cStreet Campaigns is in New York City from May 13th to 20th and we’re pretty excited about it.  

Though we’re spending most of the week in meetings and working out of client offices, when we do need office space we’ve set up shop at the New York Center for Social Innovation (CSI). CSI is a network of co-working spaces started in our hometown of Toronto, and they have recently opened their new (and still under-construction) space in NYC.  

We owe them a big thanks for letting us crash their new space and for all the free coffee!

From their site:

"The Centre for Social Innovation provides its members with the spaces, relationships and knowledge they need to translate ideas to impact. We're part coworking space, part community center and part incubator for people and organizations that are changing the world."

[LINK: CSI NYC]

Snapshot of the (under-construction) space after the 'read more'. 

This week NationBuilder launched a new Design Gallery featuring some of the best Nations out there.  Three different projects of ours were featured: United Voice Queensland, Inside District 9 and The Bully Project - more projects than any other firm developing for NationBuilder.

We’re thrilled to have the recognition for our work and to have been a part of the success of our clients.

Learn more about each of the featured projects:
United Voice Queensland [Guest Blog]
Inside District 9 [Launch] [Case Study] [Personal Feeds]
The Bully Project [Launch] [Case Study] 

Over the past year and a half, we’ve worked with a number of clients to run increasingly sophisticated A/B tests on their bulk email programs, testing calls-to-action, different messages for different users, and geographically- and demographically-differentiated messaging.

There are a handful of ways to perform A/B tests when using NationBuilder. Below I’ve highlighted some of our experience using different types of A/B tests to improve clients' results.

Page Level Testing with Optimizely

We’re working with a coalition of labour groups in Saskatchewan who are organizing to prevent the passage of Bill 85, a radical overhaul of labour law in the province.  

In this project we used Optimizely to test a series of site elements in order to improve key campaign conversions. Optimizely works by splitting your site traffic into different buckets who see varied permutations of the same page. Once one permutation is clearly outperforming the others, you can make the change to implement that as the default.  

With Fair Work Saskatchewan we were able to increase the petition's signature conversions by 8.5%, as well as increase conversions on a number of other places on the site.

Our latest project to go live is Yes on D LA, a ballot measure to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles.

Proposition D will implement responsible operation of medical marijuana dispensaries, maintaining access to medicine for permitted patients, an end to the proliferation of illegal dispensaries, and enabling regulation to keep our neighborhoods safe.  

The project is being led by the Yes on D, Citizens’ Coalition to Protect Patients & Neighborhoods, sponsored by United Food & Commercial Workers Local 770, Patients, Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance & Americans for Safe Access.  

**The post below was originally published on Pivot Legal's new Strategic Pivot blog, was written by Executive Director Peter Wrinch and has been republished here with permission.  Pivot Legal was an early client of ours, and is one of Canada's truly great non-profits, having been an advocacy leader on issues of housing, sex work, policing and harm reduction in Vancouver and across Canada.** 

Pivot made the switch to NationBuilder in August of 2012 and since that time it has changed almost every aspect of the way we work. For a decade, we ran Pivot with numerous different "solutions" all doing different parts of our work. We had a donor database tracking donations, a system for setting up and running events, a volunteer database, an email service, the list goes on and on and on. Most of these pieces did not talk to each other and only a handful of them were integrated with our website. The task of bringing all of this information together in a coherent way that provided any sense of meaning was overwhelming. More often than not, data (donor information, volunteer signups, supporter endorsements) was left in stacks of paper (or spreadsheets!) condemned to sit uselessly forever.

In 2010 I started to dig around for a better solution. Upon doing my research and talking to people, I started to realize that no-one had solved this problem in a way that was affordable to a small non-profit organization. I almost signed a deal to deploy a SalesForce solution that I am sure would have been amazing – however, it was going to cost $15,000 upfront to build it to suit our needs. There would also be an ongoing service contract.

**Below is a guest post from United Voice Queensland Coordinator of Comprehensive Campaigns Steven Miles.  United Voice is the leading Australian service workers union, and one of our longest standing (and favorite) clients.**

cStreet and NationBuilder have helped to deliver one of the Australian labour union movement’s biggest wins – a long overdue pay raise for child care workers. Long amongst Australia's lowest paid workers, child care educators launched a massive national campaign called "Big Steps", supported by United Voice. We fought hard for a wage increase fully funded by the federal government, so that fees for parents didn’t need to increase.

United Voice is a union with a long and proud history of organising workers. The challenge we faced this time was in how to organise parents on a large enough scale to convince politicians that they needed to subsidise a wage increase, despite there being no precedent for such an action. This is where cStreet came in. They helped us to build and deploy a custom NationBuilder site for our union that allowed us to better recruit parents and supporters both in centres and online. Our ‘Big Steps’ campaign brought broad-based community support for childcare workers to bear on elected officials of all stripes.