Each of your supporters or potential supporters has a unique relationship to your cause. Some treat it as a top priority, while others earnestly care but are distracted by the obligations of their day-to-day lives.
Although advocates may have differing priorities, you can increase action rates by providing relevant opportunities.
This means you need to be able to balance both easy action steps for busy supporters and opportunities for more impactful outreach from more engaged ones. Here’s how to strike that balance for a campaign with a broad impact.
Providing Multiple Modes for Advocacy
Advocacy campaigns typically consist of a few different modes of contacting legislators, including emails, social media engagement, phone calls to a legislator’s office, and even in-person events like hill days.
But how do you know which mode or modes your campaign should focus on? “For us, choosing which tactic we’re going to offer to supporters really depends on what our boots on the ground people, our lobbyists, think will be most effective in persuading the legislators,” says Bethany Dame, VP of political engagement and grassroots at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.
Emails and other quick actions often get higher engagement because they’re easier for advocates to do, but personalized messages generally make a bigger impact. For each campaign, you’ll have to consider how you’d like to balance these two priorities.
Sherry Whitworth, founder of The Advocacy Coach and senior advisor at HillStaffer, explains, “There is value in volume … Sometimes you’re doing an awareness campaign, [and] volume works there. If you’re really trying to move the needle on something … then you want to lean in more to personalization and spend more effort in getting people to do that.”
In many cases, though, it’s not in your best interest to choose just one approach. Instead, you can provide supporters with multiple options to create what Dame calls a “surround sound approach.”
To build surround sound advocacy, Dame explains that she typically asks different supporter bases to perform different actions. “We might ask our third-party coalition partners to write grasstops letters. We might leverage our consumer supporter base to send email letters because that’s just an easier action for them. We might ask our member companies’ employees to make phone calls because they’re a little more knowledgeable on the issue,” she says.
Whitworth espouses a similar approach, explaining, “It goes back to segmentation. If you want to be really effective, you have to know segments of your audience and ask them to do different things that match their knowledge level and their comfort level.”
Allowing the Option for Customizable Messaging
Of course, how supporters contact their legislators isn’t the only consideration when planning a campaign. You also have to decide what you want them to say and how tightly you want to control that message.
Some advocacy groups may want to give supporters a uniform pre-written message, while many others provide a message but let advocates edit it if they wish. While it’s tempting to maintain control by keeping your messaging set in stone, Dame and Whitworth both emphasized the value of letting people add their own words.
“Our emails are always open to editing. We do believe, and there’s research from the Congressional Management Foundation and others that shows, that personalized communications rise to the top over straight form letters,” Dame says.
“Messages will be treated differently on the hill if they have personalization,” Whitworth agrees. “And there’s a lot of noise coming from the hill right now [with] offices talking about these generic form messages that they’re getting and wondering whether these things are all generated by AI. So there’s that whole pendulum swing of trustworthiness of the message. If you can send something that is unique and personalized, it will have more value.”
When it comes to less structured approaches like phone calls, supporters generally decide what to say themselves. This can feel risky, but these conversations have the potential to have an especially powerful impact.
“If we’re doing a patch-through phone call campaign … we will just give a few talking points on the issue before patching [advocates] through. Otherwise, the ball is in their court to communicate as they see fit. Of course, that’s risky … but we have found that it works, and we’ve learned to trust the process.”
Getting Engagement for Hill Days and Fly-ins
In-person events are perhaps the most difficult form of advocacy to engage people in, but Whitworth advises not stressing too much about the number of people who attend your events. When it comes to hill days and fly-ins, “Quality is way more important than quantity.”
“Volume is not that important. It’s really about having good, informed, knowledgeable people that can carry on a conversation with that legislator, that have a good story, and that are matched to legislators that matter to you,” she says.
To source these high-quality advocates, consider engaging professionals in the field or people who have a close personal connection to your issue. You can also foster awareness of and enthusiasm for attendance by “making it an element of ‘FOMO’ … talking about it all year and getting people ginned up for the next one you’re going to do.”
Provide More Options Faster with VoterVoice
Ultimately, having multiple options for engaging supporters and letting them tell their stories leads to better campaign results. But to do this, you need flexible software that facilitates all of these forms of advocacy.
For example, establishing channels for email, social, and phone advocacy would traditionally be time-consuming, but with software like VoterVoice, you can get all three set up in just a few clicks.
Setting parameters for how much of your message supporters can personalize can also be complicated without the right tool, but it’s a matter of just clicking an option with VoterVoice.
Being flexible with the options you provide supporters is key to getting engagement and moving your campaign forward. VoterVoice helps make this flexibility happen.
Maintaining Engagement in a Distracted Society
Most of your supporters are likely feeling pulled in multiple directions. But even in this distracted society, people want to speak out for causes they care about. They just need to be met where they are, with empathy for their capacity and enough advocacy options that they can pick one that makes sense for them.
Providing so many outreach options may seem like adding more work to your plate, “but that’s where technology comes into play to make your job easier, or having an expert consultant who’s very knowledgeable,” Whitworth says. “Having those resources at your disposal can expand your reach.”
