Write Your Own Action Alerts

What’s an Action Alert?

Action alerts are messages that spur your advocates and the general public to get involved with your campaign. Whether by email, a letter, phone call or social media like Facebook or Twitter, action alerts can be used to accomplish a variety of goals. In the case of promoting awareness of and engagement around water access in schools, action alerts can be used to educate residents in your community about your specific local need and to strengthen advocates’ engagement with your campaign.

We’ve included an example of an “Issue Introduction” alert to guide you through the process of writing your own. Before we get started, here are a few general tips to keep in mind:

• Know your audience. This will help you determine the appropriate frame, tone, activation, mode of communication and messenger for your alert.
• Subject lines can often determine whether someone even opens your message. Make sure to keep them brief, include a sense of urgency and provide a preview of your message to spark the reader’s curiosity. There are free resources online that will help test how likely your subject line is to be seen as spam as well as other key metrics. www.subjectline.com is one option but do an online search to find the one that is right for you.
• Include the name of the person you’re contacting. Depending on how you are sending your message, this may need to be done manually or through a merge field from your online contact database. If a name is not available through your database, a generated term should be inserted like “friend” or “supporter.”
• Include a brief background or update on your campaign to reinforce your goals and help your advocates understand your cause. Creating a base level sense of understanding will connect your audience to your campaign and encourage them to take a specific action, like signing a petition or reaching out to decision makers.
• Clear action links should be included in your message. Using bolded text and call-out boxes can help draw readers’ attention to the goal.
• Include the state, town or county in the subject line and/or body of the message to make the message more relevant for your audience.
• Consider the story arc and narrative flow of your message to clearly identify the issue, how your campaign is working to resolve it and how the reader can get involved. Strategically include compelling statistics, links to resources and clear calls-to-action to help tell a story.

Problem, Solution, Urgency! Write your action alert in a way that first highlights the problem, then offers a solution and finally tells the reader why they should take action immediately.

Now, let’s walk through an example!

“Issue Introduction” Action Alert