The Brief:
- Overhaul the design of Unison’s campaign tools to better pressure MPs to take action to improve public serves
- Design and build ‘Email Your MP’, ‘Tweet Your MP’ and petition actions
- Deliver them in Engaging Networks, the online campaigning and fundraising platform (psst… we are an accredited implementation partner)
- Make them as easy to use templates, so new advocacy actions can be easily spun up by Unison’s offices with minimal hand-holding
The client:
Unison is one of the UK’s largest trade unions with 1.3 million members, representing staff who provide services in the public and private sectors. Despite having Engaging Networks advocacy action pages already, they were a little flat, functional and not especially compelling for their supporters to take action.
And whilst they were responsive, the UX wasn’t tailored for mobile – which was a problem considering the significant numbers of users who were being mobilised from an email first opened on a mobile device.
New advocacy action templates were needed, and the resulting campaign actions needed to be as impactful yet simple to produce as possible.
Our solution:
Through a number of design iterations we arrived at and built new ‘Email your MP’, ‘Tweet your MP’ and ‘Sign the Petition’ campaign templates.
The bold designs embraced the Unison brand colour palette, and we ensured a more attention-grabbing feel on large devices by designing key content (call to action and forms) to break out of the main content container. Totalisers were added and supplemented with custom code to improve on the default Engaging Networks designs. And, last but not least, we improved the user journeys, better daisy-chaining steps in the actions and driving finished participants back to the main Unison site.
On smaller devices, the UX was additionally improved to remove redundant content items, directing users to the key actions to be completed. Mobile social sharing was updated to include Whatsapp (as facilitating 1:1 sharing is a very effective way of increasing campaign uptake – mobile users tend to share direct to friends of a like mind).
The Tech:
Engaging Networks, using additional HTML, CSS and Javascript to improve on the default out-of-the-box offerings, provide better styling of components and to hide redundant elements on different screen sizes.
Going on:
The Unison campaign actions we created are one of an increasing number of Engaging Networks projects we are taking on here at Outlandish. We find that it’s a great platform for advocacy, fundraising and handling supporter data.
And we love extending the functionality and UX of Engaging Networks too – see our work on building an Engaging Networks’ Supporter Hub for a great example of what we can do with the platform.
