Since 1967, Washington Environmental Council (WEC) has been tackling the state’s toughest climate challenges. Their mission is to “protect, restore, and sustain Washington’s environment for all.” WEC has a long-standing history in their state as a leader in environmental advocacy work. They build and lead partnerships, mobilize the public, engage decision makers, and take legal action to enact and enforce environmental protection policy and ensure a sustainable future.
WEC accomplishes their goals through grassroots advocacy: putting people in contact with their legislators, through phone banks, postcard mailings, attending town halls, or other organizing efforts. They use action alerts to mobilize their base to stop bad policies and advocate for good ones.
WEC cannot be effective at connecting members with legislators if they do not know which legislative districts their members live in. Before they found Cicero, WEC used zipcodes to pull member lists and send action alerts. A staff member would pull all of the zipodes that were in a legislative district and use them to create an email list. But because zip codes and legislative districts do not always align, some members who would receive the email action alert unfortunately lived in a different legislative district.
WEC went looking for help on the Power of Us Hub on Salesforce, where users encouraged the usage of the Cicero Salesforce integration. Once installed, the integration began appending legislative districts to new and changed addresses in WEC’s database. Lucy Middleton, WEC’s Salesforce Administrator and Data Systems Manager, saw the immediate effects of this new tool and knew that WEC could now “target the right people and not just cast a wide net.”
The previous Data Systems Manager at WEC utilized Cicero’s District Match to update their entire database and get all members matched to their correct legislative district. After that, they knew that when they ran a new project, “it would be quality, accurate data.” Being able to target legislative districts has already been enormously helpful in connecting WEC’s members with their legislators all across the state. After they updated their system with District Match, they were able to tailor advocacy action alerts to members of that district with specific language and ways to take action. Lucy has found that, “using District Match has made WEC’s political work really effective.” Without it, some legislators would never hear from their constituents about pressing environmental issues.
This legislative session, WEC and their partners were working hard to pass a law to transition the state to 100% Clean Electricity. They knew that a few legislators were swing votes on the issue, and that they needed their constituents’ support to be able to vote for the bill. WEC sent out an action alert to their members in those specific legislative districts. It was a success and ultimately they were able to garner enough support to pass 100% Clean Electricity!
By using District Match to provide members with contact information for legislators within the action alerts, it was easier for people to take action that led to real results.
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