Imagine empowering your community to:

• click one button to lookup and contact the board of governors of their local universities or colleges to ask them to divest their endowments from fossil fuels.
• email, call or tweet their local Sheriff’s office or Police Commissioner to remind them that Black Lives Matter.
• immediately connect with a retail chain’s local stores during a lockout and inform them of a boycott until they get back to the bargaining table.

We have good news. These powers are now a reality. We’re proud to unleash what we think is the most powerful campaign targeting system on the web.

We’re sure the progressive movement will come up with way better ideas! A student union is already using it to push professors to support Open Education Resources. A teacher’s union is using it to connect people with their local school board chair to call for the suspension of ineffective standardized testing.

If you’re already a New/Mode platform subscriber you’re likely aware that our ‘Full-Spectrum’ Fax, Phone, Email, and Twitter-driven tools can be pointed at elected representatives at the Federal, State/Provincial and Municipal levels.

You may also have had opportunity to use our existing “custom targets” to define additional targets on tools that are presented either by themselves or in conjunction with geo-located (zip code or address-driven) representative targets.

This new supercharged targeting feature sits on top of this awesomeness many of you have already used.

How does it work?

Good question. New/Mode users can now use custom spreadsheets to provide New/Mode tools with both target contact information and “lookup values” that can be used by supporters to search on live forms for their personalized targets.

A specific example might be in order here…

Say you want to pressure presidents of universities and colleges to divest from fossil fuels. Here’s what you would do:

1. Create a Google Sheet with name and contact information for the presidents you would like your supporters to contact
2. Add columns for lookup values that your supporters can search to connect with the university and college presidents most relevant to them. For example, institution name is a no-brainer — many of your supporters may be alumni of a particular institution, so they should be able to search it on your form and return the contact information for that president. City might be another — perhaps a supporter lives in Berkeley, and would like to connect with the president of the University of California.
3. You can define as many lookup columns as you would like to make it as easy as possible for your supporters to connect with the most relevant targets to them.
4. Then, you simply link your spreadsheet to your New/Mode form with the URL, and add a prompt for supporters to search via the lookup values for their personalized contact.

Need another example? Here’s how the Douglas Students’ Union is using the feature to campaign for professors to adopt Open Educational Resources, and reduce students’ textbook costs:

• A student lands on the form and is asked to look up their professor by name or department.

• Autocomplete is configured so our system starts to match the student with results once they start typing, allowing the student to quickly search and select the appropriate professor.

The search box mechanism is particularly powerful as it allows you to tie all of the power of New/Mode’s various tools to a dataset and lookup mechanisms of your own devising.

Better yet, imported data is updated on a daily basis allowing you to add, edit or remove targets as you see fit. Need a tool that lets your supporters call their county district-level officials? Need a tool that lets you email school board candidates based on ward? Need a tool that let’s supporters call a corporation’s various feedback-lines based on region? All of these use cases and innumerable others can be supported using New/Mode’s new advanced custom targeting system.

If you’re a current New/Mode subscriber and you want to give this feature a try (It’s free for you!) just send our support team a message. Not a subscriber yet? Get at us!