For more than a decade, Engage has worked with the world’s best companies, trade associations, and advocacy organizations to develop campaigns and strategies that help them win. We combine our deep knowledge of the policy and regulatory process with our in-house creative and marketing teams to drive value through innovative programs that identify and activate their most important supporters. In the last few years alone, we have recruited hundreds of thousands of advocates that have delivered millions of messages to local, state and federal officials.
As the country prepares to welcome a new Congress and administration, we went back through 13 years of reporting to find out the best way to reach them. Millions of data points on email, social, programmatic, creative, web analytics, and perhaps most importantly, legislative success, tell the story of how you can best build and maintain an army of supporters primed and ready to take action. We’ve boiled down our results to the five most important components of a successful digital advocacy program.
“Digital Advocacy” is a crowded field with software vendors, social platforms, agencies, and advocate recruitment firms, all positioning themselves with the latest offerings. Our job is to make sense of this environment and pick the right tools and approaches to help you succeed. Our philosophy is built on the following strategic framework:
1. Organizational consensus at the start is critical
2. Website and advocacy tools must work in unison
3. Creative and storytelling sell your vision
4. You have to pay for scale and you get what you pay for
5. Not all advocates are created equal
#1: Early Organizational Consensus is Critical
You may know the high-level goal of what you want to accomplish through an advocacy campaign, but different internal stakeholders across communications, public affairs, government affairs/relations and other internal groups can often have slightly different needs and expectations. Part of Engage’s role at the outset of a campaign is to use our extensive public policy experience to support clients in driving alignment in audiences, goals, and outcomes.
Research Insight: Some common areas where expectations vary within an organization include:
1. Awareness vs. actions
2. District, state or national focus
3. Key targeting parameters
4. Single campaign or longer-term relationship building
Sometimes a campaign is purely transactional and solely about each individual action taken with legislators or regulators. In others, there is a need to create a general awareness of the issues at hand. Having run hundreds of successful campaigns since 2007, we can help your team decide the most efficient and effective way forward.
For example – if a client wants Congress to be aware of an issue and feel pressure from constituents to take action those could be two different (but supporting) requests. Making Congress and their staff aware of an issue they may not know much about — or to have them see that issue being talked about — would be one set of activities. Getting constituents to act would be another. They can be complementary, but real clarity is needed so that budgets can be optimized to work to their maximum potential.
Targeted advocacy actions can get more expensive the more specific the audience becomes, and this refers to both targeting parameters and geographic focus. Often government relations/affairs will have very specific district-level targets. This is great, but if not determined at the outset, the budget will be misaligned.
A one-and-done advocacy campaign has its place, particularly around ballot initiatives, but it’s often a missed opportunity when working with organizations that have a broad range of issues. Advocates are people acting on your behalf and by keeping them informed about other issues organizations can leverage their participation more fully over time.
These up-front considerations have a big impact on how a campaign might get structured. Campaigns that are simply trying to drive contacts of legislators for a single effort might use different sourcing tactics that one looking to build an advocate base over time, where the quality of that initial advocate will matter more. We help you design the right parameters for an effective digital adoption campaign from the start — so a lack of a specific capability does not impact you later. The key output from this activity is a firm agreement on the goals and the audiences of the campaign.
#2: Website, Advocacy Tools Must Work in Unison
What if you’re not starting from scratch? Perhaps you have a website, social accounts, maybe even a CRM platform. What role will they play in your advocacy effort? When your goal is to drive awareness and action on an issue with finite resources, even the smallest details of these pieces matter. For example, many times we’ve been presented with sites that were not purpose-built for advocacy. Some of the challenges they face include: creative and content not properly matched to the specific campaign, limited ability to easily create custom landing pages, poor form / data collection user experience and general lack of conversion-tracking capabilities.
This phase will make sure:
1. The tools being used in the campaign can do what we need them to. For example, calls, emails, videos, and all advocate-created media can be delivered reliably and tracked
2. There is a centrally available database to store records of all activities taken on your behalf — from all sources — and that it can be reported on and segmented easily
3. If a website is needed, it creatively addresses and offers easy ways for potential advocates to take action
4. Forms are evaluated for the user experience of completing the minimum required information and that they can be tracked upon completion for campaign optimization and retargeting
Over the last 3 years we saw lead form completion percentages range from 17% to 51%. Forms that are built complementary to the creative perform the best. Also, forms that require at least one user-filled-in field tend to yield higher-quality leads. However, if you ask too many questions, it will negatively impact costs.
“Do you really need that field?”
Research Insight: Social Lead Forms — More Fields Cost More Money
Engage has seen lead-form completion rates range from 17%-51% on Facebook Lead Ad campaigns. It can be tempting to collect as much data as possible, but the number and type of fields directly relate to cost and success.
#3: Creative and Storytelling Sell Your Vision
What people think and feel about an issue is directly related to how likely they are to take action on your behalf. We can help you frame tough-to-understand issues in ways the average person can not only understand, but also want to engage on.
As a full-service creative agency, we can deliver the content and visual approaches needed to drive potential advocates to action. Our experience shows that nobody tells the story better than a constituent directly impacted by the issue. Whether the constituent is an average citizen or a celebrity, we know how to find them and make their content work.
Working with a major industry association, Engage discovered a former NFL player affected by the issue our client was focused on. We recruited him to be a part of our campaign and developed an extensive library of content that proved to be our most successful.
Research Insight: Industry Association — Celebrity Constituents Work
Ads with an NFL player performed at a 57% lower cost-per-lead than the campaign average. Someone with a real personal connection to the issue is key. If that person can be identifiable, it is even better.
Similarly, working with a major pharmaceutical company, Engage achieved breakthrough lead-cost improvements by constantly iterating on creative approaches that worked. It eventually led to some paths very focused on patriotic imagery and others on personal stories of people affected by the issue.
Research Insight: Pharma Company — Continuous Creative Optimization is Key
In the first few months of the campaign, creative and targeting optimizations helped reduce the cost-per-lead by over 90%
Compelling creative approaches are not “set it and forget it.” They need to evolve and be refreshed on a timely basis, whether that is in reference to advertising content or other areas where creative comes into play. In advertising in particular, because much of it can be direct response based, creative options form the basis for ongoing optimization.
Good creative is a must for your campaign to stand out against all the other advertising people are seeing on social platforms. The goal is to find visuals that appeal to your audiences at a glance.
#4: You Have to Pay for Scale and You Get What You Pay for
The only thing better than finding the right advocate, is finding thousands of them. There are a myriad of options available to identify and acquire new supporters, and we can help you determine the right mix of resources, depending on your ultimate goals.
One option is to use third-party services that specialize in list building. Typically, these sources work well for single use advocacy programs. They can be cheap nationally and usually get more expensive the more targeted you get geographically. However, the recruitment methods do not always leave the advocate very invested in your organization.The recruitment method may be an appended form to an unrelated activity someone is going through online or a service that specializes in emailing people that like to take action on a variety of issues. These services can be good to pump volume into a campaign that wants a large number of contacts, actions or signatures.
Another option is to use advertising on social and other digital platforms. Currently, Facebook is the platform with the best cost-per-acquisition effectiveness. LinkedIn is an up-and-comer as well and is particularly good for hard-to-find professional audiences. They both offer lead forms which are incredibly powerful tools for streamlining the lead generation process. However, there is a lot of variation in potential costs on these platforms and it takes years of experience to help sidestep potentially expensive surprises.
Research Insight: Optimal Social Ad Frequency is Low
On social platforms, we have seen limited utility in running ads with high frequency. The optimal frequency is between 1.4 and 2 and beyond that costs-per-lead go up significantly.
On targeting, if you have a lot of individual Congressional districts, it is important to keep them grouped together to control costs. Targeting at an individual district level can double or even triple lead costs and sometimes leads to very slow campaign performance. A national campaign with limited targeting and using pre-populated lead fields only can be very cheap on Facebook. However, these might not be great quality leads.
Research Insight: Facebook Lead Ad Costs
Engage’s lowest cost lead campaign was for $1.05 per lead, but most are in the $4-$7 range or higher if a good deal of targeting or additional form fields are used.
Social and traditional web advertising allows you to upload your advocate lists and create lookalike models to expand your targeting base. These approaches can be very cost-effective. Similarly, we can retarget people who started with the lead process or visited our website but did not complete a lead form.
Finally, even a website lead form has a role in a holistic approach to lead generation. First, it opens the campaign up to more audience touch points than the leading social platforms for lead generation. Second, the advocates become more invested in the process when directed to a website and they are more likely to be very interested in the issue and willing to take multiple actions over time. It also opens the door to new media targeting opportunities through over-the-top (OTT) platforms. Engage can use email lists and website retargeting to take your message to connected TV platforms and other OTT options.
Research Insight: Lead Cost vs Lead Quality
Opt-in and co-registration lead sources can provide volume, but with those, advocates are likely to be the least involved with your issue. Driving people to custom landing pages on a website often has the highest cost, but also delivers the best quality.
In the middle lie the social platform lead forms, notably Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook is much cheaper than LinkedIn, but LinkedIn allows you to target professionals in ways Facebook cannot. Within Facebook, your lead quality will go up or down depending on your campaign construction, targeting, the quality of the creative and how much you deviate from the pre-filled fields Facebook can provide. Many commercial marketers make sure to ask at least one question requiring input to make sure lead quality is higher than the default. The more questions that are added to the form process, the more expensive the leads will be, but also — the higher the quality.
#5: Not All Advocates Are Created Equal
First impressions matter. The day you sign up an advocate is the day you can start communicating with them. For campaigns that take a longer view, advocate relationship management is critical. In addition to completing an initial ask, stay in touch with advocates to keep them informed on key issues, take a new or related action or share information with their own networks.
All these activities should have a place where they are centrally managed so you can track who your best advocates are and which sources gave you those advocates in the first place. At minimum, advocates need to hear from a campaign once per quarter – just so they feel connected.
Again, advocates who were minimally engaged in the sign up process may not be very engaged going forward, but it is always recommended to test and verify how audiences perform. Once you determine which sources drove the most engaged advocates, you can work to expand that part of your program.
Research Insight: Lead Quality
This is the only measure you cannot export from Facebook. You can start to determine the quality of your advocates in your initial email to them, or when you load them into a CRM system and do address matching. Lead quality will typically be determined over time as you work with your advocates.
Conclusion
Digital advocacy — explaining and catalyzing action around complex public policy issues — is like no other form of marketing. You wouldn’t hire a lobbyist to sell detergent so don’t hire a traditional PR and marketing firm to develop your online public affairs strategy. With 13 years of experience in communicating to lawmakers and their constituents, we can help you make sense of the evolving advocacy landscape and achieve your goals.
The month following an election is a great time to build up advocates as costs are generally lower than during the election run-up. Civic-minded advocates are excited and ready to take action. Looking at historical client data from previous election years, we saw a nearly 10% decrease in cost-per-clicks and an almost a 20% reduction in cost-per-leads in the 30 days after the election compared to the 30 days prior.