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 (web 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 on time.
• 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

When an advocate goes to send a message, the form for sending will look something like the screenshot below, along with an alert explaining the issue. In this case, there’s three messages that will go out, one to each Senator and one to the Representative.

Messages will go out to officials in the following format:

Subject:
[Subject of the message]

Body:
Dear [Official],

[Message body, including personal story if included]

Sincerely,

[Sender name]
[Sender email]
[Sender address]

We always include the name, email address, and physical address of the constituent sending the message to their legislator. This ensures the official knows who is sending them the message, with a way to respond, and ensures they are a constituent living or working in their district. These are the mandatory details that need to be filled.

In the case of email delivery to elected officials, the message comes from the email address of the user who sent the message. There are exceptions to this - some email service providers (for example Yahoo) do not allow sending on behalf of their domain. In that case, the email comes from [e-mail] and the user’s email is always included in the closing like the message above.

In the case of webform delivery to elected officials, the sender’s name, email, and physical address will be submitted in separate fields on the official online contact form, in that case, we only close with the Sender Name.