Associations, universities, non-profits or any organization that engage in advocacy often hold meetings of supporters, members, and advocates in order to discuss the upcoming legislative agenda and its impact on the organization. These types of advocacy organizations also host rallies at the capitol to make their voices heard. One way to improve the impact of these meetings to it get legislators involved. Having legislators attend your events not only gets your advocates excited, it’s a way for your organization to spend some time informing legislators on your issues and showing them the strength of your support.
Getting legislators to attend, however, is easier said than done. Whether it is a simple message to alert them of the event or an invitation to join in, in the past the only way to get legislators attention was to send them an email or written invitation. While this may not be the most effective way to ensure that legislators attend, you continue to send out invites from your desk. What if you could enable your invitation to legislators to be reinforced by their constituents?
By combining a powerful online registration system with comprehensive advocacy technology Capitol Impact’ Grassroots Advocacy and Event Management systems work together to enable event registrants to automatically send an email to their legislators encouraging them to attend. When your event attendees fill out the online registration form, you can include an option to enable them to send a crafted email message to their own legislators based on their geo-coded home address. By enabling constituents to easily send these invitations you are reinforcing the message to legislators. Now, instead of getting one single invitation from some advocacy manager, legislators can get multiple invitations from their own constituents telling them “I’m attending, and so should you.” Which do you think is more effective?
Capitol Impact offers an extensive suite of tools that cover association management, advocacy, and legislation. We have learned from our customers how they want to integrate these tools for more effective communication with members and legislators. If your organization holds meetings throughout the year for your constituents and legislators to attend, we can help to automate the sign up process and have constituents send invites to legislators.