How Associations Can Get the Most Out of VoterVoice Before and After the 2026 Midterms

Election Day is November 3. For most association advocacy teams, the weeks before it are about education and turnout. The weeks after are about turnover: new faces in office, reshuffled committees, and relationships that have to be rebuilt from scratch.

VoterVoice covers both halves. This guide walks through eight ways associations use it across the election cycle: surveys to learn what members care about, scorecards to show where incumbents stand, an Election Center to help members vote, email and text to get them to the polls, Key Contacts to surface relationships with incoming officials, segmentation to prepare for turnover, campaigns and meetings to engage new legislators, and reporting to measure what worked. None of it requires a large staff. Most of it reuses data you already have.

Understand What Members Care About

Start with a pre-election survey. An election raises members’ attention, but it does not mean they care about every issue your association tracks. A professional association might be following a dozen bills; its members may feel strongly about two.

Knowing which two changes everything downstream. It tells you which issues to emphasize in election education, which votes to highlight on a scorecard, and how to write get-out-the-vote messages that connect to something members actually want. It also keeps you from sending one broad message to a membership that is not one audience.

Decide what you need to learn

Before you build the survey, name the decision the results will inform. If you cannot say what you would do differently based on the answers, cut the question. Research questions that tend to earn their place:

You do not need all of these in one survey. Ask only what you expect to use. A short survey with a clear purpose gets more responses than a thorough one that tries to cover everything, and the responses feed directly into the scorecards, Election Center content, and GOTV messaging that follow.

Show Members Where Legislators Stand

A legislator scorecard turns a season of roll-call votes into a record members can read in a minute. It answers the question members ask most in an election year: did my representative support the issues my profession cares about?

Be clear about what a scorecard is and is not. It is issue education based on official actions. It is not a candidate endorsement, a prediction, or a replacement for the Election Center. Keeping that line clean matters for 501(c)(6) and especially 501(c)(3) associations, and it makes the scorecard more credible with members on both sides of the aisle.

VoterVoice lets you score roll-call votes and custom actions such as sponsorships or committee votes, and weight each one by how much it matters to your organization. A single vote on your top priority can count for more than three votes on secondary bills.

Decide what the score represents

Three decisions shape a scorecard before you build it:

• What to measure. Which votes, sponsorships, or custom actions best reflect your priorities? Fewer, well-chosen actions make a clearer record than every bill you tracked.
• How to score them. Should some actions carry more weight? A weighted score tells members what you consider most important.
• How to explain the results. What context will help members read a score fairly?

Add context

A number alone can mislead. For every bill or action on the scorecard, members should be able to see what it would have done and why your association supported or opposed it. A legislator who scored 60 percent because they missed a vote during a family emergency looks different from one who voted against you six times out of ten.

Once built, the scorecard earns its keep in several places: a post-session legislative recap, member education ahead of November, a link inside the Election Center, background for a district meeting or fly-in, or a reference point whenever you explain your policy record.

Help Members Navigate the Election

Members do not need another explainer on why voting matters. They need to know when registration closes in their state, whether they can vote early, where their polling place is, and who is on their ballot. If they have to hunt for that across five government websites, many will not.

The Election Center gives them one place. Based on a member’s address, it shows key dates, state voting resources, current officials, and candidates. You can customize it with introductory content, an image, and links to your own resources, including the scorecard from the previous section. It lives inside your VoterVoice advocacy center and can be embedded on your association’s website, so members have a permanent place to return to. Your job is to send them there at the right moments, which is what the next section covers.

Mobilize Members to Participate

The Election Center supplies the voting information. Campaigns supply the reasons and reminders to use it. Targeted email and text are how you move members from knowing an election is coming to actually showing up for it.

Build the message sequence

Organize messages around the moments that matter rather than a fixed weekly cadence:

As November 3 gets closer, shift from education to action. Early messages can run long and carry context. The last ones should be short, with one ask and one link.

Segment the outreach

Not every member needs the same message or the same role. VoterVoice can build audiences from location, custom fields, survey responses, and past engagement, which lets you match the ask to the member:

• Highly active advocates: Ask them to share Election Center resources, recruit colleagues, or amplify chapter outreach. They extend your reach further than another broadcast would.
• Issue-engaged members: Connect voting to the specific issues they have taken action on before.
• Less-active members: Give them one reason to care and one clear next step. Nothing more.
• Geographic groups: Match messages to the right state deadlines and voting options so a member in Texas is not reading about a mail-ballot deadline that only applies in Oregon.

Match the message to the channel

Email carries context: issue education, multiple links, a scorecard reference. SMS carries urgency: a deadline tomorrow, polls close at 7. Chapter communications carry trust, and a reminder from a local chapter leader often lands where a national email does not. If your account includes texting, reserve it for the time-sensitive moments rather than mirroring every email.

Monitor the response

Review opens, clicks, delivery, and unsubscribes after each send, and look at how segments differ. Broadcast Insights lets you compare performance by broadcast type, delivery method, and date, so you can see whether a Tuesday text outperformed a Thursday email before you schedule the next one. Use what you learn to adjust the next message instead of repeating the same content to everyone.

Find Members Who Can Open Doors

Once results are in, the most valuable thing in your database may be a connection you don’t know you have. A member who went to school with a newly elected state senator, or whose practice is down the street from a new House member’s district office, can get your association a first meeting faster than any cold request from staff.

VoterVoice’s Key Contact tool records those relationships. It stores the connection between a specific member and a specific official, so you can find trusted messengers when you need them instead of asking around.

Collect the relationships

As newly elected officials are added to VoterVoice, send members the Key Contact relationship link and ask them to flag any officials they know. Explain why you’re collecting the information. Members are more willing to share a connection when they understand how the association plans to use it.

Keep the Key Contact tool as the primary record. A short survey can add context the tool doesn’t capture, such as how well the member knows the official or whether they would make an introduction, but it shouldn’t replace the structured relationship record. A survey response is a data point; a Key Contact entry is something you can target a campaign to.

Evaluate and activate

Follow up to learn how current and substantial the relationship is, whether the member is comfortable making an introduction, what role they could realistically play, and what preparation they would need from you.

The payoff comes in the next phase. When you build outreach to a new official, VoterVoice can target the members who hold a Key Contact relationship with that office, so the first message a new legislator receives from your association comes from someone they already know.

Prepare for Legislative Turnover

Turnover is predictable even when the results aren’t. Open seats, competitive districts, and term limits tell you months in advance where representation is likely to change. Use that time to get your database and your outreach materials ready, so the week after the election is spent acting rather than scrambling.

Get the database ready

Start with the districts and offices where change is possible, then look at who you have there. Review member addresses and contact records for those areas; an outdated address puts a member in the wrong district and out of the wrong campaign. Build segments for members in affected districts so the audiences exist before you need them.

VoterVoice’s Advanced Search can segment contacts by legislative district, official, committee, campaign participation, and custom fields. Saved searches hold the criteria rather than a static list, so a search for “members in District 12” updates on its own as records change and as the district’s representation changes. Save searches for your priority districts, committees, and officials now, and they’ll be current when results are certified.

Get the outreach ready

Draft the materials you know you’ll need: an introductory email for new officials, a constituent message template for members in affected districts, a short association overview. VoterVoice saves reusable email templates and retains unfinished broadcasts, so you can build these in October and finish them in November once you know the names.

Finally, decide in advance what has to be updated once results are confirmed:

A short checklist written before Election Day is worth more than a long one written after.

Engage Newly Elected Officials

A new legislator’s first months set the pattern for the relationship. Offices are forming, staff are learning the issues, and the groups that show up early with something useful tend to stay on the call list. This is where the preparation from the previous two sections pays off.

Prioritize

You can’t build a relationship with every new official at once, so decide who comes first. Focus on officials who influence your priority issues, represent large concentrations of members, land relevant committee or leadership assignments, or already have a connection to someone in your membership. Revisit the list as committee assignments and staff hires become final, since a backbencher in November can be a subcommittee chair by February.

Choose the path

Not every introduction should come from staff. Pick the approach that fits the official and the relationships you have. Each path has a VoterVoice feature behind it:

These aren’t exclusive. A constituent campaign can open the door, a Key Contact can walk through it, and a fly-in can follow once the office knows who you are.

Prepare and follow up

Give staff and participating members a concise introduction to the association, some local member or industry context, one or two relevant priorities, and a clear purpose for the conversation. Early outreach should establish that you are relevant and useful. Save the full policy agenda for later.

After the meeting, record who participated, what the office cared about, what information or introductions were requested, and who owns the next action. VoterVoice lets meeting participants access meeting details and complete a report afterward, so the follow-up lives in the system rather than in one staffer’s notebook.

Measure What the Election Did for Your Program

VoterVoice can’t tell you whether individual members voted. What it can show is how members engaged with your communications, surveys, campaigns, and later advocacy actions, and that is the more useful measure anyway. The question isn’t whether the GOTV emails got clicks. It’s whether election season left your advocacy program stronger than it found it.

Review the results

Broadcast Insights tracks opens, clicks, action rates, delivery failures, and unsubscribes across your election sends. Campaign reports show participating advocates, message recipients, delivery methods, and geographic activity. The dashboard surfaces first-time advocates, top advocates, and activity trends over time. Together they answer the questions worth asking: which broadcasts drove action, which segments responded, how many first-time advocates participated, which districts were strong or weak, and which campaigns reached priority officials.

Look beyond volume

Total sends and total messages are the easiest numbers to report and the least meaningful. Judge the program by what it built. Did you learn more about member priorities? Did the advocate database grow or get cleaner? Did new highly engaged members surface? Did you uncover legislator relationships you didn’t know you had? Did participation strengthen in the districts that matter most for the coming session?

Those answers tell you where the program stands going into the new session, and they are the baseline for the next cycle.