Action Network Policies

Policy Statement on Using Action Network for State or Regional Communications

If you’re a state coordinator, regional lead, or national program volunteer, once you're trained up this will mean you have access to Action Network, our national mass-emailing engine. With this national-list-level access comes a big responsibility. Read on.

The national email subscriber list is crucial for Braver Angels. It’s how we communicate with members and subscribers. Every email presents an opportunity for engagement, unsubscription, or spam reporting. Unsubscribing means we can no longer reach that person via email, and spam reporting harms our sender reputation, affecting email delivery rates and increasing spam. These issues can undermine our mission.

Unfortunately, we've seen at least two examples in the past two weeks where field leaders have made avoidable errors that resulted in emailing state-level business to ALL our subscribers, resulting in a large number of unsubscribes and/or complaints.

Since you can send using the national list, use good judgment with messaging, frequency, and audience size. Before sending to a large audience, get a second opinion from our leadership.

As a rule:

• Place national calls-to-action within our regular newsletters.

• Reach out to newsletter@braverangels.org or gkearns@braverangels.org for newsletter-appropriate announcements or calls to action.

• Ensure your message has sufficient training and approval to avoid errors that result in unwanted communications.

• State Coordinators should only send to a geographically targeted audience. Rare exceptions may include neighboring states with consultation from relevant state coordinators or regional leads.

• Regional leads should provide consultation on state-level communications using Action Network.

• Never assume the default “from” settings are correct. Always double-check audience targeting and “from” email addresses before sending. State coordinators should use a specific “from” address (e.g., mn-coordinators@braverangels.org) for handling replies.

• Send a test email from Action Network to yourself and forward to relevant stakeholders for consultation and link-testing before sending to a large audience.

• Action Network is not suitable for sharing personal opinions, direct fundraising appeals, or business unrelated to engaging Braver Angels subscribers and members in mission-related work. Seek a second or third opinion from leaders in our field organization or media team for judgment calls.

• Finally: Please know that Action Network provides you the very clear warning shown below if you are about to send to the entire national list, which is something that should never be done by a state or regional level user. If you see this, STOP, troubleshoot your audience target parameters, and seek help if needed.

Please reach out to field-tech-support@braverangels.org if you have any questions about these guidelines.

Policy Statement and FAQ on the Progressive political affiliation of Action Network

Braver Angels is a non-partisan organization that partners with a wide range of public and private entities in service of our mission:  to reduce affective polarization and build social trust and relationships between citizens in order to strengthen our democracy.  As should be expected, many of our partners have partisan commitments, as do our members.  We believe this is both necessary to achieve our mission of building bonds across the partisan divide, and in some cases extremely practical in terms of our ability to achieve impact.

One such explicitly partisan partner to Braver Angels is Action Network, a fee-for-service technology platform developed as a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization whose mission is to build technologies that support grass-roots progressive activism.  Action Network provides us the infrastructure we use to publish our email newsletters, store basic contact information on our members and subscribers, and track folks’ participation in our events.  Our partnership with Action Network is limited to our payment for their hosted technology services, and we have no known relationships with their other clients.  

Because we occasionally hear concerns related to Action Network’s overtly progressive stance, we’re providing this FAQ as a resource to help folks who deserve to have these concerns addressed.

Who are some of Action Network’s Left-leaning clients?  The Action Network website indicates that it is used by the Democratic National Committee, as well as the AFL-CIO, Daily Kos, and United We Dream, among others.

Does Action Network assume data ownership, or share the data of Braver Angels subscribers and members with their progressive clients?  No.  Action Network’s privacy policy explicitly promises that subscriber data is in no way owned by Action Network or shared between clients.

How much financial support does Braver Angels provide Action Network through the purchase of its services?  Action Network’s fees are significantly lower than those of leading competitors, which is one reason we continue to use their service.  Our monthly charges typically average $250.

What relationship does Action Network have with Al Sharpton’s National Action Network? None. These two organizations have no direct relationship to each other according to our support inquiries.  We don’t know whether Sharpton’s organization uses Action Network’s software.

Why does Braver Angels use Action Network instead of a non-partisan mass emailing product like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce, etc.?  Action Network was adopted in 2017 based on its low cost and appropriate feature set for grassroots organizing.  Since then, several market reviews and competitor analyses have concluded that for the cost, and in consideration of the burdens involved in switching platforms, Action Network continues to offer the right functionality for our teams.  That being said, our choice of mass-emailing platform remains a topic under active evaluation as our needs continue to evolve.

Action Network says:  "The Action Network is only open for progressive individuals, organizations, and candidates."   Does that mean Braver Angels is a progressive organization?  No. Braver Angels believes that both progressives and conservatives benefit when we succeed.  We have been very transparent with Action Network that we do not consider ourselves a progressive organization, and they have indicated that they believe it is in their interest to have a partnership with us, just as many conservative organizations believe it is in their interest to partner with us.

Who can I reach out to if I have further questions about Action Network? 

For platform support, reach out to support@actionnetwork.org  

For questions related Braver Angels tech or data policy, reach out to tech@braverangels.org