Who Are You Talking To? Defining Your Audience for Call to Action Campaigns

In 2019, Seattle Indivisible had three very different groups receiving our daily call to action emails: experienced activists from the 2017 Women’s March who’d been calling Congress for two years, people who’d just signed up after a local protest, and members of allied organizations who’d forwarded our emails to friends who had no idea who we were.

For months, I wrote actions the same way for everyone. The result was predictable. Our regulars complained the intros were too basic. Newcomers complained they were too rushed. And the confused forwards never took action at all.

The lesson was painful but simple: a call to action campaign that speaks to everyone speaks to no one.

Start With One Audience

The biggest mistake I see organizers make is trying to write for their entire list at once. They hedge. They add parentheticals. They write “if you’ve never called before, here’s what to expect, and if you have, skip to the script.”

This is a mess. Pick one audience and write for them.

If you had to choose just one segment of your list to optimize for, who would it be? Usually, the answer is whoever represents your growth edge. For many organizations, that’s the person who signed up recently and hasn’t taken action yet. Their first experience determines whether they become a regular or quietly unsubscribe.

Write for that person. Let your experienced members figure out how to skip ahead.

The Confidence Gap

Every audience has what I call a confidence gap: the distance between what they know and what they need to know to feel ready to act.

For experienced activists, the gap is narrow. They understand the legislative process, they’ve talked to staffers before, they know their call matters even if they get voicemail. They mainly need the target and the ask.

For newcomers, the gap is wide. They’re not sure if calling actually does anything. They don’t know what happens when they dial. They’re worried about saying the wrong thing or being put on some list. They need you to close that gap before they’ll pick up the phone.

Map your audience’s confidence gap and write to close it. A seasoned activist who gets three paragraphs of “here’s why calling works” will skim and feel patronized. A newcomer who gets “call Senator Smith at this number” without context will freeze.

What Your Audience Already Knows

Take inventory of your audience’s baseline knowledge. What can you assume they already understand?

For an organization with a core list of trained volunteers, you might assume they know how to find their representatives, understand that constituent calls get logged, and have made calls before without the world ending.

For a newly recruited list, you might need to explain all of that. You might even need to explain what “constituent” means.

This isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about not wasting space on information your audience already has, and not skipping information they need.

I started keeping notes on what questions our phone bank volunteers asked most often. Those questions became the basis for my intro paragraphs. If ten people asked “what if I get voicemail?” that month, I knew I needed to address it.

Writing to One Person

Here’s a technique that transformed my action writing: pick a specific person from your target audience and write directly to them.

Not an imaginary composite. An actual human being you know. Picture their face. Think about what would make them hesitate. Think about what would make them feel confident.

For Seattle Indivisible, I often wrote to my friend Sarah, a woman in her forties who cared deeply about immigration policy but had never contacted an elected official before joining our group. What did Sarah need to know? What would make her feel like she could handle the conversation? What would make her feel like her call actually mattered?

When I got stuck, I asked myself: “Would Sarah understand this? Would this give Sarah the confidence to make the call?”

It sounds simple. It changed everything.

Segmentation When You Can

If your email tools allow it, segment your list and write different versions for different audiences. A new subscriber version and an experienced version. Separate tracks for people who’ve taken action before and people who haven’t.

Even just two segments makes a difference. You can write a longer, more explanatory version for newcomers and a shorter, denser version for regulars. Same target, same ask, different approach to closing the confidence gap.

Many organizations don’t have this capability, and that’s fine. Writing for one clear audience is still better than trying to write for everyone at once.

The Foundation

Knowing your audience is the foundation that everything else builds on. How you select targets, how you write your intro, how you craft your script: all of it depends on who you’re talking to.

Next week, we’ll dig into target selection: how to research and choose the right targets for your campaign. But everything in that post will assume you’ve already answered the question: who am I writing for?