Effective reporting on grassroots advocacy is critical to building support and sustaining momentum with funders, members, and policymakers. Reporting can make your advocacy work more visible, measurable, and strategically valuable, but compiling and interpreting your impact data by hand can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
VoterVoice simplifies the reporting process by tracking supporter activity in real-time, allowing you to generate out-of-the-box and custom reports, and offering benchmarking data to compare your performance to similar organizations.
Here’s a deeper dive into three VoterVoice features that help you use data about your broadcasts and campaigns to demonstrate the impact of your work to internal and external stakeholders.
Compare Yourself to Industry Peers and Adapt Your Strategy to Keep Up
Like most advocacy and outreach tools, VoterVoice collects metrics about the performance of your messages to supporters, such as open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, and action rates. But unlike other tools, VoterVoice puts this data into context with industry benchmarks.
Advocacy teams have used VoterVoice to send more than 2.4 billion emails and 28 million text messages. Our data science team has analyzed those messages to create the digital advocacy industry’s first-ever benchmark data. That data is integrated directly into the outreach tools, so when you’re looking at reports for your latest campaigns or broadcasts, you can use real-time data to evaluate your performance against the average for advocacy organizations within your industry.
This means no more wondering whether a 5% response rate is terrible, average, or industry-leading.
But VoterVoice goes beyond just benchmarking. If your campaigns are underperforming the industry average, the software will identify strategies that could improve your outcomes. For example, if your unsubscribe rate is higher than average, the tool will scan your campaigns and suggest tactics that might improve your unsubscribe rate, such as
- Sending fewer emails
- Writing shorter subject lines (with suggested rewrites)
- Segmenting your audience differently
These insights are based on an analysis of the best-performing messages across the VoterVoice platform. These insights aren’t just for the benefit of adding tips to our blog — we designed our product to dynamically utilize those insights to alert customers when they’re deviating from best practices in their content, making continuous improvement effortless.
Track Your Performance Over Time on Exactly the Metrics You Care About
Another important piece of context that makes your advocacy performance data more meaningful is the ability to compare it to your own historical performance. In VoterVoice’s Insights dashboard, you can do year-over-year comparisons on any metric you care about, such as your total number of supporters, number of new advocates, or number of actions taken. You can also do month-over-month comparisons or compare completely custom dates.
While the industry benchmark data helps you compare individual campaigns and broadcasts to industry averages, the Insights dashboard gives you a look at your performance across all of your activity. You can identify your top broadcasts based on performance to understand the topics that are most important to your advocates, as well as the messages that resonated the most.
You can also use these insights to turn your data into KPIs for your team. For example, you might choose to focus on increasing the number of advocates who take the time to personalize an email before sending it to a legislator, because their extra effort signals to legislators that the topic is especially important. In the Insights dashboard, you can see how many messages your advocates sent in total over the last quarter, and compare that to the number of messages that were personalized. With a few clicks, you can compare those results with the previous quarter, or the same period in the previous year to gauge whether you are improving or holding steady.
Including the previous year’s performance in your reports helps funders and other internal stakeholders make more informed decisions about supporting your advocacy efforts.
Communicate Your Impact with Easy-to-Digest Visuals
A colorful report with simple data visualizations will always be easier to understand than a wall of text. VoterVoice automatically presents your activity data in visual form, and every graph, chart, or heat map is available for download. Our team of professional designers helped build these data visualization tools to make them presentation-ready. For example, you can create graphs to represent how many messages your advocates sent over a specific time period, how many messages were personalized in a given campaign, which legislators received the most messages, or which states or districts your most active advocates live in.
One of the most popular visualization tools draws in additional data from FiscalNote. With a few simple setup steps, you can create legislator scorecards, which provide a visual representation of a particular legislator’s record on policies that matter to your organization. The scorecard also indicates whether the policy ultimately passed or failed. Including these scorecards in your advocacy reports can help tie your activity to real policy outcomes.
Produce Stronger, More Actionable Reports with Less Effort
Clear reports on grassroots advocacy activity and outcomes can help you demonstrate the ROI of your advocacy efforts, earn leadership buy-in, and refine your strategy. VoterVoice’s built-in reporting tools make this kind of data-driven advocacy a reality. Benchmarking against peer organizations and your own historical performance on similar campaigns enhances your credibility with supporters and funders and helps you set realistic goals. Internal benchmarks help you learn from past campaigns and continuously improve your strategies. And finally, presentation-ready graphs, charts, and heat maps make it easy to spot trends and make the value of advocacy work more tangible.
Request a demo today, and explore how VoterVoice makes advocacy reporting more effective.
