing menu.
• And the profile menu in the upper right has been redesigned to better highlight which default group is set.
• You can now retrieve a list of your group’s custom fields over the API

Miscellaneous Improvements

• New files added to the files system will now show up at the top of the files list.
• Updated the account creation confirmation page for clarity.
• Mobile subscription status will now be copied when phone numbers are deduplicated between activists.
• New clips are available for most recent donation amount and date, for use in email or mobile messages, as well as including on report downloads.
• You can now only subscribe new activists who have never unsubscribed to your mobile list instead of all activists in your uploaded file.
• You can also now not subscribe new activists to your email list, instead of subscribing new activists in your uploaded file.
• You can now invite multiple organizers to your group via comma separated email addresses.
• Aborting email sending will now let you exclude just those who were sent the aborted email, not all who were targeted, when you later target email, mobile messages, or reports.
• Child group email and mobile message history will be displayed in a parent group’s activist record if you are in a network.

July 1, 2020

This release adds if/then questions and miscellaneous improvements.

If/Then Questions on Forms

• You can display questions on forms conditionally when a value is filled out on another question, great for surveys where you only want to ask certain questions if an activist has filled in a previous question. Access the new functionality in the visual form builder when editing an action!

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can invite events to be part of your event campaign if they were not made that way from the beginning, using the new section on the events tab on your event campaign manage page.

May 27, 2020

This release adds automated testing, API improvements, and other and miscellaneous improvements.

Automated Testing

• You can automatically test your emails, from the email preview page before they are sent.
• Setting up an automated test will split the universe of activists you’ve targeted up into “cohorts” based on their activity level.
• We support six cohorts — one for activists who subscribed, took action, opened, or clicked an email within the last 30 days, one for the last 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, 365 days, and over 365 days.
• You can then choose to limit your test to a certain random number of activists within that cohort (say, 1,000 random activists in each cohort) and start your test.
• You’ll be able to see email statistics (opens, clicks, actions, donations, etc…) per cohort and choose which cohorts you want to send a “winning” email to, which would remove the random limit, exclude activists who got the test, and send an email to any remaining activists in the cohorts you chose.
• Optionally you can decide to automatically send a winning email to cohorts who meet or beat a certain statistic and threshold after a certain amount of time. (ex: cohorts who beat 20% open rate after 12 hours)

API Improvements

• You can now POST to create event campaigns from another system over the API.
• You can also POST to add events within that API-created event campaign over the API.
• Browser URL is now writeable for API-created actions. This URL can be used when using event campaign clips in emails and mobile messages.
• You can now pass an email or mobile referrer in the referrer_data section when creating things like petition signatures over the API, to match an API-created transaction with the Action Network email or mobile message that created it.
• New fields for donated and total donation amount are available on the messages API resource.
• See the API documentation for more details.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Email fields on actions now check for common misspellings (ex: gmail.con instead of gmail.com) and suggest fixes to cut down on mistyped email addresses.
• You can set a default query to be included or excluded when making a new email for your group, in group settings.
• Dropkiq for Liquid autocomplete in emails and mobile messages — type {{ when writing your email or mobile message to see it in action!
• Additional sponsors can be limited to receiving activists from only certain U.S. states when in proportional mode.
• One click donations now work with embeds and donation pages with page wrappers.
• ControlShift has created a Ruby client for interacting with the Action Network REST API. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. Check it out here.
• New integration with Rising Campaigns to manage your candidate or organization’s website.
• New integration with ControlShift Labs that allows you to use their suite of tools for distributed organizing and member-led campaigning.

April 25, 2020

This release adds mobile messaging, ActBlue integration, and miscellaneous improvements.

Mobile Messaging

• Mobile messaging is coming soon to Action Network! Including:
• Mass messaging: Send mass messages to your mobile list.
• Call campaigns: Make calls to elected officials.
• Automated messaging: Use ladders to send messages and have conversations with activists.
• Message inbox: Have one-on-one conversations with activists.
• It’s a big feature and it’s not fully rolled out yet, but you can sign up to learn more here.

ActBlue Integration

• Integrate with ActBlue — any donors will be subscribed to your email list in Action Network and marked as having donated.
• Track donations on a per-page basis so you know which ActBlue page generated donations.
• Source coding (ActBlue’s refcodes) and email referrer built in, with donation statistics showing you how well each email (and each test version) did.
• Tag donors as Express Lane donors for one click emails, and store phone, employer, and occupation data.
• Store recurring donations (and when recurring donations are canceled) for better recurring donor targeting.
• Available in the API & Sync section of the Start Organizing menu.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Copy a report data layout from one report to another on the data page when making a report.
• Email statistics downloads are now background jobs, and emailed to you when ready.
• Emails now have a discussion board on the preview page where the email creator and other group admins can have a discussion about the email draft.

March 30, 2020

This release adds miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now decide whether mobile opt ins go up the network from parent to child groups for a group in a network, on the settings tab on the group manage page.

March 19, 2020

This release adds miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• A new liquid “commonize” filter is available for first names in the clips window, only outputting a first name if it matches a list of 18,000 common first names.
• You can show or hide the mobile number and mobile opt in fields on a per-group basis in a network via network group permissions.

February 24, 2020

This release adds filtering for donation days and dates, editing tag names, additional bounce/unsubscribe/spam complaint data, and miscellaneous improvements.

Filtering For Donation Days And Dates

• When using the donation level filter, you can choose whether you want to target donors who gave a certain amount within the last certain number of days (which is previous behavior) or since a past date (which is a new option).
• This allows you to target donors who gave since the beginning of the year, as opposed to just within the last 365 days.
• Toggle this option by clicking the link next to the donation level filter. This option is available on report and email targeting, queries, and ladder decisions.

Editing Tag Names

• Tag names can now be edited, on the tags page from the start organizing menu.
• Editing a tag will change its name and update it on every place the tag is applied — actions, emails, targeting, queries, questions, ladder steps, etc…, including on child groups if the tag is syndicated.
• Edits will not update ad-hoc questions or API integrations, though will need to be updated manually.

Additional Unsubscribe/Bounce/Spam Complaint Data

• Additional data is now available on activists who’ve unsubscribed, bounced, or complained about spam.
• You can see which email, ladder, upload, or other option caused an activist to unsubscribe from the email or mobile lists. This can be found by hovering over the subscription status icon in activist view, or outputted as columns on reports.
• You can now tell the difference between activists who newly bounce or complained about spam on the email list vs. those that did so previously and are on the global block list. These statistics are broken out separately on emails, and can be targeted separately via report subscription options.
• Note that both of these changes are forward facing, so will affect new data coming in, rather than existing data.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now edit custom fields and tags inline in the activists tab on your group’s manage page, as well as search by tags.
• You can “pass through” URL arguments to redirect links in the responses tab when managing actions. For example, entering “https://mysite.com?myargument={{ source }}” will pass through the value of the source URL argument on the action link. If you linked to “https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/my-petition?source=mysource”, after taking action activists would be redirected to “https://mysite.com?myargument=mysource”.
• Email manage pages now display the time an email finished sending as well as when it started.
• If you include one and only one action when using standard targeting for reports, you can now include a “Mobile Opt-In” data column on step 2 when building your report, allowing you to export whether an activists checked the mobile opt in box or not when taking that particular action, similar to the default field exported on the action’s manage page.

January 25, 2020

This release adds mobile number and list support, per-field recognition, activist and paging reports, and miscellaneous improvements.

Mobile Number And List Support

• You can now store mobile number on activists as a core field, along with other core fields like first name, last name, and address.
• You can add the mobile number field to action forms in the form builder, upload mobile number via CSV, view and edit mobile number when viewing activist records, download mobile number via reports, and generally do all the things you’d expect with a new core field.
• Mobile numbers are validated, sanitized, and stored in international format (ex: +12024569475). Numbers can be entered on actions in various formats (ex: (202) 456-9475 or 202.456.9475) but will be stored in the standard format automatically. Obviously fake mobile numbers like 123.456.7890 will be rejected.
• You can also now subscribe activists to a mobile list that is attached to each Action Network group, just like activists can be subscribed to the group’s email list currently.
• A mobile list opt in checkbox can be added to action forms via the form builder. The language of the checkbox can be appended via a setting in your group’s settings tab on its manage page.
• You can upload activists to subscribe them to your mobile list, report on subscription status, edit subscriptions via an activist’s record, and generally do all the things you’d expect with a new list.

Per-Field Recognition

• Instead of recognizing returning activists and not showing any core fields (such as first name), even if blank and present on the form, and showing custom fields no matter whether the activist already has filled them out or not, activists are now recognized on a per-field basis.
• This means we will show fields that are on the form and blank so the activists can fill them out, and hide fields (custom or core) that aren’t when an activist is recognized.
• A new option has been added to the form builder allowing you to always show a field no matter what if you want to ensure activists fill it out again.

Activist And Paging Reports

• You can now page through report results on report manage pages, allowing you to view more than just the first 20 results.
• An “Activists” tab has been added to group manage pages, allowing you to set the results of a report you choose to load into that tab.
• You can search, sort, and inline edit core fields of activists in the activist tab list.
• By default, newly created groups will have a report targeting all activists created in their group and set to load into the activists tab.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• When you duplicate an email, if it has an admin title, the words “Copy of” will be prepended to keep admin titles unique.
• Emails with random limits now show the total count for targeting as well, so you can see how many would be targeted if the random limit were removed.
• If you upload an image larger than 1mb into an email using the visual editor, we will warn you that this image may cause performance issues for activists reading the email, especially on phones.
• The Emails & Reports tab on group manage pages has been separated into Emails and Reports tabs, and the group manage sidebar can be closed.

November 26, 2019

This release adds a recurring upsell option to fundraisers, new filters, image attribution, and miscellaneous improvements.

Recurring Upsell

• You can now turn on a recurring upsell option to fundraisers. If on, contributors will be asked to make their one-time contributions into monthly contributions on the fundraiser thank you page.
• You can turn on this option and customize some language on the fundraiser manage page, “Recurring Upsell” tab.

New Filters

• You can now target by city and radius — activists who live within a certain number of miles of the borders of cities you select.
• You can also now target by unique ID by uploading a CSV of unique IDs when targeting.
• These new filters work on email and report targeting, queries (and query mode), and ladder decisions.

Image Attribution

• You can now optionally add a line of text under images to attribute them to photographers.
• This allows you to give them credit where necessary or desired. You can even include HTML, in case you need to link to a website in the attribution text.
• Attributions can be added for banner images on all action types and groups, as well as images uploaded through the visual editor. The drag and drop editor does not have this feature.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now preview emails without sending tests — click the “Save & Preview” button when writing email to bring up the window. You can preview clips as other activists as well.
• You can now decide to resubscribe previously unsubscribed activists in ladder subscribe steps or not.
• Merge tags in the drag and drop editor have been renamed clips, just like the visual editor.
• You can now save custom blocks that you’ve created in the drag and drop editor for easy reuse, by clicking on a row and clicking the save icon. Blocks can have categories and tags for easy searching, and can be accessed from the blocks section to drag them in to your email or layout. Custom blocks are shared within a group as well, so other admins can access ones you make and vice versa.
• Added public host contact information to the event campaign host report.

October 2, 2019

This release adds email body testing, report access, a ladder custom field step, miscellaneous improvements.

Email Body Testing

• You can now test different email bodies just like you can subject and from lines.
• Click the add alternative body button when writing an email to add another body. (Or three!)
• Both the visual and drag and drop editor modes can have additional bodies.
• Test results are available in the same test results tab as other tests, with bodies labeled by title that you enter when creating each body, so you can tell them apart.

Report Access

• You can give people access to a specific report or the reports tab of a specific action by inviting them in the report access tab (on reports) or in the reports tab (on actions).
• This allows you to give people access to this data without having to add them as an administrator of your group and give them wider access.
• Invitees will receive an email invitation and be able to set up an Action Network account if necessary. Access can be revoked at any time.

Ladder Custom Field Step

• A new step is available for ladders: Write to custom field!
• Use it to write a specific value to a custom field you choose when an activist reaches that step in the ladder.
• You can even use this step to blank out values on a custom field for activists who reach that step, just leave the value blank in your ladder.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now delete all data in a custom field or remove a tag from all activists in the Questions & Custom Fields and Tags pages respectively.
• You can now save your email draft without sending a test, with the “Save & Refresh” button under the editor.

August 15, 2019

This release adds choosing more than one target list on letter campaigns, use URL-based redirects, group defaults for sharing options, backdating of transactions, and miscellaneous improvements.

Multiple Letter Campaign Target Lists

• You can now choose one or more target lists when creating letter campaigns, such as Governors and the state legislature.
• You can combine built in targets and custom targets as well.
• Activists will be matched to all targets based on their address and the target’s rules (shapefiles, ZIP/postal code targeting, etc…).

URL-Based Redirects

• You can redirect activists to a thank you page after they have taken action via a URL-based argument, overriding the action’s default thank you page or redirect.
• Add redirect=http://wherever-you-want-to-redirect.com as a URL argument to redirect the activist.
• URLs should be URL encoded, and this URL option will not work on ticketed event or fundraising actions for security reasons, but will work on all other action types.
• The redirect option will work with embedded widgets as well, just put the URL argument on the parent page, just like source and referrer codes.

Group Default Sharing Options

• You can now add a default Facebook share image in group settings, which will be used if an action does not have its own Facebook share image or banner image, in place of our toolset-wide default.
• You can also now add a default Twitter handle, which will be used in place of our toolset-wide default in the default Tweet text for an action.

Backdating Transactions

• You can now optionally set a date in the past when that transaction occurred.
• This applies to manually adding or editing donations in activist view, uploading transactions via uploads, or POSTing donations over the API.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• When you unpublish a group, you can choose to unpublish all of a group’s actions as well.
• If child groups in a network do not have the email permission, they will be hidden from the subscriptions page when activists view their subscriptions.
• Reports and emails now have a refresh targeting button on their manage/preview pages, which will allow you to rerun targeting as if you just saved it and get an updated count.
• Receipts can be resent to activists by clicking the resend receipt button next to the donation in their activist record.

June 28, 2019

This release adds a growth chart, permissions for features for groups in a network, and miscellaneous improvements.

Growth Chart

• Groups now have a growth chart on their manage pages, settings tab, which show more details about list growth for that group’s email list.
• The chart will show the top 25 source codes and actions for new activist list growth in the last 24 hour and 7 day periods.
• The chart is updated hourly.

Feature Permissions For Network Groups

• For groups in a network, permissions can now be set on a per-feature basis by parent groups for children, using the permissions button next to each child group in the network tab of the group’s manage page.
• Each feature can be toggled on and off for each child group. For example, you can not allow a child group to have access to email or tags by toggling those features off.
• Groups with features turned off will not be able to use those features.
• Parent groups can set permissions for their children, but cannot set their own permissions.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can search for events in event campaigns by city as well as ZIP/postal code.
• You can see whether an administrator or organizer of a group has 2-factor authentication turned on by hovering over their name in the organizer’s tab on your group’s manage page.
• Checkbox questions on forms can be marked pre-checked, and will show up to activists already checked when the action loads.

May 31, 2019

This release adds tag syndication, Facebook and Google pixel tracking, source code and VAN sync updates, and miscellaneous improvements.

Tag Syndication

• Syndicating tags down to child groups in your network now syndicates the values as well as the tag name.
• Previously, syndicating a tag from a parent to a child would give child groups the same tag as the parent to use, but which tag was on which activists was not syndicated — an activist could have the tag on a parent but not on a child, for example.
• Now, syndicating tags syndicates their values as well, so if you add a tag on an activists it will be added on that activist for all groups in the network where that tag has been syndicated, rather than data flowing upwards only as was the previous behavior.

Facebook & Google Pixel Tracking

• Tracking of conversions via Facebook and Google advertising pixels is now built in, allowing you to easily track your online advertising campaigns.
• Enter your pixel IDs on each action’s manage page in the Sharing & Tracking tab. Once entered, activists who take action will be tracked as conversions via these pixels, including their donation amounts if you’re using a ticketed event or fundraising page.

Choose VAN Shifts, Statuses, and Roles

• You can now overwrite the defaults when setting up or uploading events to sync with VAN by choosing which shift, status, and role you want to use for each RSVP, on the event’s manage page, VAN tab.
• VAN sync setup is also now easier, allowing you to pick from menus to set options.

New Source Code Targeting Options

• Source codes now appear as a dropdown list when targeting, allowing you to easily select which source codes you want to target by.
• You can also now choose to target only activists who were added to the list when the selected source code(s) were set, allowing you to more easily track list growth and lifetime value by source code.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Welsh (cy) has been added as an available language.

April 29, 2019

This release adds a drag and drop email editor, ladder randomizer, new targeting options, editable thank you pages, and more miscellaneous improvements.

Drag & Drop Email Mode

• There is now another option to compose your email, a drag and drop editor that makes creating complicated, mobile-responsive layouts such as newsletters simple and easy, with no coding required!
• You can use the drag and drop editor by choosing it with the Editor Mode toggle switch at the top of the email writing page. The older visual editor is still an option as well.
• You can set a default editor to use when you write emails in your account’s settings, accessible in the upper right menu when logged in.
• The drag and drop editor also has its own version of email wrappers, which we call email layouts, available from the email wrappers and layouts section in the Start Organizing menu.
• Email layouts are a bit different than email wrappers, they’re more like templates. You can add blocks and lock blocks so they’re not editable, leaving others editable, meaning you can create a layout with a logo and a footer that aren’t editable, but have some pre-made content blocks for a newsletter that are.

Ladder Randomizer

• There is now a new step you can add to ladders, a randomizer step, which will distribute activists randomly down two paths.
• The randomizer step allows you to test different ladder paths to see which works better. You can edit the weights for each path to send more or less activists down each with a slider when you edit the randomizer step.

Targeting

• In a network you now see child group emails in the emails, email openers, and email clickers lists, allowing you to target email to your parent group based on whether an activist has received, opened, or clicked a child group email.
• Ladders that subscribe activists will now store which ladder subscribed the activist in their activist record and for targeting purposes, so you can target email or reports by specific ladders that subscribed activists, even if that ladder was from a parent in a network.

Thank You Pages

• You can now edit the headline and sub-headline on thank you pages, to further customize them.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Events and ticketed events now display the day of the week in addition to the date and time.
• Added sponsors and additional sponsors to the event campaign event report download, and city, state, country, sponsors, and additional sponsors to the event campaign event’s list on its manage page.

February 4, 2019

This release adds the option to download previously generated reports and miscellaneous improvements.

Targeting

• You can now target emails and reports or ladder decisions by whether activists have taken action on your letter campaign, which means they filled out at least step 1 and entered their email and address to find targets, or activists who’ve actually sent a letter to at least one target.
• Letter campaigns will show up twice in the actions list when targeting, one marked as sent letter and one not. Choose the appropriate entry to target activists who’ve sent a letter or who’ve at least filled out step 1.
• You can also now target activists who are new to your list because of taking a specific action (subscribed due to taking that action) by selecting the “new activists” option under the action in the actions section when targeting.

Download Previously Generated Reports

• Instead of generating a new report with updated data and waiting for the email to arrive saying it’s ready, you can choose to download a previously generated report instantly.

View Latest 100 Action Takers

• On each action’s manage page you can now view the latest 100 action takers on that action, with the same information displayed as is contained in the report available for download. For many, this will relieve the need to download reports.

Send As Another Activist

• When testing emails you can send a test to yourself (or others) as another activist using their data but delivering the email to you.
• This is useful for testing clips, with their data populating the clips (like first name) even though the test email is sent to you.

Internationalization

• You can set a default country and language for your group on the group settings page.
• If set, activists added without a country or language (say via uploads) will get those defaults instead of our previous defaults, US and English.
• If set, pages created for the group will have that language set automatically.
• Sharing and response option defaults are now translated into all of our supported languages.
• Dates and times for german events are shown in a localized format.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Stripe ticketed event purchases now log metadata in Stripe to help identify the source action in Action Network.
• You can now trigger ladders based on clicks or opens of specific ladder emails.

December 13, 2018

This release adds shapefiles and miscellaneous improvements.

Shapefiles

• Shapefiles can be used to match activists to custom geographies like city council district in letter campaigns with custom targets.
• We accept shapes in the GeoJSON format.
• Once we’ve uploaded your shapes you can use them in your custom targets with letter campaigns. Clips work too! (Note that you cannot target emails or reports by shape however.)
• Email us at support@actionnetwork.org if you’d like to work with us to upload custom shapes!

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added US military state abbreviations (AA, AP, AE) to fundraising and other forms.
• Added party to the letter campaign target report for built-in targets.

November 20, 2018

This release adds webhooks, a new process for email creation and wrappers, upload details, event and ticketed event limit reach redirects, and miscellaneous improvements.

Webhooks

• Action Network now has webhooks!
• Webhooks are an extension of our API that are used to automatically inform other systems and servers in close to real time when something happens in Action Network, such as the signing of a petition or the receipt of a donation.
• You can read more about webhooks, how they’re used, how to set them up, and their API-based specifications in our API documentation.

Email Creation and Wrappers

• If you do not have a default group set, you will be asked to choose which group to create a new email for when you go to create a new email.
• Choosing the email wrapper you want to use is now on step 1 of email creation, where you write your email.
• Wrapper choice is also on step 3, previewing your email, where it has been up until now.

Upload Details

• You can now view the details of each upload, such as who uploaded it and what options were applied, in your uploads list.
• Click the “I” icon next to each upload to view its details.

Event and Ticketed Event Limit Reached Redirect

• Optionally redirect activists to another URL when your event RSVP limit is reached or your ticketed event is sold out of tickets, such as a wait list signup form.
• Found in the “Responses” tab on your event or ticket manage page (renamed from “Response Options”).

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Address and city will no longer be blanked out on activists if an activists changes their US zip code to add or remove or change a +4.
• Group invites now expire automatically after one month if the invited person does not accept their invite and create their account within that period of time.
• You can now add internal notes to tags, questions, custom fields, email wrappers, and page wrappers.
• We no longer add tracking URL arguments to links in emails that are mailto or internal email anchor links.
• Recurring donation notifications to administrators will now indicate if this charge is a recurrence (a charge resulting from the prior start of a recurring donation).

September 30, 2018

This release adds Redshift for filters and mirrors, editing recurring donations, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Redshift for Filters and Mirrors

• We have started to use Redshift for filtering and targeting emails and reports, as well as a few other things.
• Redshift should be much faster than our current system, especially on large lists with complex targeting.
• We are also using Redshift for our SQL mirrors. Details can be found in the mirror documentation.

Editing Recurring Donations

• Recurring donation amounts and the next charge date can now be edited from the recurring donation update page.
• Donors can edit their own amounts and next charge dates if group settings allow donors to edit or cancel their recurring donations.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added VAN ID to event campaign host report downloads.
• Page tags and administrative title are now available on group transaction report downloads.
• Event campaign events will now be shown in order by closest date if two events are in the same location.
• Added Moldovan (language code mo) as a new language.
• New integration with Campaign Deputy to manage campaign or nonprofit fundraising. Mention Action Network to receive 20% off!

July 27, 2018

This release adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Tags can now be created over the API via POST.
• Report manage pages now have a tab to show the targeting used for a report.
• We’ve removed the ability to log in via Facebook or Twitter. If you previously logged in with those options, please use the password reset feature to send yourself a password reset email and set a password for your account.
• Subscription options are now deduplicated in the situation where an event is hosted by the same group as an event campaign (or the groups are in the same network).
• Updated the Catalist sync to work with Catalist’s new authorization scheme. You will need to re-enter credentials in the API & Sync page to enable Catalist sync.
• Queries can now be duplicated.
• Preview text is now available in ladder emails.

July 4, 2018

This release adds new features for the form builder, ladders, and a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Form Builder

• The drag and drop form builder now controls both core fields (name, email, etc…) as well as custom questions for most actions (with the exception of fundraising and ticketed events).
• This means you can drag to re-order core fields (such as putting address before first name) as well as intersperse custom questions with core fields.

Ladders

• You can now target emails, reports, queries, and ladder decisions based on whether activists are currently waiting at a step in a ladder or have ever been in a ladder, using the new ladders filter.
• You can also view ladder statistics (activists exited and email statistics) by date range, using the date controls on your ladder’s manage page.
• Both of these only apply in a going forward way — activists who are currently in or have been in ladders won’t be targeted, but those who enter in the future will, and statistics for previous days aren’t available, but future ones will be.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Fixed a bug where outreaches on the API were requiring ZIP/postal code for the activist. They no longer do.

May 12, 2018

This release adds new features for affirmative opt ins, ladders, uploading of events, deleting action history, syndicated core fields, oEmbed support, and a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Affirmative opt ins

• Groups can now choose to make all of their sponsored actions feature affirmative opt ins, where activists must choose to opt in to email subscriptions or not, rather than our default pre-checked subscription checkbox.
• An activist using one of these forms must choose to either opt in or not before they can take action. If the activist is not yet subscribed and chooses not to opt in they will be added to the group’s list but unsubscribed, so their data and choice is retained. If the activist is already subscribed, they can choose either subscription option and their subscription status will not change — they will not be unsubscribed or subscribed, but remain in the status they currently are in. This is equivalent to how the default subscription checkbox works.
• Groups can also decide to optionally show additional text underneath submit buttons on all actions, useful for explaining how data collected on the form is used by the organization, linking to a privacy policy, or showing another disclaimer.
• These settings can be activated in your group’s manage page, settings tab.
• Both of these settings are useful for complying with GDPR, the EU’s new data protection law going into effect in May. However, please talk with your lawyer. These settings in and of themselves are not enough to make your compliant.
• You can read more about how Action Network can help you with GDPR compliance in our help system.

Ladders

• You can now schedule your ladder to activate, close, or stop at a certain date and time in the future.
• This can be set, edited, or canceled from the ladder’s manage page.
• There is a new trigger available for ladders — took an action of a specific type. For example, you could trigger activists to enter your ladder any time they donate on any fundraising page you’ve made.
• There is a new wait option for relative times, like wait until next Tuesday or the 1st of the next month.

Uploading Events

• Events can be uploaded to a group directly, much in the same way as events were already able to be uploaded to an event campaign.
• The upload button is located on a group’s manage page, in the sidebar.

Deleting Action History

• Simple action history such as petition signatures, event RSVPs, and form submissions can be deleted from an activist’s record when viewing their record.

Syndicated Core Fields

• You can now syndicate core field values like first name and address between parents and children, locking the value so if it changes in one group it changes in the other syndicated groups as well, instead of flowing up the network.
• You can manage syndication on the Questions & Custom Fields page.

oEmbed support

• We now support the oEmbed standard, which you can use to easily grab embed code for Action Network actions.
• See the oEmbed documentation for detailed instructions on how to use this service.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• If activists are unsubscribing from a group in a network, they can view all subscriptions in the network from the bottom of the unsubscribe page. This replaces the view all subscriptions page link.
• Merging an activist will now correctly transfer their recurring donations as well.
• Map text is now translated based on the event or ticketed event’s language where available.
• You can now send test emails to multiple email addresses separated by commas.
• Fixed a bug where unsubscribing activists via a ladder didn’t update group manage statistics.
• Added additional clips like letter campaign target information to the autoresponse clips window.
• We now integrate with ROI Solutions, a full-featured CRM for managing donors or other people you want to keep track of. You can learn more about them here.
• We now integrate with DemCampaignSites, a full-featured and affordable website system for candidates. You can learn more about them here.
• Fixed an issue in the visual editor where underline tags were receiving a line break when they shouldn’t have been.
• Added event time and whether it has yet to occur or has passed to the event campaign manage events list.
• Highest Previous Contribution clips in email now pull only contributions in a certain group.

February 2, 2018

This release adds question and form updates, and a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Question And Form Updates

• Now, when you update a question, forms that have that question added to it will be updated as well.
• This means you can add a new item to a dropdown or change a label and see the change reflected on every form with that question.
• This applies to validation too — if you add validation to a field, it will be added to all questions using that field.
• And it also applies to syndication in a network — if you update the question of field validation on the parent, child forms will get the update as well.

Enhanced Event Campaign Templating

• You can now set defaults for more options for events made under your event campaigns.
• Custom form questions and/or HTML can be added, so events made under your event campaign have those questions on the event form by default (such as phone number for RSVPers).
• Sharing and response option defaults can also be added, customizing language for events made under your event campaigns.
• In all cases, individual event hosts can still update or override these defaults if they want.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The twitter character counter now goes up to 280!
• Action Network is now available in Swedish!
• We’re once again very pleased to have support from Mapbox to power Action Network maps!
• A new email activities table was added on February 1, 2018.

December 19, 2017

This release adds multiple additional sponsors and new data sharing options, uploading and manually entering fundraising transactions, snippets, and a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Multiple Additional Sponsors And Data Sharing Options

• All action types can now have multiple additional sponsoring groups added to it, via the new “Sponsors” tab on the action’s manage page.
• Groups invited to sponsor the action will receive a notification email and can accept or decline the invitation to sponsor.
• Groups that accept the sponsorship will receive access to uploads for that group if they are not an Action Network partner, but will not be allowed to email that group’s list. This will allow groups to upload their existing list from another tool for use in the data sharing options, explained next.
• The action will be available to additional sponsors in the group’s actions tab, just like other actions, and the manage page will be accessible as well, though only that group’s statistics will be viewable on the manage page and most other functions will be disabled.
• Actions can share data with additional sponsors in two modes: “Share All” or “Proportional”.
• Share all mode, the default, is like it sounds — every additional sponsor will receive the data on every activist who takes action, just as if they had made the action themselves.
• Proportional mode will attempt to give each additional sponsor the amount of new activist who take the action equal to the number of activists they are able to convince to take the action themselves, as measured by their referrer code. So if Group A brings in 20 activists via their referrer code to the action, the proportional algorithm will attempt to give them 20 other activists who signed the petition who are new to their list. See the help section for more details on how this algorithm works.
• Additional sponsors can also optionally have limits to the number of new activists they can receive by either sharing mode, which are set by the original sponsor administrators.

Upload Transactions

• You can now upload fundraising transactions to store data about activists who may have donated to you offline or in some other way outside of the Action Network system.
• Choose the upload by transaction upload type from the tabs when adding a new upload to upload transactions.
• Transaction uploads work just like normal uploads (so they can be used to subscribe activists, add custom fields and tags, can be targeted as a group as an action when targeting, etc…) except you can add an amount for the transaction and an optional recurring period to mark the transaction as recurring.
• Uploaded transactions will appear just like other donations added from outside our system (such as via the API, integration with Salesforce, integration with ActBlue, and the like).

Manually Add & Edit Transactions

• You can also now manually add individual fundraising transactions to activist records to store data about activists who may have donated to you offline or in some other way outside of the Action Network system.
• You can add a new transaction when viewing an activists’s record with the new transaction button in the donations section.
• You can add an amount and an optional recurring period for the transaction.
• Manually added transactions will show up together under a “Manual Transactions” action, so they can be targeted as a group when targeting emails or reports.
• Manually added transactions will appear just like other donations added from outside our system (such as via the API, integration with Salesforce, integration with ActBlue, and the like).
• Manually added transactions (and other transactions added outside our system) can also be edited to change their amounts and recurring periods at any time, with edit buttons available in the donations list when viewing the activist’s record.

Snippets

• You can now create snippets — bits of custom HTML — that can be inserted with one click into emails. Useful for standard email buttons, layouts, and the like.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• A new email activities table was added on November 24, 2017.
• Email and page wrappers can be duplicated (and optionally duplicated into child groups, if you’re in a network).

November 22, 2017

This release adds a new widget version, and a few other miscellaneous improvements.

New Widget Version

• Widgets have been updated to version 3, which more closely matches our recent redesign.
• These new versions will be used on pages with page wrappers, show up in the API, and be the embed code you receive on manage and thank you pages.
• All existing embedded widgets on your websites are unaffected — they will continue to use the old version until they are replaced, though the old widget version will cease to receive new feature updates.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The SQL mirrors now include various tables relating to ladders.
• The SQL mirrors also include events, RSVPs, and subscriptions related to events in an event campaign, even if those events are not sponsored by groups being mirrored.
• New languages are available! German (de), Russian (ru), Indonesian (id), Japanese (ja), Turkish (tr), Finnish (fi), and Dutch (nl).
• Added a dropdown to allow you to quickly jump to the manage page of any group you are an administrator of in the footer.
• Added the option to turn of SMS for 2-factor authentication, for extra security against phone number compromising attacks.
• You can now remove triggers from a ladder that has been published, as long as the trigger is not the last one in a rung.
• You can now create tags while adding them to things like uploads, actions, or reports — click the new plus button to create a new tag without having to visit the tags page.
• Letter campaigns will note if they are in test mode in the “Actions” tab on group manage pages.

September 29, 2017

This release adds validation for custom fields and upload by unique ID, plus a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Validate Custom Fields

• You can add an optional validation to any custom field on the Questions & Custom Fields page, in the form of a regular expression. (We have a few common ones built in, but you can add your own as well.)
• If a validation is present on that field, any forms with that field will validate against that regular expression, showing an error if an activist tries to enter a value that doesn’t match.
• Similarly, any values entered for that field via uploads, the API, or any other method will be rejected if they don’t match the regular expression.

Upload By Unique ID

• You can upload and match by unique ID instead of by email address. Choose the upload type from the tabs at the top of the new upload window.
• If you upload by unique ID, we’ll match to existing records using our internal unique ID, which you can download as a column on reports.
• Any ID in your file that matches an activist already on your list (either subscribed or unsubscribed) will be processed, and other rows will be skipped. This means you cannot use unique ID uploads to subscribe new activists to your group, only resubscribe activists who are unsubscribed.
• All other upload options — add tags, overwrite, blank, unsubscribe, delete, etc… — work as they do with uploads that match by email.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The user_merge_logs table in the mirror now shows the email addresses of the two users, allowing for easier matching with external databases.
• Activists can now update their name and address from the unsubscribe page (as well as unsubscribe and update their email address, which were already available options).

September 4, 2017

This release adds the ability to edit URLs of actions and groups, test from lines, a new widget version, plus a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Edit URLs of Actions and Groups

• After an action or group is published, you can now edit the URL that we automatically create by clicking the “Edit URL” button on the action or group’s manage page.
• You are able to edit the unique portion of the URL — some portions of it, like our domain name and the action type, will remain.
• Note that changing the URL will break any links to the old URL or widgets you may have posted or embedded.

Testing Of From Lines

• You can now test from lines like you can test subjects, by adding more than one when writing your email.
• You can see statistics by each subject and from line combination, to pick your winner.

A New Widget Version

• We have a new widget version, version 3, to match our redesign that rolled out a few months ago.
• For right now our current version, version 2, remains the default, so all pages using page wrappers and embeds continue to look how they always have looked.
• Eventually, version 3 will become the default. When that happens, all new widget code copied will be version 3 and pages that use page wrappers will use version 3 as well. After this point, version 2 widgets will continue to work but will stop receiving upgrades.
• For now, you can preview version 3 widgets by adding the URL argument ?version=v3 on the end of the URL to pages using page wrappers, manage pages (so you can copy version 3 widget code to embed elsewhere) and on the URL when previewing a new page wrapper.
• We recommend testing your page wrappers and embeds now with the new version and making any changes necessary, as they will become the default in the future.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can set your group to automatically merge activists who update their email address to an address we already have on file instead of sending group administrators a merge notification, available in your group’s settings tab.
• If you have more than one subject or from line in your email, sending a test will send you a copy for each subject, so you can proof and test each one.
• Email and report preview and manage pages will automatically refresh when your email or report’s targeting is done calculating, no more refreshing manually!
• The letter campaign target report tab now shows the total number of letters sent to all targets.
• All groups in a network can now request the monthly network email report, which will give you a report of your group and child groups, their list size, and their cumulative email sent count for the past 30 days, so you can keep an eye on network activity.
• Accounts that are not partners are no longer able to access activist addresses in most situations.
• Kiosk mode now works on letter campaigns.
• If you’re in a network, the filters for X opens or clicks in the last Y days when targeting or building queries can optionally include selected child group opens and clicks.
• A unique ID for activists that’s not email address is available on reports as a column you can download. It corresponds to the ID provided on the API for each activist.
• You can now use clips in preview text when sending emails.
• We added a new email activities table, email_activities_6, on August 21, 2017, and email_activities_7 on September 4, 2017.
• We added the link to API endpoints for petitions, events, fundraisers, letter campaigns, event campaigns, and forms on their manage pages, for easy access.
• Groups in the networks tab now list both their public group name and their administrative title.

July 31, 2017

This release adds the ability to treat custom fields as numbers or dates when targeting, changes to how recognizing activists work to prevent issues when an email is forwarded, and a few other miscellaneous improvements.

Custom Field Number/Date Targeting

• You can now treat any custom field as a number or a date for the purposes of targeting, using greater than or less than operations.
• Use >> or << to search for numbers greater than or less than. For example, “>>1” will return activists with custom field values greater than 1.
• Use the same operations to search by date. Date format is yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss, so December 1st, 2017, 2:00pm and 15 seconds is 2017/12/01 14:00:15. Time is optional.

Recognized Activist Protections

• We add IDs to the end of links sent through our email system, identifying the activist you are sending the email to. This makes it so when they click that link they are recognized on the action page you are linking them to and won’t have to fill out their basic information like name or email again to take action.
• This is great for activists clicking on, say, their phone. It increases action rates. But it means that when an activist forwards an email to someone else, that other person will then click and be recognized as the first person. While they can click a link on the page to clear the information and start again, some people inevitably won’t and will end up taking action as someone else, meaning their information is lost.
• Now, after you take action from a link in one of our emails, if anyone else clicks that link they will not be recognized, so they can fill in their information. This means that after a link is used, forwarding it won’t cause the same issues as before.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Uploads can now be scheduled to start at a certain time, allowing you to do big uploads overnight, for example.
• When an activist’s ZIP/postal code changes, we will erase their street address and city, to avoid mismatched address/city and ZIP/postal code fields when activists update address information.
• From and reply-to have been added to the group email statistics report CSV.
• Added duplicate button to ladder manage page.
• Fixed a bug where the record_attendance_helper on the events API wasn’t properly prefixed with osdi:. Both versions are now present for backwards compatibility.
• We added some new IP addresses for sending email: 167.89.39.118, 168.245.100.154, and 168.245.74.193.

July 3, 2017

This release adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• When searching for actions in a multiselect dropdown menus on targeting and queries, if you are in a network you can click to show or hide child actions.
• When editing images in the visual editor you can now easily swap one image for another that you upload.
• Moved custom fields above the comments box on petitions.

June 26, 2017

This release adds the ability to show or hide built-in field on forms, as well as make the required or not, query mode, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Show/Hide and Required/Not Required For Built-In Fields

• On some actions, you can now choose whether to show or hide our built in fields (ex: first name, last name, ZIP/postal code) as well as make them required or not required.
• On petitions, forms, and events, first name, last name, and ZIP/postal code can be shown or hidden and marked required or not required.
• On letter campaigns, address and city can be shown or hidden and marked required or not required if you are using a custom target.

Query Mode

• Emails and reports can now be optionally targeted in query mode, rather than our standard mode.
• In query mode you will use the query builder interface to target your emails or reports.
• In query mode you can also import existing saved queries to append to your targeting if you’d like.
• Once an email or report is in query mode it will stay in that mode until it is switched out. Switching modes clears all existing targeting on that email or report.
• You can choose to have all new emails or reports open in query mode by default instead of standard mode by editing your profile.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now create checkbox, radio, and dropdown options via text (like you can using ad-hoc questions on the form builder) rather than filling out inputs, useful for really long sets of options.
• When searching for items in a multiselect dropdown menu, you can now click to select all search results.
• We have a new integration with New/Mode and their tools that allow activists to call, tweet, fax, or email their US, UK, Canada, Australia, or the EU elected officials, or send letters to the editor. Data entered in new mode can come back to Action Network so your activists are subscribed to your list.

June 8, 2017

This release adds a new email API, the ability to make questions that add tags to activists, customization of date ranges and custom field columns for built-in action reports, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Email API

• Endpoints and functionality have been added to the API to allow you to create, target, attach wrappers, and send mass email via the API.
• A read-only wrappers endpoint has been added allowing you to access email wrappers for your group for the purpose of attaching them to emails.
• A read-only queries endpoint has been added allowing you to access saved queries for your group for the purpose of attaching them to emails for targeting.
• A messages endpoint has been added allowing you to create, edit, target, schedule, send, and stop mass emails via the API.
• See the API documentation for more information.

Tag Questions

• You can now create checkbox, radio button, and dropdown menu questions, both ad-hoc questions in the drag and drop form builder and in the Questions & Custom Fields section, that add tags to activists.
• For example, you could create a series of checkboxes that if the activist checks the box when submitting your action, the tags corresponding to the boxes they checked are added to their record instead of storing a custom field value.

Customized Action Reports

• The reports available on each action’s manage page (the target report on letters, the donor report on fundraising pages, etc…) as well as the group fundraising report on the group’s manage page can now be customized.
• You can optionally choose a start and/or end date, and only actions that happened within that date range will be pulled.
• You can also optionally choose additional custom field columns to add to the report, allowing you to pull in other fields to make your report more complete.
• These reports will still contain all they did previously by default — the activist’s basic data like name and address, action-specific data like the donation amount for fundraising pages, and any custom fields on the action itself as questions.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Events that are private are marked as such in the event campaign CSV download of all events and on the event campaign manage events tab.
• We have a new email activities table on the SQL mirror as of May 16, 2017
• You can add preview text to emails you send out, allowing you to customize what recipients using email readers like Gmail see before they open your email.
• You can now limit the number of tickets one person can buy on ticketed events.
• Groups added or removed from a network will now have syndicated custom fields added or removed as they should.
• If we ever have things to announce, outages, or other important messages, you’ll see a notice about them in the footer when you’re logged in.
• You can add a custom unpublished redirect link that we’ll redirect activists to if you unpublish your action, instead of our default unpublished page.
• Fixed a bug where lists on the API were not showing identifiers.
• Include and exclude column headings when targeting emails and reports now follow you down the page in desktop, for ease of use.
• Made hide links more visible and discoverable in lists.

May 31, 2017

This release adds ladders.

Ladders

• Ladders are sophisticated automated paths you can have your activists take in response to actions they take in Action Network
• Activists can be triggered into ladders by taking action, subscribing, receiving email, and the like.
• After entering ladders, activists proceed from step to step, being sent customized email depending on their attributes, waiting for a specified time, and more.
• Ladders can be used for simple things like a welcome series, or for much more complicated automated campaign plans.
• Ladders are available to all partners from the Start Organizing menu. Check out the help documentation for more on how ladders work and some examples.

May 13, 2017

This release adds a new design, Stripe as a payment processor, syndicated custom fields in networks, some API updates, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

A New Design

• As you may have noticed, Action Network looks different!
• We’ve got a new design to make things cleaner, faster, and easier to use.
• Right now, widgets, embeds, and page wrappers have not changed at all. They will (and we’ll let you know how that will work in advance), but for now they have not been touched.
• If you see any bugs or issues with how things look, please contact us and let us know so we can fix it!

Stripe and International Currencies

• Stripe is now available as a payment option in addition to WePay when you set up payments for a new group or account.
• In most ways, Stripe and WePay will work identically — same fees, same page look and feel, same features for the most part.
• With WePay, you can enter bank details later after setup, it’s easy to manage more than one recipient of funds with the same WePay account and keep funds separate. However, you must be US-based, with a social security number or federal tax ID number and all donations are made in US dollars.
• With Stripe you must enter bank details now, and you have to maintain separate Stripe accounts if you want to keep funds raised for different recipients separate, but you can be based in any of the countries Stripe supports (see here for a list), and you can raise money is almost any currency you choose. You will be asked to choose a currency to raise in when you set up your Stripe account.

API

• You can now access attendances (RSVPs) for events over the API that are part of an event campaign your group sponsors, even if you don’t sponsor the event directly.
• Events on the API now have a capacity field if a max RSVP limit has been set for the event.

Custom Fields

• If you are in a network, you can now syndicate custom fields to child groups.
• If you syndicate a custom field to a child group, the value for the field on an activist is now locked. If you change it in one group (either the parent or any children), it will change in all of the others.
• When you syndicate a custom field that already exists on child groups, activists on those groups will assume the value for the field of the parent. The syndication will “cover” the already existing value. If you later unsyndicate, that old value will re-appear.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Tags have been added to the email statistics report download.
• You can test any autoresponder emails (including monthly receipts for recurring donations and failed charge notification emails) by using the testing section while editing the email’s parameters.
• We have moved from Instant2fa to Authy for 2-factor authentication. If you use 2-factor authentication you will be prompted to enroll in Authy next time you log in. Do this before June 6th to avoid losing 2-factor protection on your account.
• Emails sent as part of syndication packages will now automatically exclude people who already received an email as part of that syndication package.
• A new language is available — Danish! Thanks to 3F for translation!

March 4, 2017

This release adds group referrer codes, collections, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Group Referrer Codes

• Groups now have referrer codes!
• Referrer codes can now be selected on manage and thank you pages, instead of automatically being applied. This allows you to use a referrer code for any groups you’re an administrator of or use your personal referrer code as before.
• If you use a group referrer code, that group will get a copy of the data activists enter when they take action using that link, just like personal referrer codes.

Collections

• If you are in a network, you can now make collections of child groups.
• Collections are ad-hoc lists of groups that you can name and edit. For example, you could make a collection for all your western affiliates, so you don’t need to pick them out one by one every time.
• Collections can be added to various places where you pick lists of child groups. For example, you can target everyone in a collection when targeting reports or email, rather than picking every group one by one.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• 2-factor authentication is now available for all (non-social media login) Action Network accounts, for increased security. Enroll by editing your profile in the menu in the upper right when you’re logged in.
• Improved reliability of downloading big reports.
• You can force pages to display without page wrappers, useful if you don’t run javascript, for example. Add the nowrapper=true argument to the URL to remove page wrappers and view the page using our default wrapper.
• Referrer codes now work like source codes when using embeds, allowing you to use them in parent URLs.
• Swapped in Mapbox maps. Thanks for supporting us, Mapbox!
• Allowed organizers in groups to access a group’s questions on the form builder.
• Updated our support email to support@actionnetwork.org.
• Added info about Mobile Commons integration.
• Added a new partition to the email_activities table on February 15, 2017.
• Moved to a new custom fields data format.
• Added new custom fields data format documentation for the SQL mirror.
• Added a warning if you left an Action Network ID in links in your email.

November 4, 2016

This release adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• You can now add tags to emails. This won’t then add tags to users who receive the email, but they will show up in the group manage emails list, allowing you to more easily categorize and search through your emails.
• Activists outside of the US have their US counties removed if they had them in the first place.
• Counties are now available to download on reports.
• You can schedule recurring reports to start on a certain date, instead of starting the next period from when you set up the recurring report. This allows you to set reports to run, say, on the 1st of the month without having to remember to set it up on the 1st from the start.
• Fixed a situation where linking to files with certain characters in their file names was impossible.
• Updated the visual editor from Redactor source with improved functionality like better pasting from Google Docs.
• Made fundraising/ticketed event widget javascript loaded events fire after styles are loaded.
• Emails will no longer send to people who unsubscribed after you targeted the email.
• Added another partition to the email activities table on October 31, 2016.

October 7, 2016

This release adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added the event URL to event campaign event reports.
• Letter campaigns now support filling custom forms, such as regulatory agencies! Contact us for details on how to set it up.
• Administrators with contribution permissions will now get notification emails when recurring donations are canceled.
• If there is a problem with your WePay account, you will be emailed a notification telling you so.
• Updated widget embed code to simplify and future-proof.

September 2, 2016

This release adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The API has been upgraded for much greater speed, particularly around pulling the people collection. See the API documentation for information on what’s changed.
• Counties have been added on every activist who lives in the US (or will be, once the script to do so is finished). You can now target emails and reports by counties, as well as download counties as a report field and view counties for a specific activist on their record.
• If an activist updates their email address to an address that’s already in use and the two activist records can be merged automatically (ie. they have no conflicting fields such as first name or address) then the merge will indeed happen automatically instead of generating an email to admins to perform the merge. For conflicts the email to admins will still happen, as it always has.
• We are now keeping a record of merges in the SQL mirror, so you can see what activist has been merged with what other activist for your historical records. See the mirror documentation for more.

August 22, 2016

This release adds language support, a new subscription system, event campaign and custom target upgrades, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Language Support

• All actions can now be created in one of four different languages: English (the default), French, Portuguese, and Spanish. The selector to choose a language is available when creating an action, in the top right.
• Actions can have one and only one selected language. If you want to make the same action in more than one language, you’d make two different copies of the action, one in each language.
• Actions (and widgets) will display built-in text (calls to action or other bits of text that aren’t editable directly) in the language specified.
• Activists now also have a language field, which stores their language preference.
• When an activist takes action, their language preference is updated to be the preference of the language of the action they just took.
• Other non-action front-facing pages and text in emails (such as unsubscribe language and unsubscribe pages) will display to activists in their chosen language.
• The administrative interface remains English-only.
• An activist’s language can be viewed when viewing their activist record, pulled as a report field, or over the API, and updated by editing their record, uploading new data, or changing over the API.
• You can filter your list for email and report targeting by language, to target different language segments on your list.
• If you’d like to add support for a language besides these four, contact us about making that happen!

New Subscription System

• We’ve completely refactored our subscription and custom field system! It’s now faster, with less bugs! However, since this is a completely under-the-hood change, you won’t notice any differences. That said, our database structure has changed, so if you use our SQL mirror, check out the table definitions for updates. And we’ve made some small API functionality changes, which are available in the API docs.

Event Campaigns

• Event campaign reports now include event end times.
• The email sent to hosts who publish events in an event campaign now contains the event campaign’s host instructions.
• You can now control many more fields such as sharing options and end times when uploading events to an event campaign. See our help document for a list of all available fields.
• Event campaign clips in emails now only pull events that are in the future and will ignore events that have already taken place.

Custom Targets

• You can now upload custom targets without zip codes. Targets without zip codes will be matched to all activists who fill out a letter campaign with that target included.
• We will also now match multiple custom targets to activists if the targets share the same location. So targets with the same zip code (or more than one target with no zip code) will be shown to activists when they fill out letter campaigns.
• This means you no longer have to comma separate multiple emails to email multiple targets, and targets will get personalized emails!

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added OCDID to letter target report downloads.
• Fixed email escaping so strings like “200+” are allowed in email and not stripped.
• Group fundraising reports now pull transactions from all child groups if the group is in a network.
• If you have an account, you can now update your address and city by editing your profile.
• Zip code is now available in the form values filter.
• The custom field clip now works reliably in autoresponse emails, so a newly entered custom field value can be echoed out on the autoresponse email as expected.
• The API now has an action_network:hidden field on action resources that lets you know whether that action is hidden in our UI.
• Duplicating an action with custom sharing options now attempts to update the URLs in those options to the new action’s URL where possible.

June 7, 2016

This release adds duplicate and exclude email testing buttons, additional functionality for managing subscriptions in networks for individual activists, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Email Testing

• You can choose to duplicate emails with automatic excludes from the email’s manage page.
• If you duplicate with exclude, the new email will exclude the first email and remove any random limit that was set on the original.
• This is useful for email testing — it essentially “picks the winner” and sets up the winning email with the options necessary to send it to the rest of the universe you’re targeting.
• Additional fine-tuning of targeting may still be necessary, such as excluding other tests.
• Duplicate with exclude is also now an option when you pick a subject test in the Subjects tab on an email’s manage page. This will duplicate the email with the picked subject, excluding the subject test, and removing the random limit.

Network Activist Record Subscriptions

• If your group is part of a network, you can now subscribe or unsubscribe an activist from each individual child group when viewing the activist’s record on a parent group by clicking the edit icon next to each group’s subscription.
• You can also subscribe or unsubscribe the activist from all groups (the current group plus children) by clicking the appropriate buttons in the activist’s record.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Fixed a bug where recognized user parameters could overwrite logged in user parameters.
• Made the start organizing menu a bit less apt to open when the mouse gets too close.
• Made green success notifications stay onscreen less long.
• Add a note when no random limit is set.
• Updated mirror documentation for the new email_activities table and partitioning scheme.
• Fixed a bug where some group invitations could not be cancelled.

May 17, 2016

This release adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Fixed a bug where some widget javascript events were firing more than once.
• You can now hide questions (including questions syndicated to you in a network) instead of simply deleting them.
• Admin, internal-only titles can now be set on the top of create/edit pages when creating or editing actions, emails, and the like.
• Fixed bugs where third party notifications were sent even when certain donations or ticket purchases failed.
• Fixed a bug in the visual editor where new lines weren’t being added correctly.

April 29, 2016

This release adds integrations with VAN and Catalist, administrator search for networks, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

VAN Integration

• You can now send RSVPs to Action Network events over to events in VAN using VAN’s OSDI-compliant API.
• Set up your VAN API key and default roles, statuses, and a custom field to use as a phone number when sending RSVPs to VAN on the API & Sync page.
• Add VAN IDs to events in the VAN tab on event manage pages or upload VAN IDs with event campaign uploads to match events in Action Network with corresponding events in VAN.
• When an RSVP happens on a connected event in Action Network, that RSVP will be sent to VAN as a signup, with data on the person such as name, email address, and phone number if you’ve chosen a custom field. The default role and status chosen when setting up the VAN integration will be used, as well as the first available shift and location for the VAN event.

Catalist Integration

• You can match activists in Action Network to Catalist and store DWID (Catalist’s universal identifier) as a custom field.
• Set up your Catalist API key and choose a custom field used to store DWID on the API & Sync page.
• After that, activists will be matched once they have at least first name, last name, email, and zip code on their record. Catalist matching will occur whenever an activist takes an action, such as signs a petition, is part of an upload, etc…

Administrator Search

• You can search for administrators by email address in child groups in your network from the Network tab.
• Enter an email address and click “Search” to find an administrator. Groups the administrator is an admin of will be listed as results.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added an array randomizer filter to liquid templating for emails. Add | randomize to an array to randomize the order!
• Added an action’s title to the group manage page’s actions list if an admin title is being used.
• Added a state abbreviation field that can be added to reports and is automatically included in pre-built CSV downloads, so reports can have NY instead of New York.
• Removing tags via report results is now more fault tolerant.
• Removed the total_items field from /lists API endpoints, as they were slow.
• Added a section highlighting our integrations in on the Toolset and API & Sync pages.
• A new permission is available on groups, giving access to advanced upload options like overwriting data or unsubscribing activists.
• Subscription detail is available when hovering over subscription status when viewing an activist’s record.

April 4, 2016

This release adds new activity filters for email opens and clicks and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Email Open And Click Activity Filters

• Email opens and clicks now have activity filters, just like actions.
• You can target email to activists who’ve opened 3 emails in the last 60 days, for example.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Tabs such as statistics and report downloads are no longer disabled when actions are unpublished.
• When targeting emails or reports, you now have the option to move on to the next step without re-saving and re-calculating targeting, to save time and resources. Warnings will pop up if you attempt to re-save targeting without changing anything in the filters.
• Reversed the order of custom targets so newest are on top, like other similar pages.
• Group manage email stats now load asynchronously, making group manage pages load much faster.
• Fixed a bug on the API where /tags wouldn’t respect the per_page argument and would always return all results.
• Fixed a few visual editor bugs, including better pasting from Microsoft Word and fixing extra nbsp issues.

March 26, 2016

This release changes how donations work, adds a ticketed event action type, updates our visual editor, adds phone number data and variants for letter campaign targets, adds non-authenticated, featured image, and autoresponse trigger API options, and adds a few miscellaneous improvements.

Donation Changes

• Recurring donations no longer use WePay’s subscriptions. Rather, donations are stored in Action Network and cards charged at the correct time automatically using WePay’s normal charging procedures.
• Activists can update their cards or cancel recurring donations on an update page on Action Network instead of going to WePay. The page is linked in receipts and notifications activists automatically receive each time their card is charged.
• Groups can customize emails that are sent to donors when charges succeed or fail on a group’s manage page, settings tab.
• Groups can also choose whether activists can cancel their own recurring donations or have to contact the group so a group administrator can cancel for them.
• Recurring donations that fail are retried the next day, then wait until the next period (say, next month) to try again. After three failing periods they are cancelled.
• Recurring donations are now listed in an activist’s record, showing details about each recurring donation as well as a button for administrators to update cards or cancel recurring donations.
• Administrators can convert a one-time charge into a recurring charge by setting a period (weekly, monthly, etc…) and a start date in the activist’s record.
• Administrators can also issue refunds from the donations list in the activist’s record. Refunded charges will be listed as $0.00 on reports and in the activist’s record, as well as having a refunded status on reports.
• If a charge eventually fails due to fraud detection at WePay, that charge is listed as $0.00 in reports and on the activist’s record, as well as having a failed status on reports.
• Fundraising reports now include net and fee columns, so you can see the amount charged to an activist’s card, plus processing fees and your final net amount.

Ticketed Events

• Administrators can now create a new action type, ticketed events.
• Ticketed events are in many ways a mashup between events and fundraisers. They can have dates and locations and time, but they also charge activists money to purchase tickets.
• Administrators can choose what ticket types are available (ex: General Admission and VIP), the amount per ticket for each type, and the total number of each ticket type available.
• Activists can purchase any number of tickets they like (up to the ticket limit for that ticket type) and pay via credit card. They are emailed their tickets as their receipt after purchase.
• Administrators can send complimentary, or “comp” tickets to activists without requiring a purchase by entering activist information into the ticketed event manage page. Activists will receive free tickets in their receipt email after the administrator enters their data.
• The number of each ticket type sold can be tracked on the ticketed event’s manage page.
• Like events, ticketed events have a discussion board (that can be turned on and off), a 24 hour reminder email (that can be turned on and off and customized), and can be created with start and end times and with or without a location.
• Like fundraisers, administrators can choose a group to receive the funds (which will go to that group’s WePay account), can save activist credit cards, and provide reports on each transaction.
• Like all of our other action types, ticketed events can be embedded, have customizable thank you and autoresponse options, can be used with source and referrer codes, and have other common action features.

Updated Visual Editor

• We have updated our visual editor to a newer version.
• This version is cleaner, faster, and solves some persistent bugs.
• Some functionality has been eliminated, such as dragging to resize images.

Phone Numbers And Variants For Letter Campaigns

• Phone number data has been added to built-in letter campaign targets. (ex: Governors and Members of Congress)
• Phone numbers can also optionally be uploaded with custom targets.
• A phone number ask clip has been added to emails, allowing you to output a sentence asking the activist to call matching targets in an email. (ex: Call Representative John Doe at (123) 456-7890 and Senator Jane Smith at (987) 654-3210.)
• A compact phone number clip has also been added, which outputs the raw phone numbers of the matching targets, comma separated, allowing you to construct your own sentence with call information.
• Each letter version you create can have multiple variants, which are typically small variations on the same message you’d like activists to send to targets. Activists will be presented with one random variant when they write their letters, introducing variation into the default text you ask activists to use.

API Unauthenticated POST, Autoresponse Trigger, jQuery Plugin, and Featured Image API

• API action helper endpoints (such as the record signatures helper) can be POSTed to without an API key — an unauthenticated or “blind” POST — returning success or failure but no other data.
• This allows you to use our API via javascript without fear, since no API keys will be leaked to browsers.
• You can also optionally add an autoresponse trigger to your helper POSTs, which will trigger an autoresponse email based on the settings of the page you’re POSTing to.
• For example, if you’re POSTing to a petition that has the autoresponse email turned on and you include the autoresponse trigger, the activist will get an autoresponse email as normal, thanking them for taking action. If you’re POSTing to a page with the autoresponse turned off, they won’t get that email. This only works for actions created with our user interface, as they’re the only ones with response option settings.
• To go along with this, OSDI has released a jQuery plugin, allowing you to easily use unauthenticated POST and triggers in-browser. Check it out here.
• Action API endpoints also return a URL to the featured banner image, if the action has one.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added a current subject clip to output the current subject line during a subject test in the email body.
• Added an administrator report for groups in networks, which downloads a list of all administrators and organizers in that group or child groups.
• If your email has an admin title, the subject line of the email will also be shown in the “Emails & Reports” tab on your group’s manage page.
• We’ve added four new IP addresses to our system for sending email. Please update your whitelisting if necessary. A list of all IPs we use is here.
• Dropdown menus and instant search boxes now have more liberal search behavior, allowing you to match options across intervening text, out of order, and the like, making searching a lot easier. For example, searching the Legislative District filter dropdown menu for “Alabama 100 district house” would match “Alabama State House district 100”.
• Fixed a bug where blank addresses would shift columns for CSV exports. Now they show up as blank cells as expected.
• Added classes to widgets to identify the action type and the layout type.
• Search has been installed for API documentation.
• You can pass the URL parameter can_widget_id to the widget javascript file with the value of a custom ID for your widget’s target <div> instead of our automatically generated one. This is useful if you want to embed more than one copy of the same action on a page.
• On the API, removed the non-working osdi:signatures endpoint from the fundraising_pages endpoint and added the correct osdi:person endpoint on attendances in addition to the incorrect osdi:people, which will be removed in the next API version upgrade.
• Fixed a bug where uploads in child groups wouldn’t be labeled correctly on parent groups. Will apply going forward to new uploads.
• Implemented a warning when resubscribing bounced or spam complaint activists from their activist record, rather than greying out the button entirely and forcing an upload.

December 23, 2015

This release adds functionality to events and a few miscellaneous improvements.

Events

• Events can now have optional end times, to let your activists know how long events are scheduled to last.
• Events can now be published without physical locations, suitable for webinars and the like.
• Event discussion boards can now be turned off by administrators.
• Event 24-hour reminder emails can be customized by administrators.
• And administrators can allow attendees to invite gusts to events and optionally enter a number when they RSVP to indicate they’re bringing a certain amount of guests.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added a current subject clip to output the current subject line during a subject test in the email body.
• Action Network emails are now emoji-ready. 😊
• Fixed a bug where the wrong embed code was showing up over the API for certain actions.

December 8, 2015

This release adds a new API version, improvements to uploads, and other miscellaneous updates.

API Version 2

• Our API has been updated to version 2.
• This version adds lots of new features, such as support for letter campaigns (called advocacy campaigns on the API), subscription status, the person signup helper, and more. It also updates the API to OSDI version 1.1.0.
• Version 1 of the API is now depreciated. It will continue to work but will no longer receive updates.
• You can read more about the new version and the API in general here.

Upload Improvements

• Uploads no longer skip unsubscribed activists, meaning you can add custom field data or tag activists who are unsubscribed via uploads.
• Uploads now validate email addresses, skipping emails that are obviously not emails. (ex: not-an-email)
• Uploads now do not count as actions for the purpose of the “Actions taken in the last week” counts as well as the Activity filter when targeting emails or reports.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Fixed a bug where action goal counters weren’t reset when they were duplicated.
• Added the new, instant-search dropdown menu style to action forms and widgets.
• Going forward, dropdown menus you add as custom questions on actions are now searchable, making it easier to find the item you’re looking for in a long list of possible items.

November 23, 2015

This release adds link click tracking and miscellaneous improvements.

Link Click Tracking

• You are now able to track the clicks on individual links in emails.
• Tracking statistics are listed in the “Clicks” tab when managing an email.
• Links are listed as they appear in your email’s HTML, top to bottom, including links in your email wrapper.
• If a person clicks on a link, it will be tracked. If the person clicks on the same link twice, the unique value will stay the same but the raw value will increase.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Event campaign search results now show the date and time of the event.
• A bug where groups in a network weren’t displayed in sponsor dropdowns if you were an organizer has been fixed.

November 10, 2015

This release adds a SQL mirror, group searching, recurring reports, and miscellaneous improvements.

SQL Mirror

• A SQL mirror is now available for any group (and its children, if in a network) by request.
• The SQL mirror is a read-only copy of all data from that group (and children), including activists, action history, email history, etc…, absolutely everything we have. It’s useful chiefly for analytics, though may also be useful to move data from Action Network into another system.
• The mirror is updated continuously, though the amount of time each update takes depends on the size of the group.
• An extra cost is associated with your SQL mirror, as you must pay for the database server that will host the mirror.
• Click here for more details about how the SQL mirror works, and click here to contact us to request your mirror.

Group Searching

• All dropdown menus where you select a group are now searchable, making it easier to find the group you’re looking for in a long list of possible groups.

Recurring Reports

• Reports can now be set to recalculate on a set interval.
• You can set a report to be recalculated daily, weekly, or monthly and have the new targeted count sent to email addresses of your choice.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• A date picker can now be used when setting date-based targeting. Numbers may continue to be used as well.
• The subscription update time is available when viewing an activist’s record, when hovering over the activist’s subscription status.
• You can no longer subscribe bouncing or spam complainted activists when viewing their record (because it involves us clearing the block at the SendGrid level as well, so contact us if you want someone off the list). This can still be done via report results.
• You will now be warned if you create an action not sponsored by a group, as most of the time, you’ll want a group sponsor set.
• Added ad-hoc groups to the options for subscribing or unsubscribing activists from report manage pages.

September 25, 2015

This release adds a URL argument for subject lines.

Subject Line URL Argument

• A URL argument will be added to links sent through the mass mailer, identifying the subject line for the email.
• The URL argument will look like &email_subject=[subject_line], where [subject_line] is an alphanumeric permalink representation of your subject. (ex: My Subject becomes my_subject)

September 16, 2015

This release adds the ability to show or hide custom fields and pre-filling fields via URL argument, plus some miscellaneous improvements.

Show/Hide Custom Fields

• The Questions section has been renamed Questions & Custom Fields, and shows a list of all custom fields for that group at the bottom.
• Custom fields can be hidden by clicking the hide button. Hidden custom fields do not delete data (and can still receive data from forms) but do not show up in the administrative interface.
• Fields may be unhidden to restore them to the administrative interface without data loss.

Pre-Filling Fields

• You can use URL arguments to pre-fill form inputs. Any url arguments that match input names on the page or widget will have their value set to the url parameter value.
• Be careful with this — you can fill hidden inputs and inputs we use to make pages work. Make sure you understand how inputs work on pages (both with recognized and non-recognized users) and your names don’t collide with ones we use accidentally.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Group order in dropdown menus is now based on group admin title rather than public title.

September 11, 2015

This release adds custom submit button text for events, petitions, and forms, plus miscellaneous improvements.

Custom Submit Button Text

• You can now add your own submit button text for petitions, events, and forms. (Other actions use the submit button in specialized ways and are still not customizable.)

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The email report from the group manage page now includes admin title and all subjects.

September 9, 2015

This release adds a new upload option to clear field data, a new service for determining districts for letter campaigns, editable thank you pages on all actions, and some miscellaneous improvements.

Clear Field Data On Upload

• A new checkbox is available allowing you to clear matching fields if your spreadsheet file contains blank values.
• This allows you to mass delete custom field data that you mistakenly uploaded, for example.

New Service For Districts

• Our new service for determining district has been fully integrated into letter campaigns, meaning basically any address should bring up representative information.

Editable Thank You Pages

• All action types now have editable thank you pages.
• You can turn sharing options on and off, and add additional text/code to thank you pages.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• All “core” fields (first name, last name, email, address, city, state, zip code, and country) are now available on reports downloaded from action manage pages.
• Event campaign uploads for full events have been improved to add more fields (like sponsor or administrative title) and better deduplicate (we now deduplicate based on exact location/date/time).
• The network tab on group manage pages is now searchable, and levels can be opened/closed.

August 26, 2015

This release adds a new, faster filter system, updated letter campaign features, clips in email wrappers and other fields, CSS inlining for email, better permalinks on duplication, and a few miscellaneous improvements.

New Filter System

• We’ve implemented a new, faster filter system for targeting emails and reports and searching for activists individually.
• You shouldn’t notice any changes — the system will continue to work as it did, it will just be faster when doing these operations, especially for large lists.

Updated Letter Campaign Features

• An updated form filling core provides more reliable deliveries for legislative contact form targets.
• State level legislators are split up into two groups, upper and lower houses, as well as the current combined group, just like Congress.
• Non-voting members of Congress are now available.
• Washington, DC local legislators are now available. The DC mayor is in the governors group and the DC city council are listed as state legislators.

Clips In Email Wrappers And Other Fields

• You can now use email personalization clips to output things like an activists’s first name in more places.
• Clips are available for use in email subject lines, from lines, and email wrapper header and footers.

CSS Inlining For Email

• CSS styles in style tags are now automatically inlined when you send email.
• This change will allow you to do more complex email styling and have those styles picked up by more email clients, as most email clients do not render CSS in style tags, only when inlined.
• You still should not use remote stylesheets (linking) — only style tags will be inlined.
• Note that this may change how some of your email CSS works, especially when working with media queries/mobile responsive designs and pseudo selectors like :hover. Read more about the details and learn how you can tell the inliner to ignore those styles here.

Better Permalinks On Duplication

• Previously, when you duplicated actions, the system would make a permalink based on the original action. Now, permalinks on duplicated actions aren’t set until they are published, just like on normal actions, allowing you to change the title of the duplicate and get a new, matching permalink.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Moved the default group/homepage selector to the main start organizing menu for better visibility.
• Added color coding to queries, so you can tell the difference between ANDs and ORs easily.
• Added substitution when using @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @outlook.com, or @aol.com emails as the reply-to email to make info@actionnetwork.org the from email, improving deliverability.
• Added link in email sent notifications to email statistics, email body, and email targets separately.
• Added the wrapper name to the “View Email” tab on the email manage page, so you can see what wrapper was used on the email.
• Implemented validation for custom field names on upload and on activist add/edit, ensuring custom fields with the same name as core fields can’t be created.
• Made it so you can’t edit form values or save and continue when targeting filters before the filter list is loaded, making it harder to lose filter options when moving between screens quickly.

July 31, 2015

You can be notified when a group or its children send email, and events in event campaigns are now editable by event campaign administrators, plus some miscellaneous improvements.

Group Sending Notifications

• In a group’s settings tab, you can enter one or more email addresses to be notified when that group or a child group sends an email through the mass email system.
• The notification contains information about the email that was sent, including subject line, size, and a link to the email’s manage page.

Editing Events in Event Campaigns

• Previously, events could only be removed from event campaigns, not edited. Now, event campaign administrators can edit any events in their event campaign, allowing you to correct issues easily.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• The bug where sibling groups couldn’t be selected as part of dropdown menus in certain situations in a network has been fixed.

July 28, 2015

A few small updates.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• A network report is available for those using networks from your top-level group, in the Networks tab at the bottom. It provides a list of all groups in your network, their subscribed list size, and a cumulative count of the number of emails they have sent in the past 30 days, including child groups at each level.
• OCDID is available as a column in reports for download, allowing you to get a report of the internal identifiers we use for legislative districts.
• Moved to geocod.io for some legislative district geocoding work, more to come.
• You can now use the URL parameters subscription_group=false, subscription_user=false, and subscription_referrer=false to uncheck by default the subscription checkboxes for the sponsoring group, action creator, and referrer respectively, both on our pages and on pages you embed widgets on.
• Fixed a bug in the visual editor regarding editing multiple links.
• Fixed a bug in targeting and queries regarding items with quotes or other non-standard characters in their titles.
• Fixed a bug where file permissions weren’t being inherited properly in networked groups.
• Moved the change homepage option in the user menu in the upper right to a modal, for better browser compatibility.
• The last login date for organizers and administrators if available by hovering over their name in the organizers tab on group manage pages.

July 15, 2015

A minor update.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• An email’s raw HTML is now available on the “View Email” tab when managing an email, including after it has been sent.
• Group applications are now off by default. If you want to allow activists to apply to join your group, enable it in your group’s settings.

July 9, 2015

Our files system is now suitable for direct hotlinking, and malformed email addresses are now being bounced.

Files System

• The link button next to any files you upload now gives you a link to your file that’s appropriate for hotlinking.
• This means you can use our files system to host images that you display in emails, CSS or Javascript files for your wrappers, and other things like that.

Malformed Email Addresses

• Email addresses that are malformed and previously returned SendGrid errors instead of being sent and bounces will now be bounced immediately, before hitting SendGrid.
• These activists will be marked as bouncing as expected, and will have a bounced reason of “Malformed Email Address,” allowing you to find them when you pull a bounce report.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Uploads will now correctly respect subscription status all the way up the network.

July 7, 2015

A few minor updates all around.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Added note to URL modal in the visual editor, reminding people to use http:// before their links.
• Added sent date to email filters on email and report targeting and queries.
• Made multiselect inputs stay open after the first click, for easier multiple selection.
• Revamped targeting and queries pages to use more frontend efficient multiselects.
• We can now mark specific email wrappers so they don’t output unsubscribe links, useful in certain limited situations. Contact us to request this feature be added to one of your wrappers.

July 1, 2015

Added an easy way to set your Action Network homepage and fixed a few issues.

Easily Switch Your Action Network Homepage

• You can now easily switch your Action Network homepage, which sets the default group used when making new emails, actions, or accessing pages such as queries or activist search, in addition to the homepage you go to when you log in or click on the Action Network logo.
• To switch your homepage, use the menu in the upper right, under your name. There you will find a list of your groups, choose a new one to change your homepage, or pick “Your Dashboard” to set it back to no homepage.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Fixed permission issues with the download all fundraising transactions report button. Now it should show up more reliably.
• Reset group manage page counts to be more accurate.
• Fixed Salesforce unsubscribe sync.

June 29, 2015

Added a subscription date filter for emails, reports, and queries, and made a few other small updates.

Subscription Date Filter

• Added a filter to emails, reports, and queries allowing targeting by subscription date.
• You can target by how many days ago an activist subscribed (or resubscribed) to your email list.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• If you’ve set a default group, all of the menu options such as tags, uploads, and queries will point to that group by default, saving you a step.
• Sped up searching for users if you’re searching by email. Queries with an @ symbol in them will be assumed to be queries for email address.

June 24, 2015

Just a few small fixes.

Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous Improvements

• Changed the activist view to show the email sent date as opposed to the created date.
• Changed how email and report filters queue to more efficiently use resources and take into account multiple saves.

June 15, 2015

This release adds the ability to add address and city fields to petitions, events, and forms, a group fundraising report, other fundraising improvements, and fixes a few bugs and improves a few other things.

Add Address and City Fields to Actions

• You can now add address and city fields to actions that don’t have them already, such as petitions, events, and forms.
• These two new fields will show up at the top of the prebuilt questions list when editing custom form fields on an action sponsored by a group. Drag them into your custom form to use them, just like any other prebuilt question.
• Data entered with these fields will be stored in our core address and city columns, along with the zip code (and implied state) data we already collect. Activists entering data this way will receive geocoding and district location as normal as well.

Group Fundraising Report

• A group fundraising report is now available on group manage pages, in the statistics tab at the bottom, under the fundraising graphs.
• Click “Download Fundraising Transactions” to be emailed a report with every transaction your group has processed, including what page it was processed on, who donated, the amounts, custom fields, and the like.

Fundraising

• If activists donate without an email address (if you’ve enabled that option on your page), we will now send the randomly generated email we make for that activist to WePay, so you can search our system and WePay with the same email address to compare transactions.
• Relatedly, you no longer have to enter an email for your organization when you enable no-email fundraising, since we send our generated email to WePay now instead of that email you entered, which is what we used to send.
• We also now store WePay’s transaction IDs and display them in the donor report and the group fundraising report, allowing you to correlate transactions between systems.

Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous Improvements

• Fixed issues having to do with adding, viewing, and querying new activists when using your individual email list.
• Fixed issues with processing long lines of HTML in emails in Outlook.
• Fixed petition embed endpoints on the API.
• Fixed overcounting of bounces from SendGrid.
• Changed display of event campaign full layout widget on mobile to put zip code search directly below the title, instead of below the map and description.

June 8, 2015

This release changes the way recurring donations are handled, plus a few small miscellaneous updates.

New Handling for Recurring Donations

• Due to some issues with WePay, recurring donations are now handled differently.
• When a recurring donation is processed, we will now issue a one-time charge via WePay for the amount of the recurring donation. If that charge is successful (indicating the card used is valid), we will then set up the recurring donation (subscription) in WePay and delay the “first” charge on that subscription by the recurring donation period (1 week, 1 month, etc…).
• If the one-time charge is unsuccessful, the activist trying to donate will see an error and be allowed to try again as normal.
• If the one-time charge is successful but setting up the subscription is unsuccessful (a rare occurrence, but possible), the activist will be shown the donation thank you page indicating they only were charged a one-time charge and not a recurring charge.
• If everything was successful, after that delay passes, the user’s card will be charged as normal going forward using WePay’s subscription service. Note however that looking up subscription history will show one fewer charges than were actually charged, due to the first charge being a one-time charge.
• Before the first charge their subscription will be listed in WePay as in “Trial” as opposed to “Active”.
• The look of reports we generate for fundraising activity is unchanged.

Miscellaneous Updates

• Added a warning to the placeholder for letter campaign default letters, indicating that many legislators have character limits on their messages and subjects and so these should be kept as short as possible.
• Fixed a bug where additional legislative districts could be targeted than intended when reloading targeting edit pages.
• Added a warning when revoking and regenerating API keys.
• Groups that can syndicate to other groups who are not children will see those other groups as include and exclude options when targeting.
• Updated placeholders for instant search to indicate what attributes you can search by.
• Fixed a bug causing errors when unsubscribing from the all subscriptions page.

May 29, 2015

This release adds core field searching, additional clips, and fundraising language updates.

Core Field Searching

• Core fields such as first name, last name, email address, address, and city are now available for searching as part of the form answers filter when targeting emails, reports, and queries.
• Regular expressions and wildcard searching can be used, just like any other form field.

Additional Personalization Clips

• Three additional clips are now available for personalizing email and autoresponders on actions.
• The email clip will output the activist’s email address.
• The address clip will output the activist’s address.
• The can_id clip will output the can_id for the activist, allowing you to construct URLs that recognize activists, just like links in our mass emails.

Fundraising Language Updates

• We’ve updated fundraising pages to use the more neutral “contribution” instead of “donate,” which is more applicable to a broader range of situations. You’ll still see donate used on administrative pages, but activists will see contribute instead.

March 24, 2015

This release adds recurring donation data integration, notification emails, default sponsor functionality, improved action data export, and network terms and conditions.

Recurring Donation Data Integration

• Recurring donations are now monitored over their lifespan, including whether they are active, failing, or canceled, how many donations have been made, and the like.
• Each time a donor is charged while their recurring donation is active, a new entry will be added to the donor data export on fundraising pages and the activist view, and graphs and charts showing donation amounts on fundraising and group pages will be incremented.
• If a recurring donation goes into failing status (for example, if a donor’s card expires), that will be marked in the activist view and on donor data exports.
• If a recurring donation is cancelled, that will be marked in the activist view and on donor data exports, as well as decrementing recurring donation and recurring projection counts.
• Two new filters have been added to report, email, and query targeting, allowing you to target activists with failing or cancelled recurring donations.

Notification Emails

• You can choose to have notification emails sent to one or more email addresses whenever someone takes a specific action. For example, you could email yourself every time someone donates on your fundraising page.
• Notification emails contain the information about the activist such as name and email address, plus any action-specific information collected, such as custom field values, source codes, donation amounts, etc…

Default Sponsor

• If you have set an Action Network group as your homepage, by default any actions you create will have that group set as a sponsor. You can always change this when creating or editing actions.

Improved Action Data Export

• All action page types, including events, have the ability to export data on all action takers from their manage pages.
• All exports now include standard fields such as first name, last name, email address, zip/postal code, country, timestamp, source, and referrer, as well as action-specific data such as donation amount where applicable.

Network Terms and Conditions

• If you administer a network, you can request that we add custom terms and conditions to your network. Administrators must agree to these terms and conditions when they first access the network, as well as enter in information about themselves that you designate.

March 9, 2015

This release adds built-in subject line testing, navigation improvements, and easier administrator invitations for groups.

Subject Line Testing

• Subject line testing is now built in to the mass mailer tool.
• You can add as many subject lines as you want to any email. These subjects will be randomly distributed between targets of your email.
• Statistics for each subject line are tracked separately, allowing you to compare performance side-by-side and pick a winner.

Navigational Improvements

• Many more navigational breadcrumbs are now present on most pages, allowing you to return to action and group manage pages easily.
• All group selection dropdown menus correctly respect hidden groups and show network groups.

Inviting Administrators

• If you invite an administrator to your group that does not have an Action Network account yet, you will be able to set their permissions immediately instead of having to wait for them to make an account.
• Administrators added to network groups automatically receive partner features.

March 4, 2015

This release adds the syndication action, the ability to show or hide actions, emails, and groups, updates how goal counters work, and other miscellaneous improvements.

Syndication

• If your group is part of a network, you can create a syndication package, which is a package of an email and/or an action that you share as a template with other groups in your network.
• Syndication package creators can set package titles, set which email and/or action they want to send as a template, which groups they want to share with, and a message to go along with the share.
• Groups receiving a syndication package receive an email notification and the package appears in the group’s manage page in the new syndication tab.
• Groups receiving a syndication package can publish or edit the emails and/or actions they received with one click.
• Administrators can track how well their syndication package is doing by viewing which groups have published actions/emails and viewing individual and aggregate statistics about performance.
• A new clip has been added which will fill in the URL of a syndicated action in the corresponding email if they are part of the same package.

Show and Hide Items

• Groups, actions, emails, reports, and uploads can be hidden from their main lists, either on the Dashboard, group manage pages, or upload lists.
• Once hidden, these items will not be present in lists or available for email, report, or query targeting. All data is retained.
• Users can view a list of hidden items for themselves or for groups and unhide items they would like to put back into the main lists.

Goal Counters

• Goal counters are now optionally available on event and event campaign actions.
• Goal counters can also now be removed from petitions.
• Goal counters are generally standardized across actions, with similar look and behavior both on manage pages and on action pages.

Miscellaneous Updates

• Fundraising widgets have been updated to better work on websites such as those built with Wix.
• Networks have been removed from the data sharing card section of action pages. Only the sponsoring group is shown, though data still flows up the network.
• Letter version controls when editing letters have been de-emphasized visually to prevent confusion.
• Fundraising and email list charts and graphs have been moved to their own tab on group manage pages, and tab ordering has been changed.
• Edit and manage buttons have been standardized on group manage pages. If an action is published, you will see a manage button. If it is in draft, you will see an edit button.
• Email a friend has been moved above embed code on manage and thank you pages.

February 12, 2015

This release adds the ability to perform mass operations on report results.

Reports

• You can subscribe or unsubscribe activists targeted by a report to any list or group of lists you are an administrator of.
• You can add or remove tags from activists targeted by a report.

February 9, 2015

This release adds the ability to create pre-built questions, puts the form builder on every action type, allows for accessing of pre-built questions and custom fields in the form builder, uploads, and add/edit activists, as well as locks down custom field permissions in networks. We’ve also fixed a donation bug where users weren’t being set.

Questions

• You can create pre-built questions for your group, such as text boxes, radio buttons, and dropdown menus, to use and reuse on your forms.
• These pre-built questions can be used in our form builder, which is now on all action pages, as well as access when uploading activists or adding or editing individual records.
• Questions can be shared with child groups if you are in a network.
• Networks can optionally have their questions and custom fields locked down, removing the ability to create new questions or custom fields from everyone without the custom field permission given out by requesting it from Action Network.

Donations

• Fixed a bug where users weren’t being set after donation, causing missing amounts on thank you pages, inaccurate thank you log in options, and other issues.

January 28, 2015

This release updates our upload and unsubscribe process, including the ability to upload users without postal codes and change your email address instead of unsubscribing.

Uploads

• You can now upload activists without postal codes. Not recommended, but you can do it. We’ll attempt to get the activist’s postal code next time they take action.
• Activists previously stored in your database with “null” or other similar non-postal codes have been set to no postal code status.
• All fields are now true “insert if blank” but otherwise will not overwrite data unless you check the overwrite box.
• Uploads now count how many users are new to your list as well as how many total were uploaded.
• Uploads can be targeted either by every activist in the file or by just activists who are new in the file, allowing for welcome email targeting.
• Upload counts are live updating, no need to refresh the page!
• CSV files are validated before they are uploaded, alerting you to errors immediately.
• After file validation, you are now able to match columns in your CSV file to fields in our database (or create new custom fields on the fly). It’s no longer necessary to match our file format exactly.
• We will now send you an email when your upload has completed.
• Uploads that you add with the unsubscribe or unsubscribe and delete checkboxes active will stay in your upload list and be marked as such.
• Uploads now have a delete button, which will resubmit your file with the upload and delete checkbox checked, useful for fixing mistakes.

Unsubscribing

• Unsubscribe pages now use our very lightly branded wrapper.
• Unsubscribe confirmations happen on their own page, not the log in page.
• Activists can now update their email address instead of unsubscribing.
• If there is a conflict and the activist’s new desired email address already exists, we will email an administrator of that group and ask them to perform a merge to make the change for the activist.

January 19, 2015

This release moves email delivery to Sendgrid, adds bounce and spam complaint reporting, and adds administrative titles. And cats.

Sendgrid For Email Deliverability

• We now use Sendgrid for email deliverability.
• Open, click, bounce, and spam complaint stats are now essentially real time.

Bounce & Spam Complaint Tracking

• We now show bounce statistics on emails, along with your normal open, click, and spam complaint stats.
• Bouncing and spam complainted emails are unsubscribed from your list automatically.
• You can pull reports on bouncing or spam complainted email and view bounce reasons.
• Viewing an activist’s record will show whether they are bouncing or spam complainted, as well as subscribed or unsubscribed.

Administrative Titles

• You can add administrative, internal-only titles to actions, emails, and groups.
• If an administrative title is present, we will use that for internal pages (dashboard, action list, targeting, etc…) instead of the public title.
• Activists will only be shown the public title.

Cats (and dogs)

• We’ve added pictures of our cats and dogs to our error pages, because why not.

January 7, 2015

This adds activist search and add functionality as well as queries.

Search & Add Activists

• Search lists for individuals by email, name, or address, or browse report results.
• View a full activist record, including email, action, and donation history, subscription information, tags, source codes, and custom fields.
• Add private notes on an activist’s record for yourself or fellow administrators.
• Edit and merge activists to keep lists organized.

Queries

• Create queries for lists and save them for later.
• Add standard targeting filters in complex AND and OR logic to build intricate query patterns easily.
• Add queries when targeting mass email and reports, and combine with other filters.

December 20, 2014

This release changes how fundraising logout links work and adds email address to form, donor, and petition reports.

Fundraising

• Logout and edit your information links now fully log out the activist and clear all fields.

Form, Donor, and Petition Reports

• The form, donor, and petition reports available on the action manage pages now include email address.

December 17, 2014

This release removes the tip jar for partners, adds our renewable energy statement, plus other small bug fixes and performance improvements.

Tip Jar

• If you are an Action Network partner, your fundraising pages and widgets will not have a tip jar.

Renewable Energy Statement

• Our renewable energy statement has been posted and linked in our footer.

December 9, 2014

This release adds multiple email and page wrappers, as well as submitted javascript events for widgets.

Email Wrappers

• Partners can now create multiple email wrappers for each email list they control, including adding new wrappers, deleting them, and setting one as a default.
• Email wrappers now have names and can be autogenerated from a logo image, and further customized with HTML.
• The email wrapper you want to use can be set when previewing your mass email or in the “Responses” tab of your action’s manage page for autoresponse emails.

Page Wrappers

• Partners can now create multiple page wrappers for each account or group they control, including adding new wrappers, deleting them, and setting one as a default.
• Page wrappers have names and can be autogenerated from an image and a few colors, and further customized with HTML.
• The page wrapper you want to use can be set on an action’s manage page.
• When viewing an action page with a custom page wrapper, the custom head and foot HTML will be used, with a layout-only, full layout widget for that action in the middle to complete the page display.

Submitted Javascript Events For Widgets

• After a widget is successfully submitted, javascript events will fire that can be used for customization. See the help section for more details.

November 21, 2014

This release adds a max event size option and an automated reminder option to events, and allows access to canceled events. It also validates country codes.

Events

• Event organizers can set a maximum size for their events. After that number of RSVPs is reached, no further RSVPs are allowed.
• Event organizers can choose to turn off our automatic event reminders 24 hours before the event occurs, as well as event detail change notifications in the “Responses” tab.
• Event organizers can now access the manage page of canceled events.

Country Codes

• Country codes are now validated upon upload via our uploads page, event campaign locations and hosted events, and via the API. If a valid two-digit country code is not recognized, we default to US.
• Report country column results now return two digit country codes as well, instead of full country names.

November 14, 2014

This release adds the letter campaign tool and tags, changes how unsubscribes are handled to preserve data, allows for fundraising pages to be created that don’t require an email address from the donor, documentation for widget javascript events, as well as other small fixes.

Letter Campaigns

• Organizers and groups can create letter campaigns to enable their activists to send letters to their elected officials or custom targets.
• Letter campaigns can be targeted to the U.S. Congress (House and Senate separately or together), U.S. Governors, and U.S. State Legislators (upper and lower houses together), as well as custom zip/postal code geocoded lists of targets (to enable messages to corporate targets, for example).
• Activists using a letter campaign enter their personal details and address to find the targets that match their location. They can then send them an electronic message (email if we have it, but we’ll fill out elected officials’ contact forms if we don’t).
• Organizers can set up different letter versions to different sub-sections of the available targets, with different default messages (editable or non-editable), allowing organizers to send one message to one group of targets and another to a second (or third) all from the same page.
• If targets are not found for an activist, organizers have the option of redirecting them to another page.
• Organizers can test their letter campaigns without sending messages with test mode.
• Organizers can see how many letters were sent to each target and download the letter contents, who they were sent from, who they were sent to, and when as a spreadsheet.
• Organizers can target reports and email to activists by legislative district.
• Organizers can target reports and email to activists by whether they would find targets to write to on a specific letter campaign (ie: if they live in the correct area).
• Organizers can use clips in email to output target titles, names, and singular/plural and gendered pronouns and other words, to compose personalized email messages to activists. (ex: Tell Senator John Doe he should vote yes!)
• As with all of our actions, letter campaigns come with widgets, save action history, and work with networks.

Tags

• Groups can create and manage tags that they can add to pages they sponsor.
• Activists who take action on pages with tags will have the tags added to their record.
• Organizers can target email and reports by tags, using new filters.
• Networked groups can send tags to child groups, to keep data organized and in sync.

Unsubscribes and Data Preservation

• When a user unsubscribes, their data is now preserved. While they cannot be targeted via email, you can view and interact with their data via new targeting options on reports.
• Added an unsubscribe and delete option to uploads, to allow you to delete action history data if you want to.

Fundraising Without Activist Email Address

• You can now create fundraising pages that don’t require an email address from an activist to donate. (You can make them for your groups only if you are an admin of a group with the settings permission.)
• If you do so, you’ll enter a default email address for donations, which we will send to our payment processor instead of the activist’s email address.
• When donating, an activist will not be required to enter an email address. If they don’t provide one, we will create a dummy one for them so their action history will be stored in your database, though they will be unsubscribed so no emails will be delivered to a fake email address.

Widget Javascript Events

• Widget javascript events targeted to the document after widgets are loaded are documented in the help section.

Miscellaneous

• Fixed a bug where users who selected a country outside the US and switched back couldn’t enter their state.

September 30, 2014

This release sets the maximum resources per page on the API to 25. Calls looking for more resources per page will return errors.

August 22, 2014

This release fixes a bug where accurate country information for events and people was not being returned using the API.

August 12, 2014

This release adds the release notes section to the website, as well as adds networks, group invites, permissions, and settings, and kiosk mode.

Release Notes

• Release Notes section created on the website to announce newly added features.

Group Invites, Permissions, and Settings

• The term “members” to describe the lower level of group membership has been changed to “organizers”.
• Organizers can be invited to join a group by an administrator via email address instead of apply to join. Organizers will be asked to make an Action Network account through this process if they don’t have one yet.
• Administrators of groups can have three permission levels, allowing them to manage group settings/invites/membership, launch emails, or download data depending on what permissions are chosen.
• Administrators of groups can with the correct permissions can set group settings, such as default from lines and reply-to email addresses as well as whether a group can accept applications to join (to use this setting, ask us for access).
• Applications to the group can now be declined.
• The “Campaigns & Actions” tab has been renamed “Actions” and has been cleaned up. Campaign pages are now part of the main actions list.
• Duplicate buttons have been added to the “Actions” tab.
• Groups can be set as your Action Network homepage, replacing the Dashboard as the page you see after you log in. Administrators will be asked if they’d like to set a group as their new homepage the first time they visit the group manage page. After that, the setting can be changed by editing your profile.
• Added button to “Emails & Reports” tab that allows administrators to download full historical open/click/action data on all of their emails as a spreadsheet. (Also added to individual “All Emails” page.)

Networks

• Networks can be created, allowing for complex hierarchies and data sharing between groups. To get access to networks, please ask us.
• Groups can be linked together into the network, with data from a child group flowing up to its parent and on up to the top of the network. You can set or change a group’s parent by editing the group.
• New targeting options are available to target actions created by children groups, as well as the entire child group list itself.
• Administrators are granted inherited permissions on child groups, allowing them to manage child groups as well as their parent group with the same level of access. Inherited permissions can be overridden by adding the administrator directly to a child group and changing their permissions.
• Groups in a network can see their place in the network and quickly access child groups from the “Network” tab on the group manage page.
• The data sharing card now informs activists that they will be added to the email lists of groups in a network if appropriate.

Kiosk Mode

• Kiosk mode can be activated on any action or embed by adding the kiosk=true URL argument to any action page or embedding page.
• When kiosk mode is activated on a device, instead of taking activists to a thank you page after they take action, the signing page will reload with a thank you message.
• When kiosk mode is activated, users will not be recognized, allowing for easy repeat filling of a form.
• To turn kiosk mode off for a device, add the URL argument kiosk=false to any action page or embedding page.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Unchecking the subscription checkbox when taking action will now not unsubscribe activists from your list (but will continue to not subscribe new users as per their preference).
• Fixed a bug where an error was thrown if a draft action was saved without a creator or a sponsor.
• Fixed a bug where the PDF download for physical delivery of petition signatures was creating broken PDFs.
• Fixed a bug where extra spaces were added to links created in mass emails due to text wrapping.
• Fixed a bug where the auth_hash field was available as a custom field.
• Report downloads will now force a file download instead of showing the CSV as a text file in a browser.
• Improved character rejection for other donation amounts to enforce only numbers for that input.

More details about these new features are available in the help section.