End-of-year recaps can feel overplayed: “our year in review” can feel like a rehashed list of moments whose fist-pumping freshness has since faded.
Don’t worry. The advocacy DJs at Speak4 have swiped a leaf from Spotify’s book and compiled the greatest hits from our most ambitious year yet for your viewing (and listening!) pleasure.
Scroll down to see the full log of our work in 2024 and listen along to the playlist here.
Our Year At A Glance: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” – Daft Punk
Speak4 set a precedent in our first two years. We eschewed the “one-size-fits-all” approach in favor of a tailored approach to digital advocacy. We learned what not to do from our years working with legacy vendors and instead sought to craft our platform to our partners while constantly pushing the needle of what a grassroots tool can do.
Since 2022, we have laser-focused on listening to and anticipating our partners’ needs to build features that drive real value for their advocacy program. This mindset led us to win the CampaignTech Award of Best Advocacy Campaign Platform in 2022 and 2023 – and we’re proud to have won the award for the third consecutive year in 2024.
How did we do it? We strove to take our reputation for driving value for our partners a step further by honing in on two aspects of the advocacy process:
- We focused on enhancing your external advocacy funnel to create even higher-quality engagements with targets.
- We got under the hood of our platform to further streamline integrations with your advocacy ecosystem.
Funnel Upgrades: “Car Wash” – Rose Royce
On the advocate- and target-facing side, we polished our platform to drive the highest quality engagement possible.
Our Product and Partner Success teams worked overtime to deck out our partners’ funnels with souped-up functionality that served them in the election season (i.e., GOTV and Click-To-Call) and beyond – all while conducting regular tuneups to ensure that our partners could “wow” lawmakers without fear of stalling out.
In practice, this looked like:
Local Targeting Rollout: “Hometown Glory” – Adele
At the top of the year, we launched targeting at the local level, starting with the top 100 cities nationwide.
International Targeting: “O Canada – English Version” – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Band & Soloists
No passport required: we launched federal and provincial targeting in Australia and Canada.
GOTV: “Free Bird” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Our Get Out The Vote (GOTV) feature was designed to maximize advocates’ lifetime value by encouraging activism both digitally and in-person. The tool – released well in advance of election season – allows users to be redirected to an easy-to-use after-action page where they can get more information about voter registration, their lawmakers or how to request an absentee ballot.
Click-To-Call: “Call Me” – Blondie
Our latest quality-boosting tool allows our partners to prompt their advocates to take an additional step and call their lawmaker directly from their device in a single click.
Election Data Updates: “Phone Numbers” – Dominic Fike
During and after the 2024 elections, our team leveraged a mix of automated tools and manual tracking to monitor all U.S. elections on the federal, state and local levels, including federal elections in every state and U.S. territory, state legislative elections in 44 states, 11 gubernatorial races and numerous city and local elections.
Reporting Updates: “Counting Stars” – OneRepublic
While we were under the hood of our platform, we pushed a batch of updates to enhance the basics of our reporting functionality, including adding:
- Recipient filtering
- First-time advocate statistics
- Time zones and date range granularity
- District reports
- Referrer columns
- StoryTeller UTMs
- Body of message in Message Reports
- Release Schedule Report column updates
- Usability updates
AI Letter Generation: “Writer in the Dark” – Lorde
Partners can now use our AI bot for improved content recommendations to take the grunt work out of letter writing.
Integrations: “Easy” – Commodores
We refuse to become a one-size-fits-all advocacy solution that takes over our partners’ tech stacks: we’d rather tailor our product to our partners.
This tailored approach allows organizations to completely customize their tech stacks to their needs. It’s up to us to create seamless, easy integrations that help data move through that tech stack smoothly.
Speak4 integrates across multiple levels, from platforms to people. In 2024, we invested even more brain- and manpower into our integrations to make them even easier:
Tech Integrations: “Easy” – Camila Cabello
Our Product team expanded and streamlined our integrations to make it easy for Speak4 to “play nice” with our partners’ existing tech tools, no matter the requirements. We now offer custom integrations in addition to our lightning-fast Zapier integrations with more than 7,000 platforms.
Our team also issued a series of reliability and scalability upgrades to improve the speed, stability and security of our platform. These included:
- Improvements in high-speed processing and backend routines.
- Serverless technology improvements to eliminate downtime on landing pages and action centers.
- Automated data recovery processes to shorten the waiting time for restoring data during server downtime.
- Improved uptime and security through a migration of hosting platforms to a Speak4-managed cloud infrastructure on a new domain.
- Automated notifications through downtime monitoring in the event a Speak4-hosted page goes down.
- Dashboard optimizations that crunch and track numbers so our partners never see delays, even if they pump millions of advocates through the platform.
People Integrations: “Peaceful Easy Feeling” – Eagles
Easy integrations don’t stop at the keyboard. We continued to learn from our partners and other experts in the advocacy space in 2024 and sought to integrate more fully into the changing advocacy landscape through people-centered conversations.
These efforts included:
- Producing six webinars with more than a dozen guest speakers from all walks of life – grassroots advocacy, government relations, corporate, political and more – on topics such as corporate advocacy, the Lame Duck session and predictions for 2025.
- Issuing reports and white papers with insights from political playbooks, corporate advocacy strategy and internal findings collected from our own campaigns to help our partners stay proactive in a rapidly changing advocacy environment.
- Getting facetime with our partners, colleagues and other advocacy industry thought leaders at conferences, meetings, lunches and other events across the nation, including a half-day event hosted at Speak4’s HQ to help organizations maximize their advocacy capabilities ahead of the election.
And, as always – our partners remained our number one priority through it all. We maintained a 24-hour turnaround time on closing all tickets to ensure our users feel heard and conducted Strategy Sessions to offer general assistance, personalized campaign optimizations and work through feedback.
Summary: “The New Year” – Death Cab For Cutie
As we prepare for a new Congress, a returning Administration and changes at the state and local levels, we are thankful for the partnership, collaboration and dialogues that powered our work in 2024.
We fortified advocacy funnels, we invested in integrations, and now – we look forward to further improving our tool in 2025.
Here’s to a new year of listening, adapting and growing. We’ll be back in your earbuds in 2025.