Advocacy Upgrade = Best News Of 2017 (So Far)

Luminate Advocacy will get an upgrade In the upcoming Luminate Online 17.1 release in January. Infrastructure upgrades will let us improve advocacy deliverability to the hardest-to-reach contacts in our government. I know, you hear “infrastructure upgrades” and your brain thinks, “Are they fixing bridges and building new roads?” And if we were the Department of Transportation, that might be true. Blackbaud's Luminate Online infrastructure updates add technology and methods to guarantee your constituent's messages reach those once hard-to-reach targets.

If you’ve worked in the advocacy space for some time, you know some elected officials are harder to reach than others. I’m specifically talking about our Federal Senators. In 2016, Luminate Advocacy began using the Communicating with Congress (CWC) service to facilitate communication across a set of standardized protocols with members of the House of Representatives. With that integration we saw our House of Representatives deliverability jump to 100%. 

While some initiatives have been made to get the Senate onboard with a CWC type approach, this effort hasn’t moved quickly enough for us. So, we decided to not to wait. We did a big analysis of our internal processes for delivering messages to elected officials via webforms, emails and faxes in 2016. The results of this research lead us to enhance some of our delivery methods to ensure all your messages reach their targets during this critical time period. The infrastructure work we put into this release builds the foundation for us to move toward the next generation of Luminate Advocacy. 

In an effort of transparency, we’ll be moving towards 100% deliverability over the course of January and February for some of the hardest-to-hit targets we’ve identified over the past year. We'll move targets to the new delivery method in "waves" (groups) over the course of the next few months. This lets us test our new methods and then roll them out to you. If you find some targets are still especially difficult to hit, please let us know. File a Support ticket with this information and we’ll dig into it quickly.  One big change you will see is the requirement for phone number on all alerts.  This is a new requirement that is necessary across the board in order to ensure our deliverability across the board.  This is a small change, but one that we haven't found impacting the conversion rate on taking an action alert.

We expect to release roughly five waves (groups of targets) after the 17.1 "infrastructure enhancements" go live. We'll add dates for these waves soon.

Here are the waves and the targets that'll be included in each group:

Wave 1 - 20 Senators that work only sometimes (listed below) Wave 3 - Rest of Senate that we’ve received Support cases on for low deliverability

Wave 4 - State Senates

Wave 5 - Last of Senate officials we deem fall below our target deliverability range

This work has taken us a few months to build and test. We appreciate your patience as we roll this out to all Luminate customers and for all government targets. We invite your continued partnership as we move forward, addressing new targets that may suddenly become hard to reach. That’s why we ask that you reach out to Support and let us know.

The work we are doing now lays the the foundation for the "next generation" of Luminate Advocacy and ensures we do our best to deliver at 100% across the board. In subsequent updates, I’ll share more on the future path of Advocacy and new tools and features you'll see in Luminate Beta.

Let’s keep on pushing forward and moving the needle together in the advocacy space. You've got me and my team as some of *your* biggest advocates in the upcoming year.

Ryan O'Keefe
Product Manager, Luminate Online