Fireside State Best Practice: Using Issue Codes to Target Unique Individuals

Here's are two scenarios our client offices face frequently:

1. You want to send a 499 to a new constituent who has never received a 499 to before.

2. You have a robust 499 program and are working to set up several bulk mailings using the same audience but don't want constituents to receive more than one (or a few) in any one year.

If you’re trying to accomplish this solely with audiences alone, it can be quite complicated, but it needn't be if you embrace the use of issue codes! To do this, we recommend the following:

1. Create issue codes for your mass mailings, whether a 499, 199, or 1,999, and use a sensible naming scheme that’s organized and easy to follow. We recommend using larger macro issues for a broader mass mailing program in conjunction with more targeted ones that note a specific mailer:

   1. “499_2020” or “Summer 2020 499s.”

      1. The macro issues allow you to group more than one set of 499 recipients under one issue and gives you the ability to easily exclude them all from an audience, which is hugely helpful when trying to find people you haven’t yet messaged.

   2. “2020 499 Immigration” and “2020 499 Taxes”

      1. These micro issues keep your system organized and ensure you know which constituents received specific mass mailings. If you are also using a unique form letter for each and every mass mailer, that will help keep you organized as well.

   3. Note: When creating macro and micro issues for mass mailers, make sure to nest the micro (children) issues underneath the macro (parent) issues. This will keep your issues page clean and tidy! For example, your issue hierarchy should look like this:

      1. 499_2020

         1. 2020 499 Immigration

         2. 2020 499 Taxes

         3. 2020 499 Infrastructure

2. The next step is to add the issue code(s) as an exclusion to your audience. If you’re using a macro issue like “2020 499s,” you should only need to add it to the audience once, and then you’re good to go for each bulk mailing you create. Remember that it’s OK to create an audience that’s 10,000 or 20,000 people large. By adding the issue as an exclusion, you can keep creating new bulk mailings from this audience, and as long as you take the step below each time you create a new bulk mailing, you’ll pull a new set of unique constituents.

   1. If you’re sending out bulk mailings only via email, please please please do yourself a favor and exclude “Email > Does not have a value” from the audience. This will immediately pull out all people records with no email on file, and it’ll help our bulk mailing tool process faster! Efficient audiences make for efficient work.

3. Now that the issue code exists and you’ve excluded it from your audience, it’s time to create the bulk mailing. When creating a bulk mailing, add that issue code to the bulk mailing in the tagging section during setup. This will ensure that each mail item - and thus constituent - is tagged with the issue code used. You can tag more than one issue code to a bulk mailing, so it’s an opportunity to tag a macro and a micro issue tag.

4. As that bulk mailing finishes processing, those people with new mail items that are tagged with the issue will be automatically excluded from your original audience (as long as the issue tag you used is actually listed in the exclusions). Assuming you targeted a list of large group of people, you can immediately start creating the next bulk mailing and feel confident it’ll be a new group of people different from the previous ones.

   1. Note: If you use a different issue code when creating the bulk mailing than what is excluded in the audience, you will need to add that new issue code as an exclusion in the audience before you create the next bulk mailing.