Easily Notify Legislators of Constituents in Their District

Legislators tend to pay attention when they receive messages from a constituent. In the arena of public higher education, legislators create the funds that are used for the public to attend state universities. As a result, universities often want to show each legislator how many of their constituents have benefited from the investment their state has made in their institution of higher education.

The traditional process to accomplish this task puts many grassroots managers into a deep funk. For example, to take a graduating class, organize the lists by legislative district and send a list to each legislator involves the following steps:

1. Identify the legislative district that each graduate belongs in based on where they vote.
2. Organize the list of graduates by district, and create a separate list for each house and senate member.
3. If you are emailing to legislators, you need to create an attachment with each list and send each email separately to each legislator.
4. If you are using regular mail, then you have to print a list for each legislator and create a packet with a letter and list for each legislator.

The above tasks can consume varying amounts of time depending on the size of your graduate lists. Some of the lists can get quite large, and we have stories of people spending a month getting the job done.

Capitol Impact has released a new application to make the entire process a 10 minute effort. With Capitol Impact’s Grassroots Advocacy System you can take any list with addresses, geocode the people to their legislative districts, and send the constituent lists to each legislator. Here’s how it works:

1. Create a custom email to legislators in our Blast email system. The email can thank them for their work and explain that the email contains a list of their constituents.
2. Choose the list. You can choose any list in the system to create constituent lists. Whether the list is of recent graduates of your university or new association members, you can create constituent lists on the fly.
3. Select the legislators to receive the email. You can choose State House, State Senate, or US Congressional Members simply by clicking check boxes to include them in the email. When you’ve selected a legislator the list of constituents from your list will be added to their respective email. The legislator will get the title, name, and address of your graduates who are from the legislator’s district.

In a matter of minutes, your advocacy system distributes names of constituents to the state representatives and senators. They see who their decisions have affected, and you haven’t had to spend time getting the information organized and out the door.

Does your advocacy software help you do complex tasks?