Overview
People for Portland was founded to address the city’s issues with rising homelessness, public safety, and waste management. The organization used Speak4 to execute a robust digital advocacy campaign to sway public opinion towards supporting real solutions and demand city leadership to get on board.
Treatments
Speak4’s seamless integration with Facebook Lead Forms allowed advocates to send messages directly to the campaign’s target elected officials without leaving the platform. Users clicking through to the campaign’s dynamic advocacy center were greeted with eye-catching visuals and an easy-to-navigate letter submission. In addition to our letter campaign, we employed our new Storyteller Mode* feature to collect testimonials from concerned citizens.
Results
Speak4 assisted People for Portland in driving more than 183,000 letters to elected officials and collecting hundreds of testimonials from Portlanders. The campaign has had a dramatic impact by encouraging local citizens to take action and changing the debate in local government.
“No question that if you’re on the receiving end of lots of emails, you’re going to say, ‘Okay, that probably is an issue’ […] they have injected urgency into local government. You can’t hear a public official nowadays speak about this without saying we have to come up with an urgent solution.”
Len Bergstein, KGW political analyst
As a direct result of these activities, the Portland City Council voted to hire 200 more police officers and expand their street response teams. The important work of this group is ongoing, but People For Portland has already made significant, positive change in Portland.