Site Configuration¶
Your Settings¶
Generally everything you see in your instance is the same as what other admin users at your organization will see. Some information may not be visible based on your permission levels.
One exception is the time zone setting. Data is always saved to the ActionKit database in GMT. But you can tell ActionKit to display data on your screen using your preferred time zone. Just click on your user name, under the search box on the top right of each screen, then select the "Set Time Zone" link. Times displayed to you, like the sent time for mailings, will reflect your choice. Your choice will not affect reports however.
You can also change your password, set up two-factor authentication, see all archived announcements, or log out using the links under your user name.
Announcements¶
The "Announcements" page contains all the ActionKit or superuser-created announcements archived (closed) by a staff user, and the page is individual to each user.
Superusers can create their own announcements for the organization by clicking on the "Add Announcement" link at the top of the page.
They can set a title, message, "type" of announcement (info, warning, danger, or release), and an optional URL. By default, any announcement will automatically archive after 90 days.
Organization-wide Configuration Options¶
You can customize your instance's header, change various defaults, enable advanced functionality and more from the CONFIG screen.
This screen can be accessed by staff with superuser status at dash/config or by following the Configure ActionKit link under your user name in the top right corner of each screen in the admin.
The settings on this screen are:
Admin Settings¶
Admin Editor Controls: For all the text boxes in the admin (mailing compose, page contents, after action emails, etc.) you can decide whether they should default to plain, code or visual editor mode. For fields like templates that don't support the visual editor you can set the default to plain or code.
Admin Site Display: You can change the header for your instance.
Custom Snippets: You can define custom snippets to be included along with ActionKit's built-in snippets, as described in Customizing Snippets.
Password Requirements: You can set minimum password strength requirements for your staff including a minimum length and character type requirements. Your requirements will apply to any new passwords created (for new and existing staff). Existing passwords will continue to work.
If you want to enforce a new organizational requirement, you can ask us to invalidate all existing passwords. Everyone will need to follow the Forgot Password link when they next log in to reset their password. Or, you can reset passwords for your staff by clicking on the Reset Password link from the Staff dashboard and entering their staff email address. You can get a list of the ids of all active staff user accounts with this query:
select id, email from auth_user where is_staff=1 and is_active=1
Donation Settings¶
Donation Processing¶
Duplicate Window: You can change the time period during which ActionKit will reject a 2nd donation in the same amount from the same credit card as a duplicate. This is set at 5 minutes by default. You can disable duplicate detection by setting it to zero, although we don't recommend this since users will sometimes hit the submit button twice in a row.
Send IP Address: Irrelevant for Payflow Pro and Authorize.net since they always capture the IP address.
If you're using Braintree, you can send the IP address along with each one-time donation.
Warning
You must create the
customer_ipcustom field in the Braintree gateway prior to enabling the option or ALL donations will fail.
Admin Recurring Update¶
Braintree only.
Collect Card Code: If this is true, we will show the CVV on the form for updating recurring donations in the admin UI. If it's false, we won't.
This should correspond to the setting at your Braintree Gateway. If you require CVV at the gateway, you'll want to expose it on the form.
Donation Page Defaults¶
Defaults set here will be pre-selected for every new donation page created in your instance.
Allow International Addresses: If enabled, new pages will have the allow international addresses box checked. Country field is added to the user form and zip or postal shows based on the country selected by the user. Postal is not required. Note: If you use PayPal or Authorize.Net as your processor, you still need to disable their AVS verification or you will not be able to accept international addresses.
Minimum Amount: The number entered here is used for new donation pages and also new recurring donation update pages.
Payment Account: The account chosen here will be the default payment account for new donation pages.
Suggested Ask Formula: The suggested ask formula chosen here will be the default formula across your organization for new donation pages.
Recurring Retry¶
ONLY RELEVANT if Braintree is your merchant vendor. This is not applicable to ACH direct debit recurring donations, which are handled directly by ActionKit.
Each merchant vendor handles recurring donation processing slightly differently. This includes recurring donation retries. Find details about recurring donation processing and data capture.
When a user with an active recurring profile misses a payment, the merchant vendor will try again. When and how often varies by vendor and is often something you can customize for your account.
By default, Braintree accrues missed payments toward a recurring profile. This can lead to a nasty surprise for some of your most valuable donors if their payments fail for a few months and then succeed (for a total that includes the missed months). Alternately, you can change your settings in Braintree so all retries are completed before the 2nd payment comes due but this costs you money, as some of the later attempts would be successful.
ActionKit's Recurring Retry settings provide a workaround that allows you to establish a custom retry schedule without ever billing the user for more than their monthly commitment. Setting up Recurring Retry requires steps in ActionKit and in Braintree.
1. Configure Recurring Retry in ActionKit:¶
To enable this, click Edit on the CONFIG screen next to Recurring Retry, then click Enable Retries. Enter a max retry number and a retry interval. For example, you might pick 4 as the max retry with an interval of 10 days. ActionKit will prompt an attempt to bill the user's credit card for their monthly total 10 days after the initial failed payment, then 20 days, 30 days, and the last retry will be at 40 days.
If you set Cancel After Retries to True, we’ll cancel the profile at Braintree and set the status at ActionKit to canceled as well. If this is set to False, the profiles remain active unless you manually cancel them at Braintree or through the ActionKit API.
2. Configure Braintree Gateway:¶
We recommend setting the following Recurring Billing Options in the Braintree gateway:
- Automatically retry failed transactions: checked
- After a subscription is past due, retry the subscription after: 1 day
- If above retry fails, try again after: 1 day
- If above retries have failed: Leave the subscription past due
Having Braintree's automatic retries on allows the "leave subscription past due" behavior, which is what prevents accrued monthly billing from occurring. This does mean Braintree will attempt two retries, but with the above settings, they will complete before ActionKit retries begin (which have a minimum interval of four days).
If you've configured Braintree as described, no further attempts will be made after the max retries have been attempted. If the charge is processed at any point, no further attempts are made and there is no balance due.
ActionKit retries are recorded in the core_transaction table with a type of 'retry'. Each 'retry' row will have a status of 'success' or 'failure'.
Integration Settings¶
Amazon S3: Manage library buttons link to your S3 account where you can store images, PDFs, audio and video. (See How do I obtain Access and API keys for my AWS S3 Bucket?)
Facebook: App ID. Used in the social_buttons.html template to track sharing through Facebook (not required).
Interfax Account: To fax petition or letter signatures to an advocacy target you must have an account set up with Interfax.
Contact Settings¶
Administrative and Billing Contact: Select up to 3 contacts ordered in descending priority. These will be used by ActionKit staff if they need to reach somebody from your organization.
Technical Contact: Select up to 3 contacts ordered in descending priority. These will be used by ActionKit staff if they need to reach somebody from your organization.
Note
Technical contacts will be the staff who are automatically notified by ActionKit if any configuration problems are detected, such as DNS- or S3-related issues.
Security Settings¶
There are two site-wide security settings shown on this screen, but because of their wide-spread effect you can't enable them directly; you'll need to open a support ticket and we'll make the change for you.
Pages Always Use HTTPS/SSL: This setting is sometimes referred to as "SSL Everywhere" and ensures that all access to your pages takes place over HTTPS.
Before you do this you should visit all of the pages on your site in HTTPS mode (or a representative sampling of them) and ensure that there aren't any errors — for example, browsers will generally warn if you visit a page in HTTPS mode that requests resources using HTTP links.
Once you're sure that all of the pages are happy in HTTPS mode, let us know and we'll set a configuration flag that redirects anyone visiting an HTTP link on your site to its HTTPS equivalent.
You can also go through your pages and mailings to ensure that you're sending people to the HTTPS links in the first place so that they bypass that extra redirect step, which will only be hit by the folks who follow older links or those on third-party sites.
Admin Requires Two-Factor Auth: This setting locks the Two-Factor Authentication setting on for all of your staff accounts when visiting the ActionKit admin.
Special Reports¶
This section links to reports you can use to display information in the admin UI. You can read about these under Customizing the Admin Interface.
Mailer Settings¶
Mailer auto excludes: Choose whether auto exclude functionality is available in your instance and if so whether new drafts have a default send date and what it is. You'll also need to set a time zone that will be used to define today for auto excludes for your organization.
Mailer Compose Defaults: Select true for web viewable to check this box by default for every new mailing.
Mailer Deliverability Warnings: Any staff user specified here will receive a copy of every mailer deliverability warning message.
Mailer Limited Send Size: The maximum audience size for a mailing that staff with the Edit and Limited Send permission can send. Note that this subscriber counts includes all subscribed users, including those subscribed to a re-engagement list.
Mailer Link Hashing: Read about ActionKit Hashing in the developer documentation.
Mailer Seed List: Seed lists provide a way for you to send all mailings above a certain size to a list of email addresses. You might want to do this if you're using a deliverability monitoring service, for example. You can enter or upload a list of email addresses and set a threshold for the mailing count above which the list should receive a copy of the mailing.
The messages are exactly like the "Receive all mailings" final proofs, but without the [Final mailing blah] in the subject since you want this to look like real mail. An arbitrary user's data is inserted if the mailing includes snippets. The links include the proof argument so clicks from these links aren't counted.
The addresses end up in the db as "never subscribed" users and do not show up in core_usermailing. Nor do these emails affect your mailings counts.
Mailer Send Delay: If desired, set a delay (up to 300 seconds) from the time the final proof for your mailing is sent to staff to when the mailing actually begins to send to members. This gives you the ability to do one last check of the mailing, and stop it if you find errors, before any members receive the mailing.
Mailer Targeting Defaults: Defaults in this section are pre-selected as includes on the Target Mailing screen for every new mailing created in your instance.
Soft Bounce Handling: Optionally, set rules for automatic removal of users due to soft bounces:
- Remove repeat soft bouncers: Enable automatic removal of users to whom messages have repeatedly bounced due to 'Mailbox Full' errors
- Max Soft Bounces: Maximum number of soft bounces before automatic unsubscription.
- Period Length: Number of days in which 'Max Soft Bounces' must occur.
Page Settings¶
Languages¶
Default Language: Select from the drop down of languages you've set up in your instance. We will use the translations you set up for the corresponding language for every new page and assign that language to each new email wrapper. You will be able to change both.
If you leave this blank, ActionKit doesn't assign a language to new pages. Actiontakers on a page with no language are assigned English. New email wrappers are also designated as English.
If you've set up English as a language in your instance and modified field names or system messages, you must select English here to have your modified language associated with new pages by default.
Show Multilingual: Change this to False if you would like to hide the language and multilingual campaign selection boxes on the Action Basics screen for all page types in your instance.
Page Analytics¶
Analytics Tag Code: If you use an analytics system, such as Google Analytics, you can use this field to paste in a bit of code (e.g., a "Google Tag"). If provided, this code will be automatically included in the page wrapper.html template.
If you have customized your wrapper.html template, you need to add the following to the bottom of this template if you want ActionKit to automatically add this code block:
{{ analytics_tag_code|safe }}
If placed in the wrapper.html of your template sets, ActionKit will automatically populate this with the Analytics Tag Code you have set in the site configuration.
Pages¶
Defaults apply to all new pages.
Media Prefix: Allows you to use Cloudfront to serve static files more quickly. Read more in the section on Improving Page Load Speed.
Preload Context: When this is enabled, the "context"--the URL ActionKit uses to determine if a user should be recognized, to get Representative info on a call-Congress page, and so on--is loaded earlier in the page than it would be otherwise.
Recognize Users Default: Choose always, once or never.
Redirect All Links: When this is disabled (the default) ActionKit doesn't use the /go/ redirector for links to action pages. If you run into a problem with users' clicks not being tracked, enable this setting. Read more about links and tracking.
Sharing¶
Default Share Image: Save a Default share image and it will be used as the Facebook share image by default before other images on the page, if any. You can override this choice for any page in the Sharing section.
Uploader¶
Always Use Fast User Fields Option: You can have the fast upload option enabled by default for new import pages.
Uploader: Choose whether newly created Import pages should have "Subscribe to list" selected by default. If unchecked, newly created Import pages will be set to "Don't change subscriptions".
User Generated Emails¶
User-Generated Emails: Sets the "from address" to be used for TAF emails and immediate signature delivery. The user's email is used for the "reply to" but the from must be in your domain to ensure delivery.
ActBlue Webhook¶
Use ActionKit's ActBlue integration to sync donation data from ActBlue to ActionKit.
Communicating With Congress¶
These fields are submitted during the delivery to the US House of Representatives.
Organization Name: Enter the name of your organization.
Organization About Text: Description of your organization.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Settings¶
Allowed Origins: Allows you to set a list of authorized hostnames for which we will issue CORS headers.
Privacy Records¶
Settings in this section are designed to help with GDPR compliance. Read more about privacy records.
Reports¶
Compress CSV Downloads w/ ZIP: You can choose to have report downloads zipped by default.
Default Query Template: Each new query report will have this template selected by default.
Support Form Default CC Email(s)¶
CC Emails: Enter one or more email addresses here to CC those addresses on all exchanges with ActionKit support through the support form.
Prefill Settings¶
Enable cross-site prefill: Shows whether prefill is enabled for your instance. Read more about prefill including how to turn it on.
Spam Settings¶
Anti-spam Settings: Use these filters to identify and block actions from or unsubscribe spammers before they get on your list, preventing their eventual bouncing which can cause email reputation problems for you if you get hit by a large number. Read more under comment spam.