Creation of a Renewed Mobilizing Movements App
Linkup Studio is pleased to share our contribution to the Impactive platform — an all-encompassing hub designed to support digital outreach and foster civic engagement.
Our team collaborated with the existing international Impactive team, elevating the platform to new heights. Through our cohesive UX/UI product design, we enhanced the user experience and optimized existing features for volunteers. Furthermore, we developed innovative features requested by clients, refining the platform for better performance.
In partnering with Linkup Studio, Impactive expanded its reach, empowering 1,000+ clients and organizations, engaging users in 50+ states, and enlisting 350k+ registered volunteers.
Impactive Stabilizes Democracy in the US
The platform proved to be a game-changer in the recent presidential race by facilitating voter outreach during the campaign. Its effect was so significant that it was identified as one of the main reasons behind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory.
Additionally, the platform’s features are of great value for organizing mass events and demonstrations by various nonprofits, advocacy groups, and unions.
Our team’s efforts to augment the platform’s capabilities have further enhanced its multi-functionality. We introduced even more features for modern, efficient campaigning to enhance civic society.
Client’s Request for Joining Forces
The original concept behind Impactive was to bring together various methods of involving people in social activities and initiatives, such as broadcast texting, phone banking, and peer-to-peer texting. Unlike most of its competitors offering only one feature, Impactive aims to provide a comprehensive solution. The Linkup Studio team faced up to the challenge of improving the quality of their services and attracting more clients by enhancing their outreach and engagement tools.
As the platform continued to grow, at some point, executives found themselves inundated with client requests for additional and improved tools to enhance their advertising campaigns. In response to this demand, the CEO and CTO of Impactive turned to our seasoned professionals for partnership.
The duo sought to expand the existing team by seeking only the most proficient business analysts, designers, and front-end & back-end developers. It was significant for them that individuals possess a proven track record of creating impactful solutions. We met all the stringent criteria and joined in with our expertise.
Challenges & Solutions in a Complete Redesign
When we started working together, we discovered a lack of consistency within the system, both in the internal admin section and the main app for volunteers. The admin section had functionality for assigning people to campaign management and tracking their performance, but the elements were inconsistent. Similarly, the app for volunteers lacked cohesive user flows, making it difficult for users to find the necessary functionality. This was a significant issue for a product of this size.
Rather than focusing on making the product look attractive, our main priority was to improve the consistency of the elements and streamline the admin section and end-user product for better usability. Designers had previously been working on a situational basis, which only added to the system’s complexity.
We developed and implemented a design system that introduced guidelines for elements, such as button sizes and content design, to ensure a cohesive architecture on a larger scale. You can read more about Linkup Studio’s approach to design systems in the article.
One of the challenges of redesigning a product is that users have become accustomed to its existing functionality, even if it’s unsuitable. Therefore, the redesign must strike a balance between reducing confusion and providing a qualitatively new solution that users will appreciate.
When we began redesigning the user application, the client informed us of their goal to incentivize volunteers to work on projects out of a desire for change in the world rather than just for personal benefits. With this in mind, we decided to introduce a visual update to the application features and tools available for volunteers, which included new elements, bright colors, round corners, and a gamified user experience. The latter included adding awards, leaderboards, and points for achievements, among other features.
Our design creation for Impactive reflects Linkup’s shift in recent years towards a product-oriented design approach. Rather than simply creating designs and passing them off, we now deeply consider the product’s development, testing, launch, and support from the outset. This approach is not only immersed in aesthetics but also takes into account development limitations, communication, alignment with international teams, and long-term support.
Diving Into Upgrading Platform Features
In this block, we’ll describe some of the tasks we delivered to Impactive to make this product stronger:
- Extended user filters for campaign admins
Problem: Impactive’s clients needed a way to track the efficiency of their volunteers for their projects. Before our solution, they could select a campaign, location, and a few filters, but this process was cumbersome and lacked functionality.
Solution: Our team developed flexible filters that allow executives and campaign managers to observe information about each volunteer from the admin section. It includes statistics on sent messages, their frequency, the number of closed actions for the campaign, and many other engagement metrics. Overall, this enables them to see which team members contribute more effectively to specific campaigns.
This feature enabled fair allocation and reassignment of single and multiple groups of contacts among volunteers based on data.
We have also developed the ability to reorganize volunteer teams. Admins can delete, replace and move volunteers across different campaigns and even set up competitions between them.
- Organization of the information in the system
Problem: With multiple campaigns taking place across various states and countries, it’s essential to have an organized information system that meets all client needs.
Solution: Our team at Linkup Studio has designed a system structure that includes tags and folders for campaign leaders to manage their current, upcoming, and completed campaigns efficiently.
- Enhancing campaign management
Problem: The admin had to spend a lot of time creating numerous campaigns and filling in all the required details, even though the events had similar processes and methods. For example, voter mobilization during elections.
Solution: We developed sub-campaigns or affiliates that allow administrators to copy the settings of parent campaigns to child ones and re-use the actions on the affiliate level, with few manual adjustments. For this, our system reliably integrates and exchanges data.
Now, admins spend less time filling out campaign descriptions. Moreover, they view a complete dashboard of the whole campaign or its parts, including statistics of engaged volunteers, actions taken, messages sent, and more.
- Broadcast keyword automation
Problem: When a volunteer joins a project and begins engaging with people through text messaging, it can take dozens of hours to reply to all messages and maintain communication. However, many of these replies are similar and do not require live-person intervention.
Solution: The Linkup Studio team has developed a broadcast keyword automation system that functions like a chatbot, with hundreds of keywords and reserved replies already programmed. This system can be applied to various types of campaigns with different objectives.
When this functionality is deployed on a product, it will save valuable time for volunteers and supporters and enable them to accomplish more for their campaigns.
- Fundraising functionality
Problem: Impactive’s benefits extend beyond political organizations and parties. It also offers plans to assist nonprofit organizations and charitable initiatives.
Solution: To meet this goal, we have designed fundraising functionality that enables trackable links for messages and provides an overview of a fundraising campaign’s overall performance on a special dashboard. This dashboard includes information on regions, people engaged, and amounts of funds collected, among other data points.
This feature will help organizations conduct fundraising activities more strategically by understanding their target audience and selecting individuals passionate about specific campaigns, leading to faster achievement of set goals. Clients will comprehend what types of messages perform better and for what initiatives people press more clicks and send donations.
- Speeding up volunteer work and platform performance
We made some improvements to Impactive to make it easier for volunteers to use. We simplified the inbox by adding an option to archive chats, so volunteers can save time searching for active conversations and people to engage with.
Our team also worked together to fix other bugs and issues. It was challenging because we had to work with an existing and running product. We had to learn how the previous code was written and ensure our changes aligned with the established logic. We managed to improve the product without causing any crashes and successfully added new features!
Linkup Studio experts suggested improvements and updates to the processes we were using for the client. These changes helped us save time and resources throughout the project. We came up with new ways to organize our development specifications, create functionality, and more.
Linkup Studio team cares deeply about our products and understands the intents behind them. Their talented and scalable team manages projects well via GitHub and Notion. They’re also very responsive and vet designs to prevent bad development.
Naseem Makiya, Founder & CEO at Impactive
Summary. Enhanced Solution for Civil Society Initiatives
Our team collaborated with Impactive to make the product more convenient. We added functionalities like campaign management filters, organized the system data, and made the user interface consistent across the admin and volunteer sections. We also improved other features to make them faster, simpler, and more productive to use.
As a result of our contributions, the Impactive platform has solidified its market position and strongly outperformed competitors with only a few mobilizing tools in its arsenal.
The solution now has an updated admin panel that’s easier to use for managing campaigns and employee projects. We’ve also created a web and mobile app for volunteers to help them interact with people and push campaigns forward. We’re continuing to develop new functionality to make the customer experience even better for volunteers and to help significantly impact civil society initiatives.
