What do legislators see when they look at a campaign message?

Federal Level

VoterVoice (and CQ) have been part of the Communicating with Congress project since its inception. This project aims to improve communication between constituents, advocacy groups, and Congress. At the Federal level, we deliver advocate messages via the CWC API--the official, approved delivery method for Congress. All of the US House of Representatives and about half of the US Senate receive messages from constituents enabled through advocacy organizations this way. All the other competitors in our space send messages to Congress through this API as well. For the other half of the US Senate not on CWC, we send messages through their online contact forms.

For CWC API delivery, following their guidelines, we include information on:

• Advocate: the advocate’s prefix, name, email, and physical address
• Message: the subject and body of the message they sent
• Campaign: the name of the particular grassroots campaign the organization is running
• Organization: the name and primary account email of the organization running the campaign

We send information on the campaign and organization so that Congress can better organize all the traffic they receive on issues and respond accordingly. For example, each individual House office receives thousands of messages a month from constituents. The majority of that comes from advocacy organizations.

So including this information helps in a variety of ways:

• By better managing the massive influx of communications they receive, Congressional offices can more effectively respond to constituent concerns in a timely manner.
• Based on the constituent mail they get, Congressional offices may want to work more closely with advocacy organizations on specific issues - with this information they can reach out.

Ultimately advocacy organizations are trying to show grassroots support for their cause. Congress knows this, and we’re helping connect supporters, organizations, and Congress so they can better communicate.

Federal and State Level

Every campaign message sent through VoterVoice is identified with the sender's email address and is signed off with:

Sincerely,

[Sender's Name]

[Sender's Address]

We send information on the advocate (the minimum required) for a few reasons, but mostly to validate that it is a real, actual constituent making contact.  The name shows who sent the message. The physical address shows that they are a constituent. The email allows the office to reply if they want to.