getting through to MPs

Submitted by Graham on Wed Feb 11, 2009

Duane Raymond, who runs an e-campaigning consultancy called Fair Say, conducted a study of UK MPs to assess their views of e-campaigning.  It makes for interesting reading.  It both affirms many of the assumed thinking about MPs and email, and shows a new openess by MPs to receiving and benefitting from increased email communication from constituents.

The assumed thinking is that MPs like to receive personalised communication and always want to confirm if messages are coming from constituents.  The new openess revolves around the shocking (in the UK context) number of MPs that actually prefer to hear from constituencts via email!

Here are some of the key findings:

• 99% verify that the message sender is a constituent
• 44% preferred hearing from constituents via email
• 43% do not compare the number of emails received on issues
• 4% said that template messages on the same issue did not diminish their importance
• 54% said that a campaign had changed their view on an issue

All messages from our e-activist software are sent with the sender's address so MPs can easily confirm that the message is from a constituent. But more importantly, we have a noticed a dramatic increase in the number of campaigning organisations using our tool to automatically increase the targetting of MP messages and to increase the level of personalisation.  For example CAFOD used our software to ensure that each supporter was provided with a template message that was specific to the MP based on their political party.  WSPA in Canada automatically changed the message template for an MP message based on whether each MP was voted for or against some animal welfare legislation.

There is a big movement on now to maximise message customisaiton and targetting.  Right on.

To view the full study results, visit Duane's website:  Fair Say 

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