In a campaign, you have a million things going on. As you get closer to election day, you shouldn’t have to spend your time scheduling emails, sending out reminders to vote and reminding people to volunteer. With Ladders on Action Network, you can create a “ladder of engagement” to automate aspects of your campaign. Whether it’s asks to volunteer for GOTV, a welcome series for new supporters, or asks for donations, you can make all that with Ladders.
Let’s walk through how to create a Ladder for the week of GOTV. We want to ask people to volunteer, ask the people that volunteered to donate, and remind everyone to vote.
To do this, we’ll create three separate rungs.
In the Action Network email tool, schedule an email asking people to attend a canvassing event on GOTV weekend. You’ll include the link to the event, and any clips that are relevant to the event location. This email will be the trigger for the first rung.
The next step would be to wait until November 2, a few days before the canvassing event.
Then, we’ll have a decision step. If someone has RSVP’d to the canvassing event, they will be sorted into the “yes” category, and we’ll send them an email reminding them to come canvass. If someone has not RSVP’d, they’ll be sorted into the “no” category, and we’ll send them another email asking them to volunteer. After those emails are sent, people will exit that rung.
Another rung would be added below the first, and this trigger would be “Took a specific action,” in this case, RSVP’ing to the canvassing event. So everyone who RSVP’d to the canvassing event will be in this rung.
We’ll create a wait until November 3, then send an email asking supporters to donate.
After this email is sent, we’ll add a wait step for 2 days.
Then, we’ll create a decision step. If someone has donated in the past seven days, we’ll send them an email thanking them for their donation. We’ll add clips so that we can ask them to match their previous donation, and link to the fundraising page. If someone has not donated in the past seven days, we’ll send them another email saying it’s their last chance to donate and include the link to the fundraising page. Once those emails are sent, people will exit that rung.
The final rung will be triggered when someone subscribes. Since this is a general reminder to vote, we want it to go to everyone to get it who subscribed to our email list, regardless of any past actions.
The next step would be a wait until the day before the election, where we’ll send everyone an email reminding them the election is tomorrow. You can include a link to polling locations, encourage people to carpool, and thank everyone for their support thus far.
Then we will add a wait until the morning of election day, where we will send the last reminder to vote.
If you're working on a large or complex ladder, you can click Copy Steps in the bottom left to copy certain Decision steps and its follow up action, wait, or randomizer steps from one part of a ladder and paste them at the end point of a different branch in the ladder. More on copying ladder steps here.
By automating these aspects of GOTV week, you can spend less time on your computer and more time talking to voters!
Here is a screenshot of this example, taken from the Ladder’s edit page.
