Originally published February 2020

At Mobilize, we believe in the power of people; we believe that people working together can make the world more just, inclusive, and democratic. But we know that supporting the causes you believe in takes time and effort, and can be confusing.

So we’ve spun up a team dedicated to the supporter experience.  This team is focused entirely on making it easier for people support the causes they care about. In turn, this enables organizations using Mobilize to recruit their target volunteers at scale and realize their mission.

As product manager of this team, I’ll share a blog post each quarter recapping the biggest changes we’ve made and how they’re benefiting volunteers and organizers alike.

Here are three big ways we’ve made supporting easier this year and the growth our organizations have seen as a result:

1. Follow-on event suggestions (10% more registrations)
2. Improved feed ranking (8% more registrations for feed visitors)
3. Improved bring-a-friend experience (20% more social share registrations)

1. Follow-on event suggestions

Supporters often ask, “How else can I help this cause?” We’ve answered that question with a new follow-on dialog offering event suggestions at key moments in the volunteer experience.  

The dialog includes other nearby events from that same organization that you can RSVP to in one tap. It’s shown:

• After you sign up for an event
• After you confirm or cancel your shift
• After you leave positive feedback about an event  

As of February 17, it’s resulted in 10% more registrations without increasing flake rate.

From here, we plan on improving the dialog and quality of suggestions, as well as extending the concept to two other key touch points for supporters: email and SMS.

2. Improved feed ranking

Most organizations have a long, varied list of events at any given time, making it overwhelming for supporters to find the right one for them on an organization’s Mobilize feed. We now take into account your location when suggesting events to you (so people in South Carolina aren’t mainly seeing events in Nevada!).

For people who visit the feed, this results in 12% more individuals registering for events and an 8% increase in total registrations.  

We’ll be rolling out this feature soon and continuing to improve the ranking of events to help connect supporters to to the right event for them.

3. Improved bring-a-friend experience

Supporting a cause is a very social activity; many registrations result from direct clicks on social shares from friends.  We’ve improved the bring-a-friend experience by letting you know when someone you invite RSVPs.

And since two-thirds of supporters visit mobilize.us from their mobile phones, we’ve improved the bring-a-friend experience on mobile (not shown).  We added sticky sign-up and share buttons that are always visible.  And we now use the systems’ native share sheet on Android and iOS, making it easier to share the event with the friends you talk to the most through the apps you use the most.

These improvements to the bring-a-friend experience have increased the number of registrations from clicks on social shares by 20%.

We have a lot more improvements coming here, like using the native share sheet in more spot and making it easier to re-invite people you’ve invited in the past.

What’s next

By better empowering supporters to sign up for events and bring their friends, our new supporter experience team is helping organizations on Mobilize to engage the right people faster and with less effort. We expect these changes to rapidly scale the number of volunteers in the Mobilize network: currently at 1.26 million!

We’ve got more planned in each of the three areas, as well as other potential improvements (like group chat, SMS short code with links, customized event suggestions in email, etc.) that we plan to begin testing soon!