Supporter Hub step by step

In this article you’ll learn how to create your own supporter hub in the Engaging Networks system.

What is a supporter hub?

The supporter hub allows your supporters to login to their own personal account at any time. From here supporters can check their personal information, such as their name and address, and amend them if they wish. They can also check their subscriptions and opt in or out to them giving them control over the content they receive.

In addition, you can use this area to give updates to campaigns supporters have taken part in, plus you can allow your supporters to donate for the first time or upgrade their donation depending on their current status.

The hub is a created through the page-builder interface and these different functions can be made available to supporters logged into your hub by adding gadgets to your hub page.

Creating a supporter hub page

Creating a supporter hub page is as simple as creating any new page builder page. To get started, log in to your Engaging Networks account and click create new page

Open

On the next page you’ll need choose Supporter Hub as the page type

Open

After clicking next the next step to create your supporter hub is to fill in the settings for the page.

In the Page Settings area you can fill in the following fields:

Name: Internal name for your page. This is for identifying the page within your Engaging Networks account

Public Title: This field shows up in the browser tab to the viewer of your page. Enter a meaningful description for your page here.

Status: This is the setting that determines the status of your page on the system

• New – This keeps the page private until you’re ready to publish. Use this when editing or testing the page prior to its launch.

• Live – This makes the page live and available on the web to your supporters.  Use this when you’ve tested your hub and you’re ready to launch

• Blocked, Closed, Deleted – These statuses allow you to close the campaign and stop users seeing your page. Use these when you want to end the page. 

• Tested – This is a status you can use for indicating a page has been tested. Useful for teams who want colleagues to proof read a page and indicate it’s ready.

Base URL: This is usually preset in your account by support. It indicates the first part of your domain (or subdomain) if you are using your own domain with Engaging Networks, or it may show our own internal domain if you aren’t mapping your own domains to us. Usually there is no reason to change this.

Notes: You can enter any internal notes here, these will only be shown internally on your account.

Closed Landing Page: This is the page supporters will be redirected to when your page status is set to Closed

Error Landing Page: This is the page supporters will be redirected to when your page encounters a technical error

Address Lookup (US Only): This setting validates US addresses in the Engaging Networks system. Countries outside the US should leave this unchecked.

Language: This sets the language for the supporter hub page. This setting is dependent on you setting up locales in your account.

Template: This setting allows you to choose the HTML wrapper template for your supporter hub page design.

Attribute: You can enter a term here to group together pages with the same attribute for reporting purposes.

Clear Data:  Use this setting with caution. Checking Clear Data will remove all previous data from this campaign. This is useful if you are testing a new campaign and want to clear out dummy data.

Campaign References: You can enter codes here to indicate an internal reference for your organization. These can be useful for marketing tagging, entering department codes etc.

Session Validation: For security visitors to your pages are kept in ‘browser sessions’. Leave this setting checked unless otherwise advised by our support team to switch this off.

Click Next to open the page-builder interface. The supporter hub is a fixed 3 page layout in page-builder.

The first page is the supporter login page for your hub, the second page is the where you’ll setup the hub functionality for your supporter to interact with you, and lastly you’ll need to setup the Logout page.

Creating your hub login page

The login page always has a preset login block set up on the first page for you. This is to ensure your supporters always have a way to login to your hub.

You can style the login page by adding rows and blocks in the same way as any other page-builder page and you can also move the login block around the page. You cannot however delete the login block.

The supporter hub uses an email challenge and response login rather than a username and password. When supporters land on your supporter hub login page, they will be asked to enter their email address. They will then be sent an email with a link.

Once the supporter has clicked the link in the email they receive they’ll be logged in automatically and directed to the second page of your hub 

You can edit the email the supporter receives when logging in from the tools bar, under Hub Settings > Auth Email > Add Translation

The login link can be inserted with the checkbox in the blue toolbar. Once text or an image is highlighted the checkbox will be available to select.

Editing your main hub page

The second page in your hub is the page shown only to supporters who are logged in to your hub. This page is where you can add the gadgets that supporters will use to interact with your organization.

When creating a new hub page we automatically add a welcome text block with the user’s name field added. You can change this, although we recommend to keep the name field somewhere on the page so users are welcomed into your hub.

We also add a Logout link too. You can move this around the page although we don’t recommend removing this entirely since users need a way to logout and end their hub session. You can add custom logout links in page-builder text blocks using the blue custom items in the WYSIWYG menu bar.

In addition to the standard page-builder blocks, the supporter hub has additional blocks called ‘gadgets’ that you can add to your hub page by dragging these in from the right hand tools menu.

The gadgets you can add are:

• Personal Details Gadget – allow your supporters to view and amend their personal details, e.g. their address

• Manage Subscriptions Gadget – allow your supporters to view their latest response to questions and opt-ins and update them

• My Impact Gadget – allow your supporters to view any updates to the campaigns that they have taken part in (and that you have provided an update for)

• Donations Gadget – allow your supporters to donate or upgrade their donation depending on their current status

• Giving History Gadget – This gadget allows you to show your supporters any past online donations they have made, and any offline or past donations you have imported

• Membership Gadget – This gadget allows your supporters to manage their memberships

• P2P Gadget – This gadget allows you your supporters to view their active peer-to-peer fundraising pages and past activities

Creating your hub logout page

When your supporter clicks the Logout link on your hub page they will be taken to the Logout page. This is a static page that you can style using standard page builder blocks. In this example we’ve added image and text blocks to the Logout page.

Testing and launching your hub

Click the orange “Done” button to validate the page once you have saved the page and are ready to test it. This button reports on any missing elements, and reminds you about other things you may want to think about.

You can then view the page as if it were live by clicking the Preview button. The page is shown in a new tab in “DEMO” mode (which you can confirm by viewing the URL – it will end with “?mode=DEMO”). Note: If you have created versions for different locales or profiles, you will be able to view them via the preview button.

You will be presented with the log in page – enter your email address to receive the authorization email to log on. 

Note: only supporters with email addresses in your database can log onto the supporter hub, so ensure you are also on the database to test it

Once you click on the log on link you should see the main page where you can run through the various gadgets to ensure they display and work as expected.

Make it live

Once you are happy it is working correctly, you can change the status from New to Live. To do this, click the admin button and change Status from New to Live, then click Save.

In the Page Builder list of pages, you can then click on the name of your page to view the live URL. 

Under “Published URLs” you can see the URL of your page. Click “Add tracking” to add different versions of this URL for use on other channels, such as your website or in campaign emails. Then you can easily see how people come to see your hub.

Reporting and Tracking

See a snapshot of total activity on your Supporter Hub page(s), via Quick Reports.

Available data points in Hub Usage include:

• Total Login Count: Total number of times supporters have logged into the hub page.

• Personal Detail Updates: Total updates made to supporters’ personal information, such as name and address.

• Recurring Gift Updates: Total updates made to supporters’ recurring gift details, such as amount or payment detail updates.

• Subscription (Opt-in) Updates: Total updates made to any available opt-in status through the hub.

• Additional Donations: Other transactions completed via the hub page (by total volume of transactions, not revenue).

These details are also available to pull specifically through Query Builder for more information on hub page activity.