In some states, legislators don’t have direct lines – constituents have to call an operator in order to be directed to the appropriate legislator. The operator makes it difficult to have
patch through campaigns in these states. Lucky for us, we have clients who strategize and try new tactics to get voices into legislators’ offices without relying on patch through calls.
Healthy Wyoming – a coalition of business groups, community leaders, doctors, and nurses with the goal of expanding Medicaid in Wyoming – found a way to deliver hundreds of Wyomingites' voices to state legislators, without a patch through calls, by using our Story Capture program.
Healthy Wyoming called out to 16,000 Wyomingites and collected around 400 voices in support of Medicaid expansion. Here’s what they did with the recordings:
Using our transcription services, Healthy Wyoming had all of the recordings transcribed. The resulting package consisted of about 160 pages of testimony, which were then delivered to legislators to show the volume of concern in the community.
To make the biggest impact possible, all of the recordings were sorted by district, and individual messages were emailed to targeted legislators from constituents in their district/community.
Finally, some of the most powerful messages were highlighted with a word bubble handout. The best voices were displayed front and center for the legislators.
Since Wyoming is a deep red state, expanding Medicaid is still a work in progress.
Nonetheless, as we learned from a 2012 study titled “The Advocacy Gap,” even a dozen personal stories from constituents on why to vote “yes” on a bill can be significantly more effective than thousands of identical emails about the same issue.
Want to know more? Contact us about how we can work with you to cut through the noise, get real stories from constituents into legislative offices, and move your cause forward.
Take a listen to some real Wyoming voices: