Use the Match to Target action type to collect messages from your supporters for a target or targets without sending the emails to that target. You can then repackage your supporters' messages and deliver them to your target in a different way.
This can be helpful in situations such as:
- you don't want to overwhelm or annoy target(s) with lots of emails from your supporters, keeping them on good terms with your policy colleagues
- you can't send emails to a target because they don't have a public email address, don't have a specific email address (eg Peers), or the target is blocking delivery of your supporters' emails
- you want to hand-deliver the messages to the target(s)
You can think of Match to Target as like Email to Target without actually sending the email. Everything else is the same. Here's an example of the process.
- Supporters enter their postcode. We'll match them to their MP/councillor/council leader etc (any of our datasets works).
- Supporters write a subject line and message as in an email-to-target action and click Send.
- The message is stored for you to repackage and deliver later.
You can also use Match to Target actions for custom datasets that you've added yourself (eg companies or government consultations) that aren't mapped to supporters' postcodes.
If you don't mind if your supporters are matched to targets by their postcode or if you would prefer that there wasn't the Message step where your supporter write a subject line and a message then you might prefer to use a Petition or Flexible Form to collect the messages from your supporters.
Match to Target is available on new Impact Stack installations. Contact Support to enable Match to Target on your existing installations. In most cases, enabling Match to Target can comfortably be covered (leaving some time left over) by buying a 5hr support package.
Examples of actions where match-to-target could be useful
- Collect messages to deliver to a target without using email – printing onto postcards, collected together in a single letter or package, carrier pigeon, projected onto companies offices
- Collect messages to send to targets (like council leaders) who usually don't have the infrastructure to handle lots of emails
- Collect messages to send to targets who may block or have blocked your supporters emails from being delivered
- Collect messages to send to a target who you think may view your organisation or campaign in a negative way if they receive a large number of emails from your supporters
- Collect messages when the targets don't have a public email address such as during an election campaign or shortly after an election
Access your supporters' messages
The data from your Match to Target (and Email to Target) actions is available on your Impact Stack Files at files.impact-stack.org
Inside your 'exports' folder, you'll see the 'target-messages' and the 'targets' folder.
target-messages
Submission data from actions which are Email to Target or Match to Target actions. This includes supporter email address, first name, last name and postcode as well as target and message data. If a message was sent to multiple targets, there is a separate line for each message.
You can use the mail merge functionality of Microsoft Office, Google Docs/Sheets, or LibreOffice to convert the messages from 'target-messages' into letters or PDFs.
targets
Shows the target data and the number of messages sent to each target per Email to target or Match to Target action. This only includes targets who have received at least one message.
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