If you manage the communications program for a nonprofit or association, you have successfully accumulated supporters and members through a smart, well-designed email marketing strategy. Congratulations! But the work isn’t over. Now, you need to put the same amount of effort, if not more, into maintaining and engaging your membership that you worked so hard to build (just to clarify, your membership is the group of your supporters, not your internal employees).

So now begs the question: How often is too often to email your members and supporters?

Perhaps you and your contract lobbyist are going to meet with a specific lawmaker or perhaps you’ve organized a Lobby Day and fifty of your members will be joining you. Whatever the case may be, if you are going to a face-to-face meeting with a legislator on behalf of your nonprofit organization on an advocacy mission, provide the lawmaker with a policy brief. Leaving this informative and persuasive report with the lawmakers is a strategic move to provide key decision-makers with important material about your policy stance. 

Constituent communication is an essential part of the policymaking process. Legislators rely on receiving feedback and requests from their voters in order to craft policy that reflects the wishes and needs of the community they serve. Successful grassroots campaigns can effectively shape lawmaker behavior and legislative outcomes. However, grassroots campaigns can also be unsuccessful if executed without considering several important factors, as this blog post outlines below. The single most important piece of advice to remember when developing a grassroots campaign is to aim for authenticity. Constituent communication derives its power from the sincerity behind genuine citizen engagement. It is vital that a massive grassroots campaign doesn’t bury authenticity and that individual constituent voices are not lost in the noise.

If you are the leader in your organization facilitating grassroots campaigns, there are several measures you can take to increase your advocacy efforts' influence. 

Analytics will always be instrumental to those of us involved in advocacy initiatives and government relations. Understanding and measuring the success of your Action Alerts is critical in learning how to best activate your grassroots base for future campaigns. Effective digital advocacy programs rely on compelling content, so let’s talk a bit about how to get analytics where you want them to be. 

A key step in creating an effective advocacy campaign is an intriguing email subject line. Powerful subject lines compel recipients to open an email upon receiving it, meaning that subject lines are essentially the lifeblood of an advocacy campaign. Unopened emails = no actions taken, so we curated a list of important tips to assist you in creating effective subject lines to increase open rates, specifically when pushing out advocacy alerts.