Creating a Petition type action for an external site

Imagine the advocacy organization “United for Advocacy” has two sites in their nation: their main site, and an instance of My Action Center. In their main site, they have numerous petitions, such as their “Petition to Save the Bears” one. They would like their supporters to sign this petitions as one of their actions for a specific week. With My Action Center, they can do this easily.

First, create the page in your external site. Give it an unique Name and choose the Petition page type.

Add the Content of your Petition. Press Save petition text.

Go to the next tab, Petition Settings > Autoresponse. You can modify or disable the email the user will get after completing the action. Press Save autoresponse email.

Now go to the Petition Settings > Basics tab. Here, copy the Name of your action and paste it in the Tag the signer with field. This way, if you want to know which users completed the “Petition to Save the Bears” action, you can search for all users with the “Petition to Save the Bears” tag.

In the After signing, what page should they land on next? field, put dashboard_redirect. Press Save settings.

Keep the following information in a separate text file, as you will need it later: the Name of the page and the entire URL, which you can find below the Name.

Now go to your My Action Center site under the Website tab in the navigation, and create the action subpage under the week page. Choose the Redirect type. Give it a unique Name (not the same one as the one in your other site).

You will be taken automatically to the Redirect settings tab. Here, fill in URL to redirect to the URL of the page in the external site.

Tag your action with the External Page Name-redirect tag. For example, if you’re redirecting to a page called Sign Up To Save Animals where users can sign up as volunteers, tag it as Sign Up To Save Animals-redirect.

Tag the action with one or more interests. This will determine whether it appears the user’s dashboard, according to the interests the user selected when he or she signed up. These tags should have the exact same name as the areas of interest as the ones set up as shown in the Signup page. To make the action show to all users, tag the action as “Everyone”.

Change the Status to published. Press Save redirect.

Now go to the Subpages tab and create a Basic subpage on this action subpage with a unique Name (it will not be visible to users). Create it with published status.

This is where you will add the action description visible to the users. Write your description, add a horizontal line, and then add petition. Save your content.

The best way to ensure your action description page has correct formatting

First, write the content in a format-free text editor. If you’re using Mac, use TextEdit. Click Format, then Make Plain Text. If you’re using Windows, just use Notepad.

Immediately after the description, write </hr> (no spaces around it).

Then add the page type slug. It should look like this:

Sign this petition to save the bears</hr>petition

On NationBuilder, press the brackets icon (“< >”) to view the HTML. Copy the text in your text editor and paste it on the editor.

Action completed in other sites checklist

1.The external site page

A. Is it in another site of the same nation as the My Action Center instance?
B. Does it have a unique Name?
C. Does the action tag users who completed it with its Name?

2. The My Action Center subpage

A. Is it a subpage under a week page?
B. Is it a Redirect type subpage?
C. Does it have a unique Name different from the external site one?
D. Does it redirect to the URL of the page in the other site where users need to complete the task?
E. Is it tagged with one or more interests, or with Everyone?
F. Is it tagged with External Page Name-redirect?
G. Does it include a description subpage?

i.   Does it include a description?
ii.  Is it followed by an HTML horizontal line?
iii. Is it followed by the page type slug?
iv. Is there any HTML clutter?