Building big impact locally

If you’re considering using our services to coordinate political engagement between your members and their representatives across the country, we have some advice to help you make as much impact as possible.

Use local campaigners to your advantage

Ask your team: how can we make our national campaign feel local and personal to each MP? This is often the answer to building a broad coalition of support for your issue. Take advantage of the fact that you have campaigners spread across the country!

You don’t have to try to figure out a one-size-fits-all approach, you just have to know what your headlines and red lines are. The Local Intelligence Hub has tonnes of constituency-level data to help you make the local case.

For example, if you’re running a campaign about domestic retrofit, it’s more effective to include a figure for each constituency, rather than a general one. It’s extremely powerful to be able to say to an MP “In our constituency, 33.3% of children are living in poverty. This figure is almost twice as high as the national figure of 17.9%”.

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Don’t copy and paste

Mass-mailings can be high in volume but low in impact: representatives quickly spot a wave of identical messages and take them with a pinch of salt. (Here’s more on why identical ‘form’ messages don’t work.)

So don’t ask your campaigners to copy and paste — our WriteToThem servers block identical copied-and-pasted messages anyway. A message might be full of excellent facts and research, but there’s no way for the servers to know it isn’t spam, so it won’t create the change you want.

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Prompts, not paragraphs

Rather than giving your supporters paragraphs to sign their name to, you could try writing some key bullet points, and get your members to write around them. Although you’ll experience a drop-off in the quantity of communication sent, you might well see greater returns.

Some prompts you might include are:

  • Look up your MP on TheyWorkForYou — do you have anything in common that you could lead with?
  • Has your MP ever mentioned the phrase ‘retrofit’ in Parliament?
  • In a couple of sentences, explain why the issue matters to you, and the impact it’s having on you and your loved ones.
  • Have you always cared about the issue, or did something really convince you?
  • Use the Local Intelligence Hub to generate a statistic for your constituency.

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Make sure there’s a call to action

What do you want your MP to do? How can they support your campaign? Make this really obvious and just one click away from your email.

If you’ve got an MP who’s extremely supportive of your campaign, they could introduce a Private Members’ Bill that you could then ask other MPs to support. Other options include attending events, asking oral or written questions, or posting on social media.

For more advice on the actions your representative can take, read What can your representative do for you?

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