3 Building Blocks of a Data-Driven Constituent Outreach Strategy

There is so much for new congressional offices to do during the first several weeks after the election. One of the most important tasks is to develop a constituent outreach strategy.

Indigov's mission is to help Members of Congress and their staff to respond, reach out, and connect with every one of their constituents in a meaningful way. Throughout his time building and scaling Indigov, founder and CEO Alex Kouts has picked up a few communication best practices that have proven exceptionally effective when deployed in congressional offices.

Alex recommends following this three-step approach to building a communications strategy so it’s both effective and measurable.

Establish Meaningful Metrics

Ask yourself: “What are the things we can optimize against, or that we are aiming for as a team collectively that will ensure that we are successful in engaging our constituents, increasing name ID, and building a meaningful relationship with the people that we serve.”

We often hear that offices have set goals along the lines of: “we’re going to send out one 499 mailer to every constituent over the course of a month.”

The problem with that goal is that it isn’t measurable. Instead of setting a goal that reads like a box to check on a to-do list, first identify metrics that will verify that you have in fact improved at the end of every month.

If you wanted to see email list growth for example, you might want to track metrics such as open rates, click through rates, and survey responses, as these will provide feedback on how to continually improve your content over time to achieve that larger goal.

Plan Micro-targeted Campaigns

“Once you have metrics, you have to pick a strategy for how you are going to meaningfully engage folks. Now, a bad strategy would be to blast every single constituent that you have information for every single week.”

These kinds of approaches often alienate constituents by overburdening their inbox, resulting in a high unsubscribe rate and a low level of engagement (which can be identified through those metrics that were set earlier).

“Everyone gets a lot of email communication these days, so we want to keep it to the absolute minimum that will have the absolute maximum output for the office. One of the things we recommend is creating very micro-targeted email campaigns for people that you are trying to engage.”

Segment your email base into the various custom groups that you want to talk to such as female veterans, small business owners, or parents of small children.

You are then able to focus your message and tailor your content to the interests or concerns of that audience. You’ll find that proactive outreach is significantly more effective when people are being approached about issues relevant to their everyday lives.

Build a Strategic Framework

With a metric-driven goal in mind, and an outreach strategy in place, now you can build a framework to ensure everything is executed on time and with care.

Instead of leaving your staff to deploy communications ad hoc, establish a content calendar for the next couple months. This is where your team can chart out the various emails, social media posts, surveys, and town halls necessary to support the segmented newsletter campaigns you want to run.

This doesn’t mean that you have to write all this content in advance, but instead allows your team to easily see the larger picture, and adapt individual pieces of the puzzle along the way to be timely and relevant.

“Microsoft Teams has a lot of really great tools for you to plan these things. There are Kanban boards, project management software, and other tools that are approved for the House, and we strongly recommend that you leverage those.”

We’re Obsessed with Your Success

“Our passion at Indigov is making sure that offices are as successful as possible at reaching and engaging their constituents in meaningful ways.”

Get in touch to learn how Indigov and its team of former Hill staff can help you find the right metrics, tools, and strategies to communicate with the people you serve!