Activate and Engage: Advocacy Comms Best Practices for 2025 Success

Driving advocates to take action is a concern for 44 percent of advocacy professionals, our 2025 State of Advocacy Report showed. With overflowing inboxes, a stream of urgent headlines, and other distractions, it can be difficult to cut through the noise. 

FiscalNote’s data science team analyzed 455 million emails sent from VoterVoice to build our 2024 Advocacy Benchmark Report, so we know a thing or two about successful email advocacy campaigns. In fact, email campaigns are the #1 way that organizations find success using VoterVoice. That’s why we’re constantly working to leverage AI and data science to improve your advocacy results and help you bring your communications strategy to the next level in 2025. 

Access to the right data can help you be more strategic, efficient, and effective. Whether you’re seeking to increase your base of supporters, amplify your message, or influence policy, VoterVoice gives you the tools to achieve your goals. Data drives everything from helping you compose messages and increase open rates to delivering powerful insights when you’re reporting on results. 

Read on to learn how you can use VoterVoice to activate your base of supporters and best practices for advocacy success in 2025.

Know Your Audience

One of the most important things to think about when sending messages is whether the recipients are actually interested in the content. Surveys can help you better understand exactly what it is about your organization’s mission that resonates with supporters. Are there specific issues that advocates view as more timely or important than others? What are the reasons supporters care about those issues and your advocacy work? 

Knowing the answers to these questions provides valuable insight into your audience’s interests and priorities and helps you in turn understand how best to engage them. VoterVoice makes it easy with its survey feature, which automatically logs responses on participants’ contact profiles so that you can easily reference them at any time. You can also access the full set of survey results, which is permanently housed in your VoterVoice database so you can examine the data holistically — now or in the future. 

Segment Smartly

Once you know which topics each supporter is and isn’t interested in, it’s critical you use that information to target your email messages to the right inboxes. 

VoterVoice’s automatic topic tagging feature takes care of this for you. Using AI, VoterVoice assigns the appropriate topic to each campaign, survey, petition, or event you launch from the platform. When an advocate takes action on that topic, our intelligent technology tags the supporter so you know exactly what drove the action. 

Engage supporters more effectively simply by narrowing your recipient list to contacts with tags relevant to the campaign. By targeting the audiences most interested in the campaign topic, you’ll get a much higher open and action rate.

Keep Your Message Simple 

When it comes to best practices for email advocacy, short, clear messaging works best. It’s helpful to connect messaging back to your organization’s mission and focus on how an issue impacts your audience. For calls to action, be specific in asking for help (“Call your representative,” not just “Speak out”). Make a case for why it’s critical that supporters take action now. 

Subject line, message length, use of acronyms, number of links, and send time all matter. There’s no need to comb through pages of email marketing reports to unearth best practices. VoterVoice has built-in AI that guides you through the process of composing an effective email by highlighting best practices and offering suggestions in real time. Among advocacy professionals we surveyed, 40 percent are already using AI for content generation to help improve their communications. 

Benchmark Your Email Performance 

As any good advocacy professional knows, the best way to understand the effectiveness of your communications is to compare your emails to outreach focused on similar themes. VoterVoice Insights shows you how your campaigns compare to industry peers in terms of open, action, unsubscribe, and email failure rates and then gives you tips on how to improve your results. 

You can also see how your broadcast performance compares to overall advocacy email performance rates in the 2024 Advocacy Benchmark Report.

Monitor Activity By Geographic Area

Knowing in which locations your advocates are most engaged helps you leverage that support 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. Color coding and overlaid totals allow you to get the information you need in just a few seconds. You can also view the numbers in a table for a quick ranked list.

Follow Up

Busy schedules and crowded inboxes mean that messages are quickly forgotten. If your email has a call to action, don’t be afraid to follow up with a second communication to advocates who didn’t act. Multiple messages a week is overdoing it, but an additional nudge may be just what’s needed to remind your audience that their voices matter.

This is the idea behind the intelligent prompts in VoterVoice, which use data science to notify you in real time when your open or action rates are below average. You can use the Track & Resend feature to identify unresponsive message recipients and automatically contact them a second time.

You can also vary your outreach method. If you initially sent an email, try sending a text message next. Text messages have higher open rates than emails, so while you can include less information, your chances of getting your audience’s attention are stronger. You can use VoterVoice both to send a mass email and a mass text!

A Complete Advocacy Solution 

The only data-led 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.