Animal Welfare Nonprofit Uses District Match to “Surgically” Target Legislators
The Animal Defense League of Arizona is a small, 32-year old grassroots organization operating on a shoestring budget. Their mission is protecting and defending Arizona’s animals through legislation, wildlife protection, animals in entertainment advocacy, and spay and neuter clinics. ADLA relies on dedicated staff and volunteers, and passionate community members. They do a lot with very little. Over 90% of donations to ADLA go directly to program services.
Strategic legislative campaigns
ADLA mobilizes their members during the legislative session to stop bad bills and encourage the passing of good bills affecting animals. To do this, they connect their members to their state representatives. They are “surgical” about connecting their members to the correct representative, according to Board Officer Karen Michael. “If you have large numbers of people calling legislators that are outside of their district, it can backfire — some might become irritated and ignore all the calls. It is important that legislators hear primarily from their own constituents.”
In the early days, ADLA would match their members to legislative districts and elected officials using the free lookup tool on the state website and their members’ zip codes. But this didn’t work for 2 reasons:
- It was extremely time-consuming
- Zipcode matching sometimes gave them wrong districts
The best tool for our legislative program
Karen went searching for a tool that could help. “It was really important that we were strategic with who we sent emails to and what our ask was.” She found District Match. It was quick, accurate, and affordable.
“I think it’s by far the best tool we could have for our legislative program.”
With District Match, ADLA was able to increase member involvement, reduce inaccuracies, and improve the precision and effectiveness of their legislative outreach. This gave volunteers time to do more outreach. In 2017, this helped lead to the passage of the Samaritan Hot Car Bill.
On the Cicero team, we love hearing success stories from our users. Are you looking to increase the accuracy of your advocacy campaigns? Try District Match today.
