In 2025, advocacy teams pushed harder than ever. Email volume rose 15% year over year, and text messaging jumped 42%. But engagement told a different story: open rates and action rates both softened, even as deliverability held steady. The messages are landing — audiences just aren't giving them as much attention. When deliverability improves but engagement doesn't, the problem isn't technical. It's strategic.
On August 27, 2026, FiscalNote's Anna van Erven sat down with VoterVoice Senior Product Manager Paul Ellender for a 30-minute session unpacking the findings of the 2026 VoterVoice Benchmark Advocacy Report — why engagement is slipping, and the three-part strategy the most successful advocacy teams are using to earn attention instead of just inbox space. Here's what they had to say.
Video Timestamps
- 1:54 — The Benchmark Report's central finding: more messages aren't earning more attention
- 3:16 — Why attention is shrinking: faster content production, rising volume, and AI
- 4:57 — Paul on AI's double-edged effect on grassroots advocacy
- 8:20 — Strategy 1: Target the right lawmakers with a tiered approach
- 9:11 — VoterVoice demo: bill sponsorship targeting and legislator scorecards
- 12:04 — Strategy 2: Find the right messenger — treat your list as a network, not just reach
- 13:33 — VoterVoice demo: key contact relationships and the advocate leaderboard
- 16:55 — Strategy 3: Make the message relevant through local, specific detail
- 18:40 — VoterVoice demo: topic tagging, audience segmentation, and personalized broadcasts
- 22:23 — Recap: why constituency and personal connection matter more than ever
- 26:19 — Bonus benchmark findings: the best day and time to send advocacy emails
Full Transcript
Anna van Erven
Hello, everyone! Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Anna, and I am the Advocacy and Policy Content Strategist at FiscalNote. Today's webinar is brought to you by VoterVoice. VoterVoice is part of a larger suite of tools that can really help you expand your policy intelligence. In addition to running your advocacy campaigns, you can also track policy data through PolicyNote and get expert analysis on what's happening federally and in Congress through our award-winning reporters at CQ and Roll Call.
I am joined today by Paul Ellender, who is our Senior Product Manager. Paul has been with VoterVoice for a very long time, and we are very lucky to have him join us today. He has a lot of experience, and I think you're going to get a lot of value from the tips he has to offer. So let's dive in, shall we, Paul?
Paul Ellender
Let's do it!
Anna van Erven
We're here today because we just recently published the 2026 VoterVoice Benchmark Report. What we do in that report, for those of you who aren't familiar, is look at all of the data across our users and report on those trends so that you can compare and contrast the success of your campaigns with the metrics of our users.
Here's what we found that was really interesting. The through line is that more messages are not earning more attention. This year, we saw a 15% increase in the number of emails that were sent, and a 42% increase in the total number of text messages that were sent year over year. But here's the surprising thing, and this really did surprise me: open rates and action rates softened.
We know that the messages landed in inboxes. There was no shift with our deliverability rates — the rate at which our campaigns were delivered into inboxes didn't change. So messages are reaching inboxes, but audiences are not responding.
And that begs the question: why? Why is attention shrinking? Paul and I met earlier to brainstorm and think through this.
I did a little bit of research and digging about what's going on in terms of technology and content production, and here are some interesting statistics that I found.
From the Litmus State of Email report, we found that there's a huge increase in the speed at which people are producing email campaigns. 78% of teams reported that they can do an email in 3 days. Just 2 years ago, 62% of people needed at least 2 weeks. That is a hugely accelerated timeline.
No surprise here, the volume of emails being sent is increasing year over year — by 2027, it's projected that we'll have 408 billion emails sent in the year. That's bananoramas.
And here's the other thing, when looking at the Adobe Digital Trends Report. We know digital tools are changing, so we have all this increased production. Well, what kind of tools are we using? AI, obviously — and 76% of organizations said that generative AI has helped them improve the volume and the speed of their content production.
So, Paul, help me pull all of this together. We've got more content, it's being produced faster, we've got a lot more people competing for the same limited attention, and AI could potentially be accelerating that effect.
Have you heard that happening out in the field when you've talked with folks, either at trade shows or customers? Is this something that you're seeing as well?
Paul Ellender
Yeah, for sure, and thanks, Anna, for the intro. Hey, everybody who's watching and listening, it's nice to see you. I've been off working on PolicyNote for a bit now, but I'm happy to come and talk about VoterVoice for a little bit with everybody as well.
I attended the PAC Advocacy Conference a little earlier this year, and the topic of the short presentation I gave there was actually about how, while there's a lot of benefits to AI, we do need to be judicious in how we use it for grassroots advocacy because of this problem. It is easier than ever to generate content, especially text content. Any LLM in the market can generate this content very easily, at mass and at scale. And what has online grassroots advocacy relied on a lot over the years? Mass-generated emails, at scale, sent to elected officials to sway them.
So I think what I have heard, and what I continue to see, is a shift in how organizations are thinking about how they run their grassroots efforts. They're not stopping the grassroots campaigns that they are doing through VoterVoice or tools like VoterVoice. Instead, they're shifting their strategies to be a little more focused on meeting in person. What are the personal relationships that you have with the legislators? How can you make sure that you're getting your message in front of just the right audience, with the right message, at the right time, in order to make a difference? And the organizations that are doing that really well, I think, are generally reaping the benefits of doing that.
Anna van Erven
So if you hear that and panic, don't — because Paul is going to show us special features inside of VoterVoice that can help you do all of those things. I'm sure hearing those words — right people, right time, right message — sometimes it's easier said than done. So we're actually going to do it and show you how easy it can be.
Following up on the things that Paul mentioned, the advocacy teams that are most successful have a different approach. It's a three-step strategy.
The first one is: instead of starting with your list, start with the lawmakers, and then build your list around them. Identify the lawmakers who are going to move the vote.
The second is find the right messenger. Like Paul talked about relationships — use your contacts as a networking opportunity. Who can introduce you? Who can help you convey your message?
Third is make the message relevant. That comes down to personalization and giving people a real reason to care. We are not advocating the spray and pray method — mass sending a message to everyone and just hoping they care enough to act. Let's give them a reason to care. Let's highlight those personal connections.
So let's get into the first one: target the right lawmakers.
As I said, you want to start not with your list, but with: okay, who actually can make a difference? The most obvious Tier 1 type of legislators are going to be the folks within the jurisdiction where a pivotal vote will be happening, and anyone who has any kind of leadership influence. That's going to be your Tier 1. But then there might be likely champions who can persuade other colleagues or be an advocate in the future — you want to identify those as well. And then you might have a Tier 3, just general broad awareness: maybe legislators that have a lot of experience in this topic, that are very passionate, and can help you build relationships with lawmakers in your jurisdiction.
So, Paul, I think you're going to show us how to do this in VoterVoice.
Paul Ellender
Yeah, so I'm going to hop out here for a second into VoterVoice and talk about a few different things. I'm just in a demo system right now, but I wanted to show a couple of things real quick based on what Anna's talking about.
First, just so everybody knows you can do this: when you go to build campaigns in VoterVoice, and you go to target those campaigns, one of the things you can do very easily is target based on how a bill has been sponsored or voted on. When you target based on bill sponsorship or by voting status, VoterVoice is going to automatically keep those lists up to date. So as new sponsors come on, as they come off, they'll get targeted automatically. You could also use this as a base to build on top of — you can get who sponsored the bill, who's voted on something, and maybe target that a little more narrowly.
The other tool relevant to this is scorecards. In VoterVoice, you can score elected officials based on how they have voted on key provisions that you care about, as opposed to how you wanted them to vote. This is hooked into the FiscalNote bill data at the federal and state level. To add new ones, you can just add them through the UI here — search for the bill you want, add it, and we'll automatically pull in either the roll call votes or the sponsorship. You can do both through here. And just as a side note, you can also add custom scorecard actions. So if you want to rate legislators based on whether they've attended events that you've run, or other things like that, you can give custom weighting through that as well.
And — I hope ABC's okay with it, this is a public website — this is one of the customer scorecards, just to show an example of what this looks like. This is useful both to your membership, so they understand who are the legislators who are most influential for your organization or not, and it's helpful to your organization as you build these campaigns to help identify who's most likely to support another piece of legislation that you are trying to get moved through the process.
Anna van Erven
That's really important data to have to build your strategy around. Your strategy could be to focus on lawmakers that are on your side, or to focus harder on converting or having a dialogue with legislators that maybe have voted differently than your organization. Whatever strategy you choose, you need solid data to test a hypothesis and build a strong strategy around, so that's really helpful.
Let's go to the next slide.
The second point is to find the right messenger. When you're building out a campaign, most people start with a list, and they think that it shows them reach. I'm going to challenge you to think about your list as a network that can show influence. Paul talked about relationships. While VoterVoice is really good at helping you with email campaigns, it doesn't mean you can't use it for networking as well. You can use your network to identify introductions that can build relationships with legislators.
Once you've identified those key legislators that will have an impact or an outcome, find constituents in their districts — obviously. But then find folks who are connected through a professional, personal, or community relationship. Maybe it's someone that's been affected by the policy in a concrete way, or someone who's engaged on that issue already. These are just examples that maybe some of you are already using, but I think the biggest takeaway here is: if relationships and human interaction are really important, how can I tap my network to facilitate that?
So, Paul, why don't you show us how we can use VoterVoice to help us there?
Paul Ellender
Yeah, sure. So I'll show a few things. I think there are sort of two directions where organizations most often use VoterVoice to build those relationships. One is through asking your advocates directly. This is another public site, for the American Medical Association — their Patient Action Network. They're asking their members to tell them if they know any elected officials personally. My college roommate actually was a page for Senator Cassidy back in the day. He's a doctor now, so he is somebody who has some sort of connection to that elected official outside of just being a constituent.
So this tool will help you identify those relationships. You can create the different relationship types you would like to have in here. Your advocates come in and pick a relationship type, they can give you some detail about that relationship, and they can assign that relationship. So what does that do? A, you get that data within VoterVoice — under people and contacts and relationships, those key contact relationships are stored here in the system, so you can see them and access them at any time. B, when you send out communications or when you build campaigns, you can also leverage those relationships. So when you run a campaign, let's say at the state level, and you're targeting a really important committee, you can activate your key contacts who have relationships with officials on that committee, even if they don't live in the district — because that key contact relationship gives them sort of an extra constituency in to that elected official to communicate with them.
The other direction that organizations do this through is building those relationships. Let's say your advocates maybe don't have as many connections with the legislators. The leaderboard in VoterVoice allows you to see who are your most active advocates — who's doing the most in your system, who's calling the most, who's emailing the most, who's really doing a lot of work on behalf of your organization. You can take a look at this leaderboard and reach out to those contacts directly. You can either do that individually through here, or in the broadcast tool when you send broadcasts, you can pick these different segments and try to grow those relationships. So you could say: hey, Paul Ellender, whoever that guy is, you might want to go reach out to Senator Kennedy, because you've reached out to him a whole lot, you live in the district, you own four different businesses in the district. I don't own any businesses — this is a hypothetical Paul Ellender who'll do the reach out.
So the leaderboard affords you a way to find a good base to pull from to start building relationships, not just trying to sort them out from the other end.
Anna van Erven
That's awesome. So the next point in the strategy is to make the message relevant, and I think this goes both ways.
What I meant initially when I built this slide is make it relevant to the constituents — make it relevant for your advocates — but it will have a domino effect. If it's relevant for them, their outreach will be relevant to the legislators. We have heard, and maybe, Paul, you might have some anecdotes: nothing is more frustrating than for a lawmaker to receive communication from someone that's not in their district.
The best way to cut through the clutter is to be really specific. When you are trying to craft a message to the voices that you think will carry the most weight, make it specific. Give some local data on how this will impact them directly. Maybe include a personal story of someone that's just like them — a business owner like the hypothetical Paul Ellender, someone they can relate to. Same thing with having a local voice, someone that's really trusted or respected in the community. Talk about the local impact directly, or talk about this legislative moment right here, right now — not broadly speaking, but very specific.
Those are just some suggestions on how to make the message relevant, and like I said, when it's relevant to your advocates, your advocates' response will then be relevant to their lawmakers. Paul, do you want to show us how VoterVoice can help achieve that specificity?
Paul Ellender
Sure, so let's go look at some topic tagging. Anna and I were talking about this before the webinar — we have a number of more religious organizations as customers, and for those organizations, their membership may be interested in a wide variety of issues. In some cases, you may have certain segments of the membership who really want to hear about a certain issue, and really do not want to hear about other issues that you are running.
Through topic tagging your campaigns, your surveys, the different sorts of content that you build in VoterVoice, you can actually help segment your audience over time as they act and do things on your behalf. Whenever you build campaigns, VoterVoice will suggest topics based on the content of the campaign, but you can also just create topics and add new ones directly through here. We have a bunch of pre-built topics in here you can pick from, but you can add them and even create your own through this interface. As you create topics, and as you tag all of your different surveys, campaigns, and petitions with those topics, your advocates get tagged with those topics as they act.
Another way that groups do this is to just ask the members. You can create custom fields to go on the contact forms, so you can ask your members: hey, what are the topics that interest you most? And have them self-select that way. So these are all different ways where you can get information about what interests your advocates have — where they're most interested in advocacy and what they're trying to do.
Just as an example, I'm going to go build a broadcast really quick. Here are some of the types of things you can do with that data once you have it. Let's say I want to find all of my advocates who are interested in a certain subset of topics. I can pick what is going to be a totally random subset of topics here — these are the topics that I care about — and that gives me this set of recipients. Then I can further subdivide this down by something like the leaderboard: maybe I want only my power advocates who have acted on those topics. You can continue to further subdivide this by advocates in different states, different counties, different legislative districts. All of those are searchable fields within VoterVoice for you to build these searches and find just the right, precise, targeted audience you want to reach out to.
And then when you're building that content, you can personalize it as well. Just as an example, I'm going to pick one of these demo templates. Within the content that you build, you can merge your contacts' data into those communications. That includes all the standard information, like their name, but it also includes custom field data — any custom data you've uploaded to VoterVoice. So if you've uploaded whether someone's a PAC contributor and how much they've contributed to your PAC lately — maybe you don't want to put that in an email, maybe you do! — or data like what types of policies they're interested in, or how many businesses they own, you can use that to personalize your messaging within VoterVoice as well.
Back to you, Anna.
Anna van Erven
Thanks! So, we've kind of zipped through, but I just want to summarize and recap the three things that we've seen really successful teams do amongst our VoterVoice customer base — and it is a perfect fit to the recommendations we make coming off of the Advocacy Benchmark Report.
Start with the right lawmakers. Start with them first, not your list first. Then really dig down deep into your contact list and help build relationships. We talk all the time in marketing about how I would rather have 20 really interested people read content than a thousand people for whom it's not relevant whatsoever. It's not a volume play, it's an engagement play, and that comes from finding the right messengers.
And also, make the message relevant. Personalization is king, but it also is a way of just being really authentic. If you take the time to make the message relevant, it will land, and it will resonate. People can see through pretty quickly if a message feels really generic or was generated one-to-many versus a personalized message. So make it relevant. Paul, is there anything you want to add based on your experience here?
Paul Ellender
Yeah, I mean, I think in general — I was at the National Conference of State Legislatures recently as well, and I spoke with a state lawmaker for a little bit, and I just can't emphasize enough that constituency really matters to lawmakers. As important as an issue is, if you are trying to get tons of people from outside of the district or outside of the state to reach out to elected officials, it is honestly not going to go very far with most elected officials. I think a lot of officials do care what their constituents think — at least, ideally, the ones who want to get re-elected should care what their constituents think.
But I do think an interesting side effect of all the advances we've had in AI over the past few years is that it matters more than ever to make personal connections, and to really make sure you're finding the right audience to connect with legislators. I mean, think of yourselves and your daily work that you do — I'm sure there's a lot of noise that you have to sift through. They have the exact same problem.
See How Your Program Measures Up
The full 2026 VoterVoice Benchmark Advocacy Report is free and packed with the data behind this conversation — open rates, action rates, send-time trends, and channel benchmarks you can compare directly against your own campaigns. Download the 2026 Benchmark Advocacy Report to see where your program stands and where to focus next.