E-Newsletter Case Study

One of our clients needed a way to effectively reach distinct segments of his constituent base, an easy method to distribute press releases, a look and feel for his e-newsletter that would match the brand he’d already established for his office, and a way to track the viral distribution of his e-newsletters after they were sent out.

iConstituent responded by:

Setting up his office’s system with micro-targeting so he could easily send emails to specific lists of constituents and effortlessly add people to the appropriate lists based on survey responses.
Giving him access to an entire suite of reporting tools allowing his office to see who viewed a mailing, who responded to it, who forwarded it, etc. iConstituent offers over 50 such reports on each e-newsletter so legislators can identify exactly what works for them.
Building custom e-newsletter templates to coordinate with his website and other materials.
Offering detailed reporting on social network sharing via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, and LinkedIn. In fact, iConstituent is the only vendor able to provide such reports.

" In the case of email, lawmakers are allowed to contact constituents within the 90-day run-up to an election, so long as they are communicating with individuals who have signed up for their email newsletters.

Further, lawmakers use information they collect on constituents' interests to target them with issue-oriented emails -- a tactic drawn from recent political campaigns.

A spokesman for the Committee on House Administration said the growing use of email, including sophisticated techniques known as data-mining and micro-targeting, lets lawmakers "more effectively provide information to constituents who express interest in specific issues … [and] more effectively represent the interests of their constituents."

--The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2009

Thanks to iConstituent’s reports, this office discovered that one recent mailing was shared on Facebook over 750 times. Just two months after his office started taking advantage of social network sharing, his e-newsletters had been shared on Facebook over 5,000 times!