Encourage participants to follow your projects

Learn how to add the follow project widget to your projects to capture email lists.

Gayathri Rajendiran avatar
Written by Gayathri Rajendiran
Updated over a week ago

The Follow Project widget allows visitors to opt-in to receive updates on your project. Unlike a normal registration process, the Follow Project widget provides a lighter way of collecting participant details as they will not be required to go through a registration process. By using this widget, you will be able to capture authenticated email addresses to use with our Newsletter Tool in order to keep your community informed.

NOTE - Your project follower will NOT get automatic updates about your project. You need to keep them informed by sending them a newsletter- Read our article on How to send newsletters to project followers to view the list of your followers and send them a newsletter

The following steps describe how to integrate the Follow Project widget in your EngagementHQ project using the Widgets feature.

1. Click the Projects link and select the project to which you want to add the Follow Project widget. 

The Project page is displayed. Click on the Add Widget link. 

2. A list of active and available widgets are displayed that can be added to your page. Click on Follow Project in the Available Widgets list to add it to the Active Widgets list.

3. A preview of the widget is shown. 

The Follow Project widget is also now shown in the Active Widgets list. 

The participant's experience of this widget will differ, based on whether or not they are registered. This is explained towards the end of this article.

After integrating the Follow Project widget in your project, participants are allowed to subscribe to updates from this project without registering. Read the article on How many people are following my project ? to understand how to track your project followers and read our article on How to send newsletters to project followers to keep them informed with project updates by sending them newsletters. 

NOTE - In case your project is in Draft status, this widget is disabled. Participants can subscribe only to published projects. On archiving this project, the Follow Project widget does not appear on the project anymore.
 
Participants can view the Follow Project widget on the front end, as shown below.

4. After adding the Follow Project widget in the Active Widgets list, you can hide or delete it. 

The following figure illustrates the project’s page with the Follow Project widget visible on the left and hidden on the right.

Registered and unregistered participant have a slightly different user experience when using this follow project widget as detailed below:

How UNREGISTERED participants can subscribe to follow a project.

1. Participants have to provide their email and click on the Subscribe button.

2. After they have provided their email address, the following message is displayed for confirmation.

3. The participant will then receive an email prompting them to confirm their email or to register on the site. An example email is shown below.

Note - Only when the participant either confirms his email or registers on the site will they become a project follower and start receiving the newsletters you send.

How REGISTERED participants can subscribe to follow a project.

1. The participant has to only click the Subscribe button to start receiving project newsletters.

2. The following message is displayed as confirmation.

Note: All admins on the site will be able to receive newsletters by subscribing to the Follow project widget with the same steps as shown above.

How subscribed participants can UNSUBSCRIBE to follow a project.

1. After subscribing to a project, a Manage your subscriptions link is provided to manage and edit your subscriptions.

2. Clicking on the link will display the following Manage your Subscriptions page. This displays the projects you are subscribed to receive emails from and provides the option to Unsubscribe.

NOTE: For more information on managing email subscriptions, see article Managing Email Preferences.

Contact our support team if you need any further assistance via chat or email support@engagementhq.com

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