Pivot Legal: Optimizing supporter outreach using recurring Twitter imports

Pivot Legal Society has been fighting for Vancouver’s downtown eastside community since 2001 through legal challenges, legal education campaigns, public engagement, and other projects aimed at highlighting the struggles and insights of “people living on the margins of society.”

Their Executive Director, Katrina Pacey, was recently recognized for her work advocating for sex workers across Canada and for her role in the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Canada’s anti-prostitution laws in December 2013 (Go Katrina!)

Pivot is an early adopter of NationBuilder and has made a lot of progress since it started using the product. However, they came to us recognizing the many opportunities for list growth, donor acquisition, and deepened engagement.

One of our strategies in our work with Pivot was to leverage Twitter, specifically recurring Twitter imports, to conduct supporter outreach. This is a technique used to import multiple followers into your nation through Twitter, and growing your list of potential targets for advocacy.

These are the steps that we took to identify key supporters through Twitter

You want to identify who your target audience is? For Pivot’s case, the archetypal donor would look something like this:

• Be interested in the legal system, justice, homelessness, fairness, specifically: policing, carding, sex workers’ rights, health and drug policy, decriminalization vs. legalization etc.

• Be influential: we measured this by klout score and twitter following

• Be interested in non profits and perhaps had donated in the past or volunteered in the past.

Identify Twitter accounts that may have followers like your archetypal donors.

• Everyone who follows @cStreet_ca seriously rocks, but may not be interested in social determinants of health (#sdoh).

Go to your nation > People > More > Import

• Select “New recurring import”

• Fill in the fields and plug in the Twitter accounts you identified in Step 2 and plug them in the “Twitter account” field.

You could also generate more leads by importing those who your Twitter accounts follow but that might get a bit unwieldy if it gets upwards of thousands of accounts.

When setting up individual imports, you can set a variety of data points on the backend in order to classify and tag individual records so that I am able to sift through them when you’re ready to start reaching out to these individuals. In Pivot’s case you can tag your individuals based on an issue or a task, ie: homelessness or email for gala.

Once you begin your import, the followers are auto-imported into the nation as prospects.

Setting an import limit can be helpful and make it easier to mine the data as well as help you remain within your NationBuilder account and usage rates.

When your import has finished, you can run a filter on the tag homelessness or email for gala and should see all the folks you’ve imported as well as an advanced NationBuilder filter looking for those folks that fit the archetypal donor profile you drafted up earlier, by filtering those who have:

• a klout score above x

• have specific keywords in their bios like #sdoh, #decriminalization etc.

Key things to consider:

• Shoot for a total Twitter import of 40-50k as your starting point, and pick organizations or people that are either allied with you and your work, or are hubs of conversation and information for the work that you do.

• Filter based on Bio content using the terms of the individuals you want to attract (and the more specific the better: searching for #sdoh instead of justice)

• Make functional work lists of 20-50 targeted leads based on your filter for organizers.

• Log your Twitter outreach in your nation to determine who stays and who goes.

• Get rid of the dead weight, unhook the automatic imports that brought all those leads in originally, or find them in your nation again the next day.