Sending a Broadcast to Federal Legislators / Congressional Staffers

In addition to having your supporters email their officials directly, VoterVoice allows you to contact those officials as a representative of your association. Federal-level legislators all use constituency restricted webforms that do not allow you to email them directly. Instead, you will need to email their staffers. If you need to contact state-level officials instead, click here. 

If emailing staffers is a primary use of the VoterVoice software for your association, you may want to check out the Knowlegis program offered by our sister company, CQ. You can see articles on how to create legislative contact lists and send out emails in Knowlegis. Please contact your account manager for a demo or pricing information.

To email congressional staffers, mouse over the Messaging menu, and choose Broadcasts. Create a new broadcast by clicking the icon in the top-right corner and select “contact congressional staff” as the purpose of your message.

On the Recipients page of the message wizard, you will be required to perform an advanced search to limit the number of staffers you contact. You can search by any of the following:

• Staff (House or Senate)
• Officials (name of the official the staffer works for)
• Committees (staffers who work for an official on a given committee)
• Committee Staff (staffers who work directly for the committee as a whole)
• Job Title (Legislative Assistant, Chief of Staff, etc…)
• Political Party (used to pull out just those who work for Republicans or Democrats)
• Responsibility (type of issues the staffer handles: veterans affairs, health, finance, etc...)
• First Name (of the staffer)
• Last Name (of the staffer)
• Bills (staffers who work for officials who cosponsored a particular bill)
• Office Location (capitol or district office staffers)
• State (for easily picking a state delegations’ staffers)

When you continue forward, you will craft an email message just like a normal broadcast to your supporters. Since Congress has strict firewalls, please be careful to limit the number of images, links, and attachments in your broadcast.