Campaign Deputy is celebrating it’s four-year anniversary today when we publicly launched back in July of 2017. Campaign Deputy launched with the help of some takeout food, a kitchen table and a 2-liter that was not diet (oops). Since then, we have helped campaigns from a School board seat, Council, Mayor, County Treasurer, State Representative, House of Representatives and Governor.

New Look

We switched to a new look and a new domain (us.campaigndeputy.app) with a select group of users and now have everyone migrated over to the new site! Campaign Deputy was updated to be more mobile friendly, a new more standard look, and faster. Our goal is to improve every year and the software gets a boost from our vendors doing the same. The switch to .app starts every connection over HTTPS and uses DNSSEC for added security features.

New Pricing

Don’t worry, we are lowering pricing. Our State, Congressional, State-Wide and Senate pricing now start their additional email pricing at $1.00/thousand. Volume Pricing starts at 250,000 additional emails. We are also creating a new High-Email plan for Congressional, State-Wide and Senate to include more emails a month as part of the base plan.

Updated Message Center

We updated our Message Center to send out emails faster, and to load statistics faster. Our delivered/open/click moved to a serverless model to calculate for each email campaign as we outgrew trying to calculate those on the fly. The Message Center now loads faster, and we send out emails 200% faster than we did this time last year. We added a Raised column that integrates with ActBlue and A/B Testing for an email campaign. Email Campaigns have the choice to use Templates and create a sender directly in the Campaign Editor. We improved our Merge Tags with Liquid templates with 4 custom preview profiles and a detailed error message when there is an issue with the Liquid syntax. No more hunting for that extra {{ in your email. New merge fields and advance syntax is available in our support portal or from your Account Manager.

Updated Forms

Forms received an upgrade with our new Landing Page and Zapier (more below) forms. Landing Page forms allow you the ability to create a custom page using our drag-and-drop editor to build a very stylist page for both the page and thank you page. They also support redirect options and a custom setting for the iOS 14 conversion tracking. A deeper integration with our Message Center allows you to track a donation from Email->Form->Redirect to ActBlue automatically.

Custom Domains

Need a custom domain for your brand or for iOS 14 updates? We now, officially, offer custom domains for the act.campaigndeputy.com hosted site. Once enabled, Campaign Deputy switches the links internally to your domain. The same attribution tracking follows for our domain and yours for dollars raised.

Source Codes

Campaign Deputy now tracks two types of Source Codes, one at the Contribution level and one at the Person level. For ActBlue, source codes are translated from the refCode parameter and assigned to the Contribution. If the donor does not already have an Origin Source Code, Campaign Deputy will assign it for their first Contribution. Already have donors you want setup with a Source Code before they donate? Our Import process allows you to assign a source code as part of the import process. When you send an email from our Message Center, you can use the Tracking Parameters feature to update your Source Code for all of your links in one place not eight.

Custom Fields

Our first Custom Field was back in 2018, and was more of a “Contact Support” option. Now you can setup Custom Fields in the Account Settings with three different types, Text, Decimal, and Lookup. Those are all available in the Universe Search with Decimal allowing you to search for > or < for a specific amount. Want to add a Lifetime Value field, add a Custom Field with a Decimal type and reference it in your Segments. Our Import process has been updated to import, and update, Custom Fields on records as well. Learn more at our Custom Fields Feature Update post.

Event RSVPs

We had a few people use our Forms as a RSVP feature, which separated it from our Events area in the system. We recently launched Event RSVPs to enhance our Guest List feature. Built on the same tech as our Landing Pages, you can customize your RSVP page with our drag-and-drop editor. We have included a base template that works great on desktop or mobile bowsers to help get you started. Event RSVPs pages support Thank You Pages and custom Redirects. If you have a Custom Domain hosted by use they use that domain as well.

Compliance

Recently we became an approved vendor for Campaign Finance in Pennsylvania. This is in addition to our FEC compliance, Kentucky Compliance Upload, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Alabama, Virginia (COMET) with a few more states pending approval. Don’t see your state listed, contact us. Some states do not require an approval process and can be added quickly.

Series

Other systems call them Drip Campaigns, Welcome Series or Ladders, we call them Series. Series were built out last year and received a major upgrade. You can create a Series with unlimited Conditional Splits. Series already support sending out emails, delays, and adding a person to a list. With Conditional Splits you can send out a reminder to donate, and another if they don’t, and another if they don’t. You could do a third or add them to a suppression list. The options are truly unlimited, though we recommend a large monitor if you take us up on that offer.

Zapier

We launched a Zapier integration last year and now you can request your Zapier API Key from your Account Settings. Zapier integrates with our Forms to allow you to trigger an auto-response email or to start a Series. If you want to add people, there is also a Zap to add people as well.

Integrations

We created a new Integration with PhoneBurner, DonorBox and working on an integration with Mobilize. We are exploring an integration with AirCall and Justcall as well. A VoteBuilder API can be requested through your State Party if you want a VoteBuilder integration. Don’t see an integration you are looking for? Contact us to start that conversation.

Campaign Deputy API

Back in early 2019, we were ready to launch our first mobile app to help fundraising teams collect donations in person. Plans changed and we launched P2P texting as one of the lowest cost vendors for P2P last cycle. Now, we have a few organizations who want to build an integration with us and we have relaunched our API. Our API Documentation includes example code in major languages like Javascript, Java, Node, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Go, C#, Swift, and Curl for the command line users out there. One major part we changed with our API is the permissions. In Campaign Deputy, users have somewhat broad permissions over certain areas. Our API has finer grain access controls, called Scopes, that allow for a very exact set of permissions that a web application couldn’t support. Scopes will allow you to setup an API Key that gives a website access to a “Scope”. For example, our sales form uses the Scopes “create_person”, “create_task”. If someone had that API Key, they couldn’t access your database since they wouldn’t have the “read_person” Scope. This also meets the NIST Cybersecurity Framework guideline of “least privilege and separation of duties”.

Have a question that we did not cover above? Use the form below and we can setup a time to talk.

One of our top 3 requested features has released, Custom Fields. We have been building this feature behind the scenes for a while. The VAN ID was built out as a default Custom Field for everyone in early 2020. We had a few state-wide campaigns use Custom Fields in 2018 and our Support Team could add a new field if requested. We found most did not need a Custom Field, the ones that did really needed a custom field.

One major piece of us waiting to build out custom fields is that we wanted it to be extremely useful. Database design is tough, and we had enough use cases to understand what everyone wanted. We built out three different types of custom fields, Text, Decimal, Lookup. Most systems only have Text as a custom field, not very useful if you wanted to search based on a number. Lookup was another type provided by a campaign for when you only need a handful of values. I’m sure everyone has seen an Excel file with data in the wrong column, or 3 columns worth of data in one. Lookup helps by limiting what you can enter. Lets say you have a lookup of A, B, C. Your searches/segments are quick and easy, it will always be either A, or B, or C.

Custom Fields can be searched for in the Universe Search as well.

If the Type is Decimal you can search by greater or less than for your searches. If type Text/Lookup you can search by equal, starts with, contains.

Custom Fields are also available during Imports. Decimals support values of $1,500 or 1500.24. Text supports up to 255 characters and Lookup supports the values you pick. In the example above that would be A, B, C. Lookups also support “a “, or “b” to try to find a match.

In Early June we launched Event RSVP tracking to a group of beta testers and it was a huge success! A campaign, or organization, can have multiple types of events and our users have been asking how to track RSVPs as part of their fundraising process. These events typically mailed out or emailed out to a group of guests a host knows. Our Forms worked for a time, while this Event RSVP integrates more with our Event system and compliance aspects of fundraising. Some states require total raised to be recorded per an event. With our ActBlue integration with custom refCodes and our own donation platform, this is even easier to track. Also exciting as it’s the launch of our first Campaign Deputy designed template.

Each Event has an option to make the Event public. This allows the RSVP feature to set a Unique URL and edit the default template for the form. The form supports custom fields as well as some additional fields specific to Events, Additional Guest and the Unable to Attend option. Once a person signs up for an Event, you will see them in the Guest List tab and Response tab. The Response tab has the full details, including custom fields, of their response. You also have full control over the output of the Event page and the Thank You Page. Redirects are also an option with URL Parameters that will get passed to your redirect URL for those who use Source Reporting.

We have made several updates to our email editor based on feedback from our community. About 9 months ago we wanted to move to a more advanced template option beyond a find and replace that was used when it was first launched. One of the major drivers for the change was our Call Time Manager. The first email editor lacked the sophistication that we wanted for all types of donor communication. .We settled on an open source tool that allows us to customize a template, add new features to it over time and is fast so we can send out emails to those large groups. We also wanted to keep the look and feel of the industry standard Liquid templates that seem to be everywhere.

Autocomplete for Liquid Fields

We have added location information and donor history to the email merge fields. This allows for some great ideas for customizing your emails.
{{if city='Louisville'}} RSVP to our event {{else}} RSVP to our Zoom event {{end}}
{{if lifetime_contributions>10000}} thank you for being huge supporter over the years{{else}} we appreciate every donation {{end}}
{{if zip}} be one of the {{math.random 10 25}} supporters in {{zip}} {{else}} we need 76 supporters by midnight {{end}}

Restricted Domains

We have a range of clients, from school board to Governor, PACs, non-profits and even one law firm. Historically, you could ask our support team to put in a block for a specific domain name based on your needs. (Looking at you .us school systems). Now those options are available for you in Account Settings. It’s also tiered in that you can block all .gov and .us or you can say .gov and .jeffersonkyschools.us to be exact for those local agencies that don’t use a .gov domain.

Upcoming Features

We still have more features in the works for our email system. We have a few people Beta testing our AB Testing, new segment filters and a GIF countdown timer. The GIF countdown timer is the biggest upcoming feature as generating 10,000 GIFs on open was a fun challenge for our team. We will be deploying that in both a West Coast and East Coast datacenters once we do a week long verification.