You’ve probably heard the saying that all politics is local. Well, that means advocacy efforts must be local as well. Gridlock in Congress and state legislatures means the fight over critical issues has been pushed to the local level. Influencing local government, forming strong relationships with the right stakeholders, and mobilizing your supporters to take action quickly are key to helping pass (or kill) legislation for your organization.
But contact information for local officials is notoriously difficult to find without manually combing the internet — and the published information is often not up-to-date. Then, the additional challenge is ensuring your supporters connect with the right policymaker. Learn how VoterVoice can equip you with the tools and information you need when you need it.
Get Verified Local Stakeholder Data from Anchorage to Yakima
Ever wondered how to get in touch with city council members, commissioners, or a county board of supervisors? VoterVoice is the only tool that matches advocates with their specific local representatives, ensuring that elected local officials hear only from their constituents and not from people residing outside their districts.
VoterVoice automatically produces up-to-date contact information so neither your team nor advocates need to search for it, and we navigate webforms and other delivery obstacles so your supporters don’t have to.
Local data is offered for the main elected officials of the executive and legislative bodies of all U.S. areas greater than 250,000 in population. While most digital advocacy tools can only match constituents to local public officials at large, VoterVoice does district matching, which means we match advocates to their specific district or ward representatives. This is critical for big cities and counties to make sure your message is getting to the right people.
Get the Word Out
Not only does VoterVoice offer fully verified local stakeholder data, but we also have an unmatched track record of getting advocates’ messages through to lawmakers and providing you with the campaign tools to get the word out.
Influencing policy begins with educating your audience on how the decision affects them. VoterVoice’s tools help you educate lawmakers, and the public, about the most critical issues facing your organization and how these affect them. Plus, VoterVoice also helps you report on the successes and wins of their participation. Resources to help with outreach and education include a newsletter tool, hosted blog posts, and a holistic Action Center where you can share information and your positions on issues, plus allow supporters to take action.
Advocacy teams can determine which campaigns were most effective, where they are seeing the most results, who the most influential and productive stakeholders and lawmakers are, and the direct budgetary impact of their campaigns. You can also use our solution to educate lawmakers by showing the number of advocates you’re able to activate and move your issue to the top of their queue. The loudest voice in the room is often the most important when it comes to grassroots advocacy.
Pro Tip: Use VoterVoice to influence legislation at every level. Our address-matching capabilities connect your advocates with their local, state, and federal lawmakers, ensuring your message is heard.
Monitor Which Geographic Areas are Most Active
Knowing which areas are most engaged helps you build on that support and leverage it to make your campaign more effective. It also allows you to more strategically plan outreach and craft different messaging for more and less active audiences. Knowing where to focus your efforts when you have limited time helps you run a tighter and more successful campaign.
VoterVoice makes it easy to monitor action and identify target geographic areas. Maps updated in real time keep a running tally of advocates who have called or emailed their lawmakers. You can also view the numbers in a table for a quick ranked list.
Pro Tip: Be confident your data is secure with VoterVoice. As the only advocacy platform that is SOC-2 Type 2 compliant, you can trust your data is guarded & your communications are deployed safely.
Track Legislation Locally & Across the Country
Legislative action often moves faster in states, counties, and cities than it does in Washington, D.C. This means it’s a challenging task to stay on top of every development. Keeping track of trigger laws, pre-filing, extended or special sessions, let alone the thousands of bills and ordinances during regular sessions, plus the repercussions they have across the local policy landscape, can quickly turn into a maze.
Our comprehensive solutions enable you to stay on top of legislation being introduced across the country and successfully brief internal and external stakeholders on the issues impacting your organization. Alerts to new bills and bill status updates guarantee you can react quickly.
Curate allows you to monitor changes at the local level. Curate uses advanced data collection techniques to find public documents like meeting minutes and agendas as soon as they are uploaded to the web and then analyzes the content of those documents to identify mentions of key topics. Using machine learning algorithms, the software determines which mentions are relevant and sifts out the rest. You then receive alerts for the specific topics you want to monitor and review all of your topics in a user-friendly online dashboard. Pair Curate with PolicyNote and your team can monitor state legislative and regulatory developments, prioritize outreach, and manage relationships with policymakers and other influential stakeholders.
How Trinity Health Sent 3,000 Letters to Local Legislators in Three Days
Trinity Health, one of the largest Catholic health systems, was actively campaigning to increase the buying age of tobacco-related products. In Albany, New York, the local grassroots initiative was eager to campaign for the implementation of this bill. To do that, they had to engage with local county legislators who were planning to vote on the initiative.
Using VoterVoice, Trinity Health was able to identify all of the 30+ county-level legislators in Albany who would be voting on the initiative, so they could target them with their advocacy campaign.
Though they made extensive progress, the local Albany grassroots coalition decided to push out an advocacy email campaign when they determined the proposal had lost momentum. VoterVoice text message and email action alerts made it easy for the Trinity Health team to reach supporters when there was no time to lose. The campaign resulted in almost 3,000 letters in less than three days.
“Even our federal-level advocacy campaigns that we’ve sent out to employees across all our ministries didn’t have such a good response rate,” says Stephanie Armstrong Helton, who leads communications and digital advocacy at Trinity Health.
Not only did the effort breathe new life into the proposal but the advocacy engagement was credited with pushing the legislation to the point that it received a veto-proof margin. The campaign also made the county legislators — not used to getting so much advocacy correspondence — sit up and take notice. Each had received 10 letters before the campaign’s end, a significant amount for local-level lawmakers.
A Complete Solution for Local Advocacy
With trending issues and fast-moving policy, you can’t afford to miss a beat. The only data-led local advocacy solution, VoterVoice uses AI and data science to ensure your message reaches the right audience. Whether you’re looking to educate supporters, survey their interests, or drive action, VoterVoice can help.
Learn more about how you can maximize your impact by combining our award-winning digital advocacy tool with the richest sets of legislation and regulation data. Request a demo to see for yourself.
The #1 Solution for Digital Advocacy
VoterVoice is the #1 most trusted and secure advocacy tool on the market. Request a demo today to see how we can help you influence the policy that matters.
