Every page will automatically ask activists to enter the information we need to complete the action. For instance, fundraising pages will ask for and require first name, last name, email address, street address, city, state or province, country, ZIP/postal code, credit card number, expiration date, and security code, because we need all of that information to process a contribution. Petitions, on the other hand, will by default only ask for first name, last name, email address, ZIP/postal code, and country to take action and only email address, ZIP/postal code, and country are required.
When activists are filling out their email address information, the system will automatically catch common spelling errors in the email domain (the @website.com bit). It will pick up on common errors like @gmail.ocm or @ayhoo.com, and suggest a correction.
On petitions, forms, and events, you will be able to add or remove these standard fields to remove, say, first name from the form if you do not want to collect it. You can also decide whether you want to make the field required or not. You can control these options in the visual form builder by clicking the blue "Edit Form" button. You can read more about the visual form builder here. Note that email address and country must always be present and required, as every activist in our system must have an email address and country.
On letter campaigns, if you're using custom targets rather than our built-in targets, you have the option of removing or making not required the street and city fields. If using built-in targets these are required, as we need them to match up activists to their elected official.
If an activist is signed into an account on the Action Network or has given us their information in the past, we will recognize them when they visit any action page so they can take action with one click without having to fill out their name, email address, or ZIP/postal code again. Instead, they will receive a 'welcome back' message.
Recognition is per-field. Any fields (core fields like first name or custom fields) that the activist has not filled out in the past will be shown on the page. Any fields that the activist has already filled out will be hidden. You can choose to always show a field even if the activist has already filled it out by checking the "Always Show" option in the form builder when creating the action.
If they want, they can log out and cancel the recognition to fill out the form with another email address by clicking the link next to their recognized user avatar.
Activists are automatically de-duplicated by email address. In addition, for many actions (say, events, and forms), activists can only take action once, with the newer action overwriting the older one if they take action again.