At ShareProgress, we’re always interested in finding out how our sharing tools perform in different scenarios, to see if we can provide a big boost to social recruitment in a variety of use cases. Recently, we had to chance to learn how well our tools worked with the ControlShift campaigns platform.

ControlShift is software that allows advocacy organizations to run their own crowd-sourced petition platform, much like Change.org or Care2.com. Instead of staff campaigners creating and promoting petitions, anyone can start a petition on an issue that’s important to them.

When CREDO Mobilize, an instance of ControlShift run by CREDO Action, tested ShareProgress against standard social sharing buttons, they saw a substantial improvement in social sharing on petitions where ShareProgress was used. Across multiple experiments, ShareProgress outperformed the default share buttons on number of shares and on number of actions resulting from those shares.

Results: More Shares and Better Shares

On every petition tested, people were more like to share on Facebook and via email when a ShareProgress share page was used. On average, ShareProgress increased Facebook sharing by 22% and more than doubled the amount of email sharing. While the tools did result in fewer Twitter shares (a decrease of 35%), using ShareProgress increased overall sharing on ControlShift by 20%.

ShareProgress gets more shares than standard share buttons.

In addition to generating more shares, ShareProgress share language optimization helped to make social sharing posts more effective at recruiting people to take actions. For Facebook, Twitter, and email sharing, people who shared with ShareProgress were more likely to convince their friends to click and sign the petition as well.

Take-Away Lessons

A couple of lessons have emerged from testing ShareProgress on CREDO Action’s ControlShift platform:

You can do better than just using standard share buttons. ShareProgress provides every subscription with unlimited after-action share pages. We constantly A/B test these pages across the millions of visitors we receive to create the most optimized after-action thank you page and consistently deliver more shares than using share buttons alone.

Customized and A/B tested share language leads to much more effective sharing. On every test, ShareProgress helped organizers use the most effective language to attract new supporters.

Have an unusual use case for the ShareProgress toolset that you’d like to have published on the ShareProgress blog? Let us know!