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Embassy of the Republic of Korea

Personalized Action Center Drives High Support for International Policy Initiative

The Embassy of the Republic of Korea approached Edelman to build a grassroots network of Korean Americans to show support for the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement through direct messaging to their Members of Congress and community engagement.

Edelman's Grassroots Enterprise team deployed a supporter Action Center that blends advocacy-focused technology with a few strategically deployed social media platforms (http://act.koreauspartnership.org/). The custom Action Center encourages Korean Americans to contact elected officials and use social media to extend supportive messaging to their personal networks in the U.S.-Korean community. To date the initiative has recruited more than 12,100 supporters and sent more than 9,700 letters to Members of Congress.

Boosting Actions Nearly 50 Percent

When a supporter sends a letter to his or her Member of Congress, the Action Center highlights the geographies of the latest 100 supporter letters through an interactive map utilizing the Google Maps API. It's not only cool…but we increased by 44% the number of supporters who took a second action right away.

Secondary Actions

Experience shows that individual supporters who have taken one action will take another right away if the activity is meaningful and simple. The Grassroots Enterprise Action Center includes several secondary actions:

Meeting Maker

The action center prompts supporters to use our Meeting Maker functionality to actively schedule district office meetings with supporter's representatives (sort of a reverse "fly in" that can be used during any congressional recess or weekends) by sending a fax request to the elected official's scheduler. We scheduled more than 500 meetings using this tool for the Embassy.

Matched and Tracked Tweets

The Action Center also encourages supporters to post a trackable tweet of support to his or her congressional delegation. The tweet is automatically pre-populated with the Twitter handle(s) of the supporter's delegation. The ability to add a trackable Tweet to a supporter's profile enables us to identify Tweople Advocates for future messaging.

To drive further action within the personal and professional social networks of supporters, all advocates are encouraged to post a message to their Facebook wall and Twitter feed. 14% of all letters were driven from Facebook and social networking activity.

The Grassroots teams also drives deeper engagement through social media by posting updates to the Korea-U.S. Partnership Facebook page, providing their 6,750 fans the ability to stay on top of the latest legislation news. The Korean Ambassador, Dr. Han Duk-soo, also communicates to followers through his Twitter account and personally thanks supporters by re-tweet their Twitter actions.

Results

Deploying a personalized Action Center for the Embassy helped increase overall supporter engagement and empowered community supporters to take the appeal to their own networks, delivering a personalized appeal that drives results. We recruited more than 12,000 Korean-American voters from all 50 states to support the policy initiative by signing a petition, generated nearly 10,000 letters to targeted elected officials (reaching every Senator and more than 98% of the House), boosted supporters' secondary actions by 44 percent, drove 14 percent of all constituent letters to elected officials from social media platforms, and requested more 500 meetings with congressional district offices using our online Meeting Maker tool.

The FTA passed both Chambers of Congress October 12, 2011 with wide, bipartisan margins.