Image courtesy of Flickr user wiredforlego. Licensed under Creative Commons SA-2.0.

Part 1 of a 3 part series

If you’re using ActionKit, you know you’re dealing with a complex CRM. It’s one of the most flexible CRMs on the market, but sometimes all that power can make managing your customizations unwieldy.

A great example of that is templates. With many CRMs, including ActionKit, making a new action page with slightly different functionality than the last requires copying the older template and then editing the HTML. Sometimes you need to make a small change, and other times you need to make big changes. Either way, copying an old template and then editing it isn’t the most streamlined or easiest process.

Editing HTML can be messy, and it’s easy to potentially break the HTML if you’re not a developer. It can also be time consuming, even for the most experienced developers. You also might end up in the world of template hell, with 50 to 60 templates, not remembering which one is which.

Fission Strategy has found a solution to get you out of “template hell” and save you lots of time and headache.

This signup page uses multiple custom fields to display the page this way (hidden navigation bar except for donate button, progress bar placed with text instead of above form fields, SMS opt-in displayed and pre-checked)

Mayors Against Illegal Guns wanted to customize their ActionKit pages (petitions, letters, events, whip counts). With ActionKit, making these customizations with custom fields made a lot more sense than making 50 different templates.

With custom fields, anyone, from a lead developer to the less HTML-savvy could create highly customized action pages with relative ease.

Custom fields make customizing your page and its content way easier.
 

The custom fields in this case actually serve as feature settings, where an admin can turn the feature on or off based on if they have the custom field set or not.

Here’s just a taste of what we’ve done with ActionKit for clients like Mayors Against Illegal Guns, J Street, the ONE Campaign, and others:

• Customize Twitter and Facebook share functionality on “Thanks” pages with custom links, messages, and images.

• Turn a typical “Thanks” page after an action into a donate page, while still showing share buttons for the action.

• Easily set whether supporters are allowed to customize your letter or petition to Congress, or add a custom comment (or not, to stop people from using your tool to advocate an alternative position!).

• Show or hide any of the content areas of a page to streamline the user flow, eg. comments section, description text, headlines, etc.

• Add unrequired additional fields to the forms on your pages without messing with the form template.

• Set a baseline of signatures on a goal bar, allowing you to show the real number of signatures you have (from multiple petitions).

With custom fields set up, tweaks to pages just take a click of a button, as opposed to editing code.

If you’re not sure how to implement custom fields in this way, we can help! Just give us a ring!

Austen Levihn-Coon and Sean Quinn contributed to this blog post.