How do I have my supporters email officials out of constituency?

In almost all cases we’ve encountered, legislators do not want to hear from non-constituents, and a few messages from constituents matter much more than hundreds of messages from non-constituents. If you get your members to flood legislator inboxes with non-constituent emails, you run the risk of hurting your cause rather than helping it as well. (It's a bit of an extreme, but here's a case: Uber in Kansas. Also, here’s a video of former US Rep Barney Frank and a blog post by the Congressional Management Foundation explaining why out-of-constituency messages are disregarded ).

Our goal is to meet your needs while still playing by the legislators' rules, therefore ensuring that we are able to continue delivering messages successfully for all of our clients.

There are three suggested methods of ensuring that everyone can take action and that the messages are still delivered without issue and without sending non-constituent emails:

1. Run a campaign to the entire legislature with one message to the committee and a separate message for non-committee members (or some similar targeting). All campaign letters can be printed to deliver to committee chairs, etc.
2. Set up a Petition in the system to collect signatures on the issue.
3. Use phone calls and tweets. These are modes of communication for any campaign and can be used to target officials outside of constituency.

These are the most effective, time tested methods of communicating with groups of officials, but if none of the recommended options work for you, we’ll need to know more about your campaign in order to consider a request for regardless-of-constituency contact:

• What is the campaign about?
• How long do you expect the campaign to last?
• Will this campaign get promotion on social media, ads, etc.?
• How many people do you expect to take action on the campaign?

Please contact Support at [e-mail] with answers to the questions above if you would like us to consider enabling regardless-of-constituency email contact at the state level.