March/April 2005

Using Vote Data to Ensure Ongoing Support for Advocacy Issues

New functionality in Convio Advocacy Center helps organizations develop ongoing support for their most important issues

Many organizations are starting to take their advocacy efforts online, using the Internet to influence public policy makers before a vote. But, that is just one component of a comprehensive online advocacy strategy. Continuing grassroots efforts after votes have taken place also helps ensure ongoing support for the issues most important to an organization.

Convio's new vote-driven action system, the latest addition to Convio Advocacy, powers legislator scorecards, customizable vote pages and email action alerts that help organizations drive the actions they want, from the constituents they want, on their most important issues.

Developed by working with some of the leading advocacy groups in the country, this vote-driven system includes the following key features:

• Customizable vote pages include a description of the issue, vote date, the organization's position on the issue, how a constituent's legislators voted and more. Depending on the specific action the organization wants to drive, it can provide an option for a constituent to send a "thank" or "spank" message to his or her legislators based on their vote, or offer no action options at all.
• Legislator scorecards rate how lawmakers voted on the issues that matter most to an organization. The organization defines exactly how this score is calculated. For example, the organization can exclude issues that might inadvertently skew a score, or choose whether vote abstentions and absences affect a score.
• Targeted action alerts and email filter tools help an organization quickly define who receives what alerts, and what the alerts instruct constituents to do. The organization can target action alerts to a subset of its email file based on how individuals' legislators voted on a specific issue, as well as by state, Congressional district or interest.

Consider this example of how an organization could use the vote-driven action system to influence public policy:

A child welfare organization believes that support for a major educational program is key to its mission. Recently, a bill for additional program funding went before Congress. The organization thought the bill would pass, but a last-minute amendment caused its defeat.

Because the organization has found that some legislators consider an influx of "thank you" emails to be a nuisance, it uses Convio's vote-driven advocacy system to send an email only to constituents whose legislators supported the amendment that, in effect, caused the bill to fail. The email drives recipients to a Web page that encourages them to send a message reprimanding their legislators for helping to defeat the educational program bill.

Depending on how their legislators voted, site visitors who did not receive the email see either the "your legislator voted the wrong way" page, with the same call to action as the email recipients, or a "your legislator voted the right way" page, showing their legislators' scorecards based on how the legislators voted on issues important to the organization, but including no call to action. This approach allows the organization to keep its activists informed and to encourage a grassroots movement to let the legislators who played a part in the bill's defeat know that constituents are keeping an eye on votes, and will remember them at election time.

Whether the goal is motivating activists to contact legislators after a vote, to simply inform constituents of how their legislators' votes align with the organization's goals, or to influence upcoming votes, Convio's vote-driven approach gives organizations the following benefits:

• Impact — Organizations can work with their constituents to shape legislative policy over the long-term using Convio's relationship approach to advocacy.
  
• Accountability — Organizations can hold legislators to a higher level of accountability by monitoring voting performance. Constituents can track and respond to how their lawmakers voted or affected pending legislation.
  
• Focus — Organizations can simultaneously deliver different Web site and email content to different groups of constituents depending on how their legislators voted. By setting this up on a vote-by-vote basis, organizations have unprecedented control over the messages and who receives them, focusing constituents on the most critical issues.
  
• Customizability — Organizations can customize each constituent's online experience so he or she is informed about his or her lawmakers' records and is motivated to take action.  This can include scorecards that rate legislators on their voting history — on all or just selected issues.

Find out more about Convio's new vote-driven functionality.

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