Targeting State Legislators to Defend Public Education

This case study was originally published by CounterPoint Messaging, a SoSha customer. We’re proud to share their case study highlighting their organic social media + paid ads strategy for advocacy.

Key takeaway: There is some fatigue among organizers and the public around actions targeting Federal lawmakers. This campaign proved these digital actions work on smaller and more local players who are not used to negative attention online.

The Approach: 

With just six days to act, CounterPoint was hired by pro-public school advocates to stop Ohio legislators from overriding Governor DeWine’s veto of key public school funding provisions in the state budget. Using an approach that layered paid digital and organic social media, CPM produced and targeted a video that championed the vetoes and their positive funding impact on public schools. 

They trained a cohort of 19 social media users to effectively post and amplify the video and additional static collateral using SoSha’s customizable, easy-to-share toolkits that made it easy for them to tag and spotlight two dozen legislators who needed to be moved on the issue and demand their support in refusing to override Governor Dewine’s vetoes. 

The Result: 

While one veto was overridden in the Ohio State House, two of the overrides they campaigned against were not brought for a vote. (As of this report’s writing the first overridden item had not been scheduled for a vote in the State Senate.)

Two of the top tagged representatives did not vote in the affirmative and were not listed on the clerk’s roll of votes for the override that did pass. 

The campaign earned an estimated organic reach of close to 130,000 accounts with just 19 participants, creating over 160,000 estimated impressions. On paid media, we earned over 3 million impressions, over 2400 clicks, and a video completion rate of 79%. They built camaraderie and enthusiasm in our trained organic cohort, who enjoyed the experience and are eager to repeat their success in the future.