Events and Forms

These are called 'actions' in Action Network jargon.

What are event and forms for?
Creating a form
Online events
In-person events
Page Wrappers
Useful fields and questions
Advertising your event
Pre-fill data in a form

What are event and forms for?

Events and forms are called 'actions' on Action Network.

Why use them?
They are a way of getting the subscribers on your list to interact and respond. Instead of sending them away from Action Network (e.g. to read a newspaper article or to sign up to a zoom) you keep them inside Action Network and therefore track responses.

You can use forms to do surveys, ask questions or collect more data on interests or skills.

You can use events for both in-person events with a physical location or for online talks, meetings, training etc.

If people fill in your form or event, you'll be able to see their response and learn more about the people on your list.

A list of useful ready-made standard questions are available for you to use.

Creating a form

Forms are for collecting extra information or feedback from your list. E.g

asking people if they are interested in certain ongoing activities like 'arts', 'action planning', 'social media support'.
a general shout out for people with any time to spare (giving some options)
registering their interest in distributing leaflets (you might collect their phone number so you could contact)

To start a new form - start here

From the Create a sponsored action menu on the right hand side, choose Form

Start a new form

To edit a current form - start here

Click on Actions then either Manage for a published form OR Edit for a form still in draft. Follow the same instructions below, but obviously some things may have already been set up.

edit a current form

1. Title and description

Give your form a short and clear title (and optionally a more descriptive different title for internal use only) and also a description/instructions written clearly for the person you want to fill in the form.

Form title and description

2. More settings

You can let people know how many other people have taken the action of filling out the form by leaving the Progress Bar on, but usually this is turned off. Then you need a short Form Heading and at the is you can update the text that appears on the submit button depending on what kind of form this is. This could be e.g. 'Update', 'Submit Info' or 'Register'.

3. Edit Form

Then click Edit Form (as seen just above), which takes you to a drag and drop type page to add or remove questions from your form.

This part is hard to describe in words and images - so you need to just have a go. You can drag and drop any fields you don't want for your event (it's up to you). Just click on them and drag away from the left and let go.

In this example the surname and postcode have been removed and the GDPR field is being picked up and moved in to the form.

The fields can then be set to 'Required' if they are mandatory.

NOTE: Historically all admins could create questions and we've ended up with hundreds of questions with lots of overlap. So we are documenting a list of some standard XRUK questions that you can use.

You could also add your own questions at this stage, but note that the information will only be stored within the form answers, not with their activist record. It might be worth requesting some training from the Action Network Data Team to explain how all this works in more depth.

In the bottom right click 'SAVE AND PREVIEW' and 'SAVE AND GO TO NEXT STEP'.

4. Thank You page

To keep things simple - turn off the sharing options (you can investigate this later), and change the title to something that suits your form.

5. Write a short message

6. Click 'Save and Publish'

You form is now live, some last things to do are:

add a nice page wrapper
- The page wrapper gives your Event the 'XR Style' of font and colours and also this gets rid of all the Action Network branding at the top and bottom of the page. Swap from the default to the 'no logo' one.
turn off or set up auto-reply emails (see next page)
- Click on 'Responses'
- As usual for an email - you might pick an appropriate wrapper (contact data team if you don't have the XR Wrappers), set up your subject, from and reply-to email correctly.
- Click SAVE RESPONSES

7. Promote

Lear more about advertising your event in regards to URLs, preview images and tracking where sign ups have come from.

If you need help with setting up a Form, please book a training or coaching session via our Training Request Form, or contact the Action Network Data Team.

Online events

Guidance below focuses on events that point to a zoom link.

The zoom meeting link should be one that doesn't require the person to register (otherwise they'll end up having to register on the AN event AND again on the zoom link).

There are benefits to using Action Network events instead of sending people direct to a zoom registration. It enables you to easily see who has registered without having to download details from Zoom. Also it makes it easier to set up auto-reply emails, 24hr reminders and follow up emails.

This page covers how to:

Create an Event (see below)
Duplicate an existing Event - watch this video

1. Create an Event

2. Add the key details

Title, start and end time, zoom link and timezone

title - keep it short and clear
zoom link - this should NOT be a registration link (otherwise people will have to register here on the event and then again when they click the zoom)
timezone - if your event date is within British Summer Time (then pick that time zone - see above) - otherwise choose Greenwich Mean Time.

3. Add some short text about the event and upload graphic

Write something a little shorter than you might do on a Facebook event or other advert - because by the time they've reached this registration page - they should already know something about what they are signing up for.

4. Then the graphic

5. Update the form data entry details

Check the button to 'Register' and then click 'Edit Form'

6. Choose data fields

In this example the surname and postcode have been removed and the GDPR field is being picked up and moved in to the form.

The fields can then be set to 'Required' if they are mandatory.

NOTE: Historically all admins could create questions and we've ended up with hundreds of questions with lots of overlap. So we are documenting a list of some standard XRUK questions that you can use.

In the bottom right clock 'SAVE AND PREVIEW' and 'SAVE AND GO TO NEXT STEP'.

7. Thank You page

To keep things simple - turn off the sharing options (you can investigate this later), and change the title.

8. Also you can write a message here e.g.

9. Click 'Save and Publish'

You event is now live, some last things to do are:

add a nice page wrapper
The page wrapper gives your Event the 'XR Style' of font and colours and also this gets rid of all the Action Network branding at the top and bottom of the page. Swap from the default to the 'no logo' one.
turn the discussion board off
Click on Discussion and toggle off.

set up auto-reply emails (see following page)
- Click on 'Responses'
- As usual for an email - you might pick an appropriate wrapper (contact data team if you don't have the XR Wrappers), set up your subject, from and reply-to email correctly.

Then write the content of the email. Some of the default things on offer aren't very clear, so here is an example of a clear email.
You can copy the same email or something slightly different for the 24hr before reminder email.
Click SAVE RESPONSES

10. Promote

Lear more about advertising your event in regards to URLs, preview images and tracking where sign ups have come from.

In-person events

The guidance for creating an in-person event is very similar to creating an online event - but in step 2 you just need to give the physical location of the event.

If you need help on this, please book time on our Training Request Form, or contact the Action Network Data Team.

Page Wrappers

The default for any new event or form is for it to have Action Network branding at the top and the bottom. You can easily remove this by applying a 'page wrapper'. There is an XR wrapper created for you to use (with and you apply it once your event or form is published by going to 'manage' the event/form and you'll see the open to apply the wrapper...

This changes your form from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Viewing on a phone

The effect of a page wrapper is even better when viewing on a phone, because it removes very distracting 'login or sign up' at the top. This option is attempting to get someone to sign up for an Action Network account - which is entirely unnecessary and a huge distraction from your own action/form/event sign up.

Useful fields and questions

All these questions are available to all groups using the the XRUK network

When you use these questions in your forms/events the data you collect will be added to subscribers record.

You can also create your own questions in a form or event, but these will just be held within the 'action' itself (this is more suited to temporary information e.g. to ask people what shifts they could cover when stewarding for an action with options of 12-2pm,2-4pm, 4-6pm)

If you need help on this, please book time on our Training Request Form, or contact the Action Network Data Team.

Commonly used questions

If you have an idea for a question that could be useful system-wide then get in touch. If you feel like you need the freedom to create your own questions, read more here

QUESTIONS

A shortlist of most useful questions. These are questions that can be added to forms or events.

GDPR_UK - For use on UK forms, it add "GDPR_Policy_V3" to the field 'GDPR_consent'. Essential for every form and should be set as 'required'.
Which Region - Drop down menu of options of every nation or region and an 'other/nomad' category too. This adds the chosen option to a field called 'Region'. Apologies for this question and field being just called 'Region' and not NationRegion.
Mattermost Handle - This is a free text field of the same name, for someone to enter their mattermost handle.
Event Attended - This is a free text field that you could use on forms you set up for helping you with data entry of paper sign up sheets. Data added to the field 'event_attended'.
Local XR Group 2024 dropdown - Useful for UK, Action Support or other UK-wide lists, to pick up information on the person's local group. Note: nothing happens when they fill this is, there is no coding that automatically subscribes them to that LG email list. It's just for information only.
Principles and Values - This give a link to the P&Vs on the website and asked for use to tick if they agree with them. Then it tags their activist record with 'P&Vs_agreed'.

CUSTOM FIELDS

A shortlist of most useful custom fields. You can view the data in custom fields via reports or by looking at an individual activist record.

WestminsterConstituency - these are maintained by the Action Network Data Team and are based on the postcode core field. So data will only be available if people have given us their postcode.
Region - this data is added via a project to the whole user database in relation to what LG a person was signed up to and also collected via user input, in particular on volunteer role forms.
Local XR Group - this data comes from user input via the dropdown question (listed above).

Contact the Action Network Data Team if you are looking for a question to use on your form that you can't find.

Advertising your event

URLs, adding preview graphics and tracking sign ups

Links to use when advertising your event or form

After you've set up your event (or form) - you can find it's URL which you can see when clicking 'View Event'.

You can use this link to adveritise your event.

For Action Network emails use the full link: https://actionnetwork.org/events/yourevent

But beware of copying links out of an email you've been sent - some info on a major issue if you copy links from one email to another.

Preview graphics

This is the image that will automatically show through to channels such at Telegram or WhatsApp as a kind of thumbnail image when you post the URL link.

The image preview for your form comes from the 'Sharing and Tracking' tab. If you add an image to the Facebook sharing information. It's particularly important to check this if you've duplicated a form, as the previous information/image will still be in this 'Facebook' sharing info.
Click 'SAVE OPTIONS' after updating.

Here is some advice for if you've already shared a link on Telegram before fixing this and need to refresh the graphic preview.

Tracking

If you are interested in knowing WHERE your signs up have come from then read on

You can add a paramater called 'source' to the end of your URL and using the example above, this would look like https://actionnetwork.org/events/yourevent?source=UKemail

The source parameter can then be seen when you are 'managing' your event by looking at the 'RSVPs'.

If you'd like monitor the effectiveness of advertising between your email list, facebook, website and your group chat you could use different source codes.

?source=email
?source=chat
?source=facebook
?source=website

Pre-fill data in a form

This will only work with custom fields in your form (not core fields or action-only fields)

If the field name has spaces in it, then you need to use %20 in the URL for each space.
If the URL is case sensitive, e.g. use Region, not region if you were to pre-fill that particular field

A current example of this is the volunteer form for Upgrade Democracy and here is a URL that allows for the first question to be auto-filled.

The custom field is ASUD_PrefRole and the url mechanism is

source=ASUD_PrefRole=Steward

Here is the full URL (with an extra source parameter showing the person is signing up from the Rebel Toolkit):

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/upgrade-democracy-crew-signup?source=RTUDCrew&ASUD_PrefRole=Steward&

You can see this and various other pre-selected choices on the Upgrade Democracy volunteering page

More information on custom fields is here