When it comes to moving your supporters to action, most political websites today lack a certain something.

With the incredible democratizing force of open source software and CMSes like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla powering more and more websites, campaigns are nailing down the basics online, but struggling to find the right solutions to tap into their most valuable resource as we head into Election Day: their volunteers.

The result: websites that are cheaper and faster to build (and that’s good), but which are still an unwieldy mix of static content, links to social media, and when it comes to campaign-centric interactivity, a basic volunteer form.

And that’s it.

Today’s Landscape

Campaigns on a budget that want to take their websites further than an out-of-the-box WordPress theme don’t have that many good options today.

Many use free or low-cost form plugins and call this a database. And oftentimes, the data collection is one-way — think of those ubiquitous volunteer form with name and address fields and a bunch of checkboxes. If the campaign wants to follow up with their volunteers, their best and only bet is to call them. There’s next to no ability to analyze the data to see how much action a user has taken over time.

There are comprehensive database solutions out there, but few of them built for politics, and little expertise with integrating them with public websites. Backend database work is a pretty lucrative business, and often exists in a silo apart from online outreach and social media. Data is the “serious” stuff and new media is the “fun” stuff. Most periodically import website data into their databases and call it a day. And the databases themselves, being the serious, backoffice creatures that they are, don’t often have very good social features and don’t lend themselves to being repositories for fast-moving marketing campaigns that require you to very quickly deploy new landing pages and forms on the fly, segmenting your signups according to what ad they clicked on, not just clunky presets for “wants a bumper sticker,” “issues,” or “coalitions.”

In the complete opposite direction, there’s the approach of making your website a social network. We’ve actually been pretty big fans of Ning — having used it or encouraged its adoption on numerous statewide campaigns. A solution like Ning brings its own strengths and weaknesses. By making your site social, it builds stickiness and encourages your users to come back. The downside: It won’t succeed without participation from campaign staff, and if supporters are coming back just to banter back and forth in discussion forums, that has little value to a campaign.

Lots of others have tried to solve this by creating custom social networks built for politics. On the plus side, they’ve built more functionality relevant to a campaign. And they have all the trappings of a social network: personal profile pages, walls, groups, etc. These purely social features rarely ever get much traction because there is little appetite to create another social profile for yourself limited exclusively to your existence as a campaign supporter.

We felt the time was ripe for a different approach.

Introducing Multiply

Today, we’re rolling out Multiply, a social activation platform that gives campaigns the tools they need and in turn solves several key problems with the current political technology ecosystem.

Multiply takes the best lessons of social gaming and applies them to politics. Your supporters earn points and badges for taking action, whether that’s volunteering, contributing, telling their friends, becoming a verified voter, and any one of a number of actions you define. They can see where they stand in real time and how they stack up to the broader community.

Here’s what your dashboard as a user might look like:

As an optional feature, Multiply also doubles as a supporter database — which is what Multiply was originally built on top of. Multiply not only keeps track of people who register for the app, but anyone who fills out a form anywhere on your site, ever — whether that’s a petition, e-mail signup, or contacting the campaign. You can score all your supporters and the actions they take over time — not just those who happen to register for Multiply. If they eventually register to be a part of your Multiply community, they can redeem all the points they’ve already collected for just using your site in a normal way.

Plus — and this will be a boon for any field staffer — we make it easy to import lists of your supporters, whether they’re just new members you want to keep track of or people who have taken a specific action you want to award points for. Say there was a phone bank at headquarters, and you want to award 50 points to anyone who attended. You can upload your list and 50 points will be awarded — whether they’re a Multiply member or not. Beyond making your supporters feel special and rewarded, it also helps you as a campaign or advocacy effort better target your most likely activists — based on what they’ve actually done, not convoluted targeting models.

Multiply’s forms are also made fully available and distributable as widgets. Say you’re a campaign with 76 days left in the cycle. You’re not going to change out your site’s entire design or underlying technology platform, but want to start getting smarter about data collection and also enabling volunteers to take the extra step to self-organize. On your main website, we’d give you the tools — through simple HTML or iFrames — to hook up your forms to a Multiply database. (You can also make these available to supporters on their sites.) Have legacy data? Just import it. For those that want to take the extra step of joining Multiply and taking action in a more social, rewards-driven environment, we’d set you up on your own subdomain with a Multiply site that looks exactly like yours.

Multiply isn’t just another social network for politics, fun but likely to fail because of lack of adoption. And it’s not just another boring database. It combines the essential features of both into a versatile and lightweight volunteer management system targeted to what campaigns actually need.

We’ve got 76 days left until one of the most consequential midterm elections in history. Make sure you’re ready to tap into the grassroots energy of your supporter base. We’d love to get you started on Multiply today.