Title: Assisting Supporters With Their CitizenBuilder Account
Original CoS Document (slug): cb-account-help
Login Required to view? No
Created: 2018-08-02 07:29:44
Updated: 2021-02-24 05:25:14
Published: 2018-08-02 01:00:00
Converted: 2025-04-14T20:24:35.435070453
The following information may be helpful for leaders who are assisting supporters in getting signed in or creating their account. This is to supplement the general sign in help page that is intended for the supporters themselves.
Links have been included below for the various Sign In and related pages for convenience. You would generally need to open them in a window where you are not currently signed in yourself, for them to function as they would for the supporter you are assisting. Use of a private or incognito window can be helpful for this purpose.
Account Status
The account status is shown on the left-pane of the profile page with the heading Confirmed Account. There are 3 possible values:
No - an account has not yet been created
Pending - an account exists, but it has not yet been confirmed
Yes - the account is confirmed
An account must be in confirmed status (i.e., Yes) to enable the supporter to sign in.
For No status, the supporter needs to create an account using the Sign Up page. If they already have a profile from signing the petition or some other action such as completing the Receive Updates form, it is important they use one of the email addresses on the existing profile, so that the account gets attached to that profile. You can review the email addresses on the profile from the Emails tab.
You would want to make note of any email addresses that are marked as Bad, as these would be a problem since the supporter would be unable to receive the Confirmation instructions email. Although you could “uncheck” the bad status, be cautious of doing this since generally it got marked from a hard bounce, and it likely will just bounce again. If needed, you could add another email address to the profile if you were in contact with the supporter.
For Pending status, the supporter needs to locate their Confirmation instructions email so they can click on the Confirm my account link. If they can't find it, have them request another using the Resend Confirmation Instructions page. If desired, you could trigger this email for them by entering their email address. When there have been multiple Confirmation instructions emails sent, the link in each remains active until any one of them has been clicked, or until a password reset link has been clicked and a new password is set. At that point, they will all be considered expired.
For Yes status, the account is confirmed and they just need to sign in from the Sign In page. If they're having trouble with their password, they can request a password reset email be sent to the primary email address. Note that if there is more than one email address on the account, it doesn't matter which one is used for the request, but the email will be sent to the one marked as primary. Make sure that email address is not marked as Bad. As an alternative, if you have the proper role permissions, you could use the Password tab on the profile to manually set it for the supporter and let them know what it is, but it's generally better to leave it in their own hands. Any account that was confirmed since around Jun 2018 will have an activity note showing when that occurred.
Locked Account
If the supporter has unsuccessfully attempted to sign in 5 times, their account will be locked temporarily for one hour. They will automatically receive an email at their primary email address which has a link they can use to clear the lock immediately. Alternatively, you may clear the lock for them if you like from the Unlock tab of the profile. It will show “This Account is active” when it is not locked, or “This Account is locked” when locked.
Auto-Created Accounts
Between the launch of CitizenBuilder in November 2017 and approximately March 2018, an account was auto-created for all new supporters, whenever they signed the petition, submitted the Receive Updates form, submitted the Contact My State Leader form, or applied for a leadership role. These accounts were in unconfirmed status (Pending), and the supporter received an email with the subject “Welcome to Convention of States Action!”, which contained a link to confirm their email address (basically the same as the current Confirmation instructions email).
Since many of the supporters did not expect an account to be created, and the email body was very terse, likely most of these supporters never confirmed their account, so we have a very large number of unconfirmed accounts. If you run across one of these supporters, the quickest way to get them going would be to just have them request a password reset, and that will confirm the account at the same time as they set their password.
For all the leaders who were in LAPD in NationBuilder, in whatever status, a confirmed account was automatically created for them when CitizenBuilder was launched, but many of these leaders or former leaders may never have been notified, and they would thus not know their password. You would handle these in the same manner as the unconfirmed, in that they can just request a password reset, and that should get them going.
While we encourage you to use the COS Help Center for further questions and issues you may have, the cb-preview Slack team is still active and is another option that will be especially useful if you are looking for a more immediate response. If you're not already a member of that team, you may self-join with your cosaction.com email address.