Advocacy Deliverability Reports Getting You Down?

Sara Thomas 2

If you're anything like me, you work hard to make change happen every day--mostly through federal, state or local policy--and rely on the advocacy tool as one of your main ways to do that. Over the years, I've seen deliverability to congressional offices fluctuate based on whether it's an election year, the offices decided to change something without telling anyone, or the servers get jammed.



Days are busy and the last thing we want to worry about is whether the messages we worked hard to get through approvals and out the door for constituent communication are actually being delivered as promised. But, sometimes that's exactly what we have to worry about.



Here are some things (you are probably already doing) I have on my check list that I thought I would share:

1. Run advocacy deliverability failure report every morning for 3 days after you promote a priority action via email. Resubmit failures after each report -- often times that covers the failures. If you see that the failures continue, try resubmitting them at different hours to cover for receiver server overload (for instance, Monday morning isn’t the best time to try to resend failures for obvious reasons, Monday at 12PM is probably better).
   
   
2. If messages are not being delivered and you aren’t pressed for time, let your lobbyist know and have her/her bring it up at his/her next meeting with that official’s office. (This is also a good tactic to do in addition to the messages successfully going directly to the office.)
   
   
3. If you are pressed for time and a vote is happening soon, notify the office and submit the names another way after running a report and exporting action takers. (This is also a good tactic to do in addition to the messages successfully going directly to the office.)
   
   
4. Set up your actions to have them roll over to fax which seems to be helping with the failures. (You do not get charged extra from BB for this.)

What about you? I’d love to hear what everyone else does to ensure their messages are heard and accounted for!