Updated November 1, 2010: We have a brand-new version of this tool called Engagement Tracker for Salesforce! Our strategy team can also help you put the Engagement Tracker to work by creating an Engagement Pyramid for your organization. Contact Dave Averill, Director of Consulting Services, to learn more about our engagement tools and services.

Here at Groundwire, we're keenly interested in helping environmental organizations use databases as powerful tools for grassroots organizing.   We're trying to bake proven organizing strategies into database tools. 

In this short article and the accompanying screencast, we'll demonstrate one example of this: how we're modeling a "ladder of engagement" in a Salesforce.com relationship management database.

The folks at Online Engagement, drawing on work by Steph Legault, summarize the concept of the Ladder of Engagement as follows:

The Ladder of Engagement sets out a simple scale for ranking different activities that online supporters may engage in. Low on the ladder are quick and easy items such as signing an online petition or forwarding an email to a friend. At the top of the ladder are the most involving forms of activism, including meeting with elected officials, organizing local actions, and making donations.

High Engagement
		Recruit friends/family Upgrade monthly donation Signup for monthly giving Renew single donation Make single donation Make a phone call Write a letter Attend a "real world" event Sign petition Viral / Tell a friend Send an e-postcard Subscribe to e-Alerts / Issue Alerts Subscribe to eNewsletter Enter a contest Visit website
Low Engagement

 

Over time, an individual supporter would be expected to engage in a variety activities, both high and low on the ladder. The goal of an engagement strategy is not just get increased numbers of people involved, but also to encourage them to climb the ladder of engagement.

Here's an example of how Amnesty Canada used a ladder of engagement in a real-world campaign.

In other words, groups are communicating with their members and engaging them in the activities that affect policy decisions.  Each action has an associated leadership value, and as a person completes more actions, their leadership score increases.  Over time, you track people's progress up the ladder, and ask them to do more and more high-engagement actions.

Here's a short 5-minute screencast by Groundwire's Database Program Manager, in which he demonstrates how to use Salesforce to model a ladder of engagement strategy:

Why this is interesting

A relationship management database that can track people through a ladder of engagement helps you create targeted prospect lists for people you might want to focus your limited outreach resources upon. For example, you can easily write queries that show you:

• Everyone who took an action last year but hasn't taken one this year.

• People who've taken multiple easy actions, but not yet taken a harder one.

• All your members who haven't taken actions, and all your leaders who aren't members.

• Everyone who's taken an action and is interested in a particular issue area.

While your organizers likely know all of your most engaged activists personally, and have a lot of information in their head about these folks, a database can helps you keep track of your "second tier" activists -- the folks you really want to develop into top-tier activists.  These people are large in number, yet easy to lose track of because you don't see them as often.

Questions you should ask yourself

• Do you know who your most active leaders are?  Is that information recorded anywhere other than inside your organizers' heads?

• Do you currently have the ability to target your outreach to people whom you know are likely to respond based on their past actions for you?
• What are the 5-7 long-term issue areas or campaigns that you want to track activists' interest in over time?
• What are the rungs in your ladder of engagement? Are you effectively moving people up that ladder?
• The essence of effective organizing is person-to-person contact.  But, are you capturing those "touches" in your long-term organizational memory so that can be continually building and deepening the relationship, rather than starting over from scratch again all the time?
• How would your organization make the shift to a culture that, in the words of Steve Wright of the Salesforce.com Foundation, combines both passion and rigor.  Are you recording your work in sufficient detail that you can analyze what's working, and what you need to do next?