How to Tailor Advocacy Messages for Email, Social Media, and Text

Advocacy teams must communicate across multiple channels to cut through the noise and make an impact. VoterVoice’s 2025 Advocacy Benchmark Report found that text messaging reached a record high last year as a means of communicating with advocates. More than 12 million advocacy texts were sent in 2024, double the volume from two years before. SMS and social media, in addition to email, have become must-have channels for urgent, high-priority communications. 

However, one-size-fits-all messaging doesn’t work across platforms. Audiences expect different types of messages depending on where they are delivered. Nuance, personalization, and clarity are essential for reaching supporters across various channels. 

Read on to learn how to adapt your messages by channel, choose the right platform for your advocacy campaign, overcome common challenges, and test messages for impact. 

Adjusting Messaging by Channel

“Our messaging always starts with clarity, but how we deliver that message depends on the audience and the platform,” says Michelle Roth, VP of Advocacy at The League of Credit Unions. 

When sending an email, your message can be more comprehensive and detailed. “Emails can dive deeper into policy specifics and legislation, and make direct asks,” says Ellie Barmish, VP of Advocacy at McGuireWoods Consulting. Rely on email to provide context and connect issues to your supporters’ daily work. 

Email also provides an opportunity to segment your audience by role, issue area, geographical region, and more. “We segment audiences whenever possible so we’re not sending the same message to a CEO, a front-line employee, and a lawmaker,” Roth says. “We pay attention to the frequency of emails impacting our CEOs to ensure we are not bombarding them, making them more likely to respond to a request.” 

Social media is an ideal platform for urgency and brevity. It’s also a chance to add some visual flair to your campaign. Try video clips, infographics, or even memes when communicating via social media. Different platforms also offer varying levels of content depth. For example, on X, messages should be “very brief, impactful statements, or immediate asks that aren’t overly complicated,” Barmish advises. “The middle ground is LinkedIn, where you can dive in deeper.” 

Generally, the tone for social media in advocacy is more immediate and action-oriented. It’s a great place for broad awareness campaigns or driving urgent action. 

Text messages should be used for your most critical calls to action. Keep them clear, concise, and immediate. A good advocacy text should read more like a subject line than a full email. Supporters will see the notification and skim the first line, so clarity and brevity are critical. Remember that, unlike email, text messages don’t come with logos or familiar branding. Always clearly state in the text who is sending the message so that supporters can immediately recognize and trust the source.

Choosing the Right Channel

Part of designing an effective advocacy campaign is selecting the right channels. Start by looking at the campaign objectives and determining what you want to achieve — for example, broad awareness, legislative action, or data collection. 

A general awareness campaign may focus on social media, where the audience is broadest and interested in learning about new topics. A legislation-focused campaign should span many platforms. 

“Our audience makeup, demographics, and habits are factors as well,” Barmish adds. “We look at how they’re spending their time online to learn how to best reach them.” 

Multichannel campaigns often work best, but resource and budget constraints will guide the mix you ultimately choose. 

“Look at the complexity and urgency of your campaign,” Barmish suggests. “If it’s something that takes more explanation to get the nuance, rely on longer-form messages.” 

Overcoming Messaging Challenges

The core challenge of advocacy campaigns is striking a balance between simplicity and nuance. It’s essential to craft clear, action-oriented messages that include the necessary details to clarify often complex issues. 

To combat this, distill your message down to its essence, then layer in more detail for those who want it. A simpler message — with links to find more information — might be right for platforms like X, Instagram, or text, while those details are useful for segmented emails, LinkedIn, or even TikTok. 

“Keep building those layers so if people are interested, they can find out more,” Barmish says. “But if they’re ready to take action, you’re not burdening them with extra things.”

Use universal values to connect across diverse audiences. “We focus on values that unite our members: service, local impact, and the credit union difference,” Roth shares. “We build messages around what they care about, not just what we need. It’s less about simplifying and more about personalizing.” 

Regardless of your audience, it’s best to avoid jargon, acronyms, and overly academic language. Segmenting your message also helps you adjust for regional differences in tone or phrasing. “How we phrase things in Texas is going to be totally different from how we phrase them in California,” Barmish says. “Little things like that bring a lot of personalization.” 

Storytelling is a solution that helps overcome many messaging challenges. Showcasing real stories and communities creates an emotional connection with your audience and drives engagement. It’s one of the quickest ways to illustrate the impact of an issue and make supporters eager to act. 

Testing What Works

Advocacy isn’t static. What resonates with one audience may completely miss the mark with another. That’s why constant testing and refinement are essential. A message that feels too generic won’t inspire action, but slight shifts in wording, tone, or even imagery can make the difference between a supporter clicking “send” or scrolling past.

“A/B testing is a great tool to hone in on your issue and target audience,” Barmish says. In the past, her teams have focused heavily on testing language — trying out different phrases, sentence structures, or calls to action to see what resonated most with their audience. More recently, they’ve leaned into testing visuals alongside text. “It’s not just about the wording anymore,” she explains. “Pairing a message with a particular photo, graphic, or video can completely change the way people respond.”

For example, in a Texas campaign related to natural resources and eminent domain, her team tested images of a family with young children, grandparents, a small business storefront, and a sweeping natural landscape. The results were striking: each audience group responded differently depending on the image. Even small differences — such as featuring a large family versus a small family — produced noticeably different levels of engagement.

This same principle of constant refinement is why VoterVoice customers rely on Smart Check, the first AI-powered tool in grassroots marketing designed to help advocacy professionals make real-time adjustments before hitting “send.” Based on billions of advocacy emails, Smart Check scans subject lines, calls to action, and links, then flags areas that could improve performance. For instance, it might suggest shortening a subject line, removing extra action links, or avoiding spammy words — all proven factors that boost open and action rates.

Taken together, A/B testing and Smart Check give advocacy professionals a one-two punch: testing ensures you learn what resonates with your unique audience, while Smart Check applies best practices from across online advocacy to help you deliver emails that cut through the noise.

Turning Insights Into Action

Effective advocacy messaging must be tailored to be channel-specific, audience-specific, and action-oriented. Keep clarity front and center so your audience isn’t guessing at what you want them to do next. “Always make it easy to act,” Roth says. “If your message doesn’t include a simple, direct call to action, then you’ve missed the point. People want to help, but they need to know exactly what to do next, and it must feel worthwhile to their time.” 

When messages are tailored thoughtfully, they inform and mobilize audiences. By embracing a culture of testing and experimentation, advocacy professionals can ensure that their grassroots marketing campaigns inspire audiences to act.