The following is a guest blog post by 1Sky's Garth Moore about Salsa Scoring.  Please contact Salsa support at support@salsalabs.com if you're interested in learning more about the scoring package or you'd like to add it to your account.


Maintaining long-term engagement with your online supporters can be a challenge. How many times have you sent an email to your entire supporter base hoping for big returns and the email ended up with an 11% open rate or a .8% click-through rate? You just created the best action that will create the biggest impact, yet participation didn’t meet your expectations. It leaves you a bit taken aback, knowing you have to go back to the drawing board and determine how you can be more effective when reaching out to your supporters.

This usually means you should look at your supporter list a little more closely. Who are your rock stars, the ones who have taken the most actions, made the most donations, or attended the most events? Conversely, who has taken the least number of actions? How can you convince these inactive people to take action? How can you move your supporters though the ladder of engagement and create more rock stars and exceptional supporters? How can you segment your list in a meaningful way to maximize your recruitment, actions, or fundraising?

For 1Sky, a great way to segment our supporter lists was to use Salsa’s Scoring module. Our Field and Policy teams wanted to maximize recruitment for volunteers and our Internet team wanted to get more action out of low action supporters. Rather than just query out folks by groups or tags, we used scoring because it showed a cumulative number of actions. Scoring was very simple to set-up. We initially scored by number of actions, donations, and events. After building the scoring and waiting 24 hours, we could instantly see who was taking action, and who needed a nudge up that ladder.

The initial queries really illuminated how we could be more effective.  Scoring showed us who were the more active supporters on our list or within a specific group. It also showed us whom we needed to target with simpler, low-barrier asks to take action and get the inactive supporters to convert to more meaningful actions. Once we delivered a petition to the Obama Administration officials or sent Congress enough emails to stop a server, we could then get these low-action supporters to use a tell-a-friend function or send a letter to their local newspaper editors. 

There is some trial-and-error with scoring with setting up and running this module; it’s definitely an ongoing process with our campaign.  However, the dividends for scoring have already paid off in how we recruit volunteers, how we disperse high barrier and low-barrier actions, and how we get folks up that ladder to taking more actions. Your email target sizes can be smaller and yield better open and click rates, your communications can be more personal, and your action rates can be higher. If you’re constantly looking at how you can improve your online communications, Scoring offers a great resource to help score big with your supporters. 

Check out Garth’s presentation on Scoring in Salsa from the September Third Thursday training at Salsa Labs:

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