Cosponsor Alerts

Liz Pomper

How do folks handle alerts where you are encouraging folks to ask their members of Congress (both Senators and Representatives) to cosponsor legislation? Specifically, what do you do about those legislators that have already cosponsored the legislation? I'm coming up with two options, but curious if there's a better one out there:

A. Try to phrase the sample letter generically enough that it would be appropriate to go to all Sens and Reps, regardless of whether they're already cosponsors;

B. Keep language from Option A, but also provide a link on the advocacy page that people can use if they know their member is already a cosponsor. This could get messy quick, and I'm worried it would reduce the number of actions taken. 



I've already voted for the idea to "Add bill cosponsorship to Advocacy Vote Center" ... curious to hear what everyone does as a workaround until that idea gets implemented!

Sally Heaven

Disclaimer:  this is what I used to do, but I haven't run a campaign in a while. We used to create two custom target lists and two Action Alerts, one for "Please cosponsor" and one for "Thanks for cosponsoring!"


It's easy to target outgoing emails based on geography, but where it gets tricky is if people forward the action alert to friends, Tell A Friend, or if you want to link from the website or social media. It's also tricky if someone lives in a state where one Senator is a cosponsor and one isn't - you want them to partcipate in both. This is where "cosponsor alerts" like the Vote Center "thank or spank" alerts would be useful, as you mentioned.


However, according to best practices, it's much better to put a specific ask into members of Congress rather than generic language. If someone's not a cosponsor yet, let them know that you want them to be a cosponsor.


For workarounds, we used to include links in the "intro text" on the action page to link to the other alert. You could also include a list of cosponsors (linking to thomas.loc.gov), or simply say "If you receive an error message that you are not eligible to participate in this campaign, it means your member of Congress is already a cosponsor - click here to say thank you." You're right that it's messier, but it's better to be more accurate if the goal is to get cosponsors.


Anyone else have an elegantly designed way to do what Liz describes?