Affecting Change: How Modern Marketing Tools Build Ongoing Relationships in Advocacy
Q&A with Bryan Fratkin, Founder & CEO, Whistle Stop Digital
Bryan Fratkin is a native Washingtonian. He has spent his entire career at the nexus of politics, advocacy and digital marketing. But those worlds never came together quite the way he wanted them to until he founded Whistle Stop Digital, makers of SparkInfluence. “I was tired of stitching together off the shelf solutions that never did what I thought they should do. I never felt like I could fully leverage the data to run effective advocacy campaigns. So I built the platform myself.” SparkInfluence is that platform, bringing together the best of digital marketing, data, social graphs and behavioral signals to provide associations and non-profits a better view of their constituents and a clearer path for activating their relationships with them. “We’re the people you come to when you want to get something done.”
Q. What is SparkInfluence and why did you found it?
SparkInfluence at its core is a community building platform. We work with all types of groups — associations, non-profits, educational institutions and corporations — helping them build communities around their issues and drive users to take an action. That action could be legislatively oriented — say commenting on a regulation or tweeting their legislator — or it could be something as simple as asking users to share their story or sign a petition. Either way, SparkInfluence is the backbone these groups use for engaging with their audience.
What makes us different is in what happens next and is really the reason I founded the company. One of our sayings around here is, “Your advocacy effort is more than just names on a spreadsheet.” And really, that’s what we’re all about. For too long, advocacy software has been pretty simplistic — a user enters their address, they get a letter to send to their legislators and, when done, they see a generic thank you page. Even worse, for the admin trying to track it all, it was a slew of spreadsheets just giving them basic details on their advocates.
As someone with a background in marketing, this pained me to no end. An advocate just took time out of their day to participate in your effort. They clicked to the form from somewhere (email, an ad on Twitter or Facebook, etc), they filled out the form giving their personal information, they sent what could be a custom message to specific legislators, and after all that, the old software could only display a generic thank you message. Imagine Amazon doing that. You just made a purchase and all they do is say thank you — no suggestions, no “other people who bought this, also bought that.” Or even Netflix. They just spent $10M dollars a few years back to upgrade their recommendation engine so that when you finish one movie, they make the right suggestion for another.
It’s those ideas that drove me to build SparkInfluence. Advocates are more than just names on a spreadsheet. They’re real people with real interests. Organizations need to be able to understand that quickly and act on that information. Our platform helps with that, matching users to social media and voter files, identifying influencers and key relationships, capturing prospects, pinpointing users to their congressional and state voting districts and more.
Q. How are things going so far?
Things are going well. I like to think we launched at just the right time. There’s this growing intersection of data with a desire to engage better with folks that are interested in your effort.
Going back to the Amazon and Netflix customization example I mentioned a minute ago. The stat changes often, but I think it’s now at something like 70% of users expect a website’s content to be customized based on their preferences. The fact that SparkInfluence can customize even just the Thank You page based on the user’s information has been huge. We’ve seen a big uptick in follow-on actions for organizations that are leveraging that functionality. Folks take one action, the system suggests other actions based on who they are, how many followers they have on Twitter, where they live, etc. and now they’re almost twice as likely to take another action.
From an admin side, we’re seeing a great response to the platform’s backend. A key area is the interface. A little known fact is our platform is built entirely on top of Wordpress. That means that we can take advantage of just how comfortable everyone is with the software that already runs many of our client’s websites and almost 30% of the internet.
Among other things, other areas where we’ve seen a great response has been in our referral and prospecting tools. You know, a lot organization’s struggle with building their effort outside of their known users. They may have a set list that ebbs and flows but they know there are more folks out there that they just haven’t been able to reach.
We have a client that’s grown their list by 20% this year just by leveraging built-in functionality. With referrals, each user in the system gets a unique referral id. That means that when sending out an action alert email, they can attach that referral link and track back whose link was shared the most. The admin has a referral dashboard set up and can see the growth and reward those users making the most referrals.
At the same time, they know that there are people on social media talking about their issues that aren’t in their system. Built-in social listening means that SparkInfluence can look at the latest tweets, and soon Facebook posts, to see who’s talking about your issues and, if they’re not in the system, bring them in as prospects so the group can target them with ads or messaging in the future.
So it’s been fun to say the least. We’re helping organization’s build their stakeholder list and understand their audience better while at the same time, making it supremely easy for advocates to reach their message across to their legislators.
Q. Washington, D.C. seems to be an ideal city for your company — both the political and tech communities here are strong. Tell us how being part of this community has helped your company grow.
It’s all here. I’m a DC native, grew up in Adams Morgan. I’ve left a few times but the city keeps pulling me back. It was a no-brainer starting the business here. The talent pool, the number of just smart people with relevant skills and who are passionate about what they do, that’s here. DC also has this amazing, growing and vibrant tech scene. There’s a definite misconception of DC as this political cesspool. It couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a great city with a great history, and smart people changing the world in all types of industries. Couldn’t see myself doing this anywhere else.
Q. Tell us how the advocacy world has changed over the years. What impact has technology had?
I think we’re seeing a pretty seismic change in the advocacy world right now because of technology. And you have to credit consumer technology first, right. Back to Amazon, they moved quickly over a decade ago trying to understand the buyer so that they could better sell them products. Then about ten years ago, politics came along and started doing the same. Obviously with Obama’s campaign, the data modeling, the A/B testing, etc. In the old days you had reams of paper and lengthy strategy on what to do about the polls. That changed with technology where the data now drives the effort across the board. The saying goes, “if you have a donor, you have a voter.” Right, because that person’s invested enough to donate, let’s see what drove them to do so and what else they might be able to help us with.
That’s what we’re starting to see in advocacy, both from a specific effort level and an organization level. First the profession is modernizing. So you have advocacy professionals now whose only job is to run effective campaigns. Second, you have the technology that can help the organization across the board. For associations, that means that the data generated out of advocacy interactions — letters, phone calls, tweets, etc — can help the group better understand their advocates, with the data helping content creators, membership, event sales and more.
Finally the technology is making it so much easier for me to deliver the right ask to the right user at the right time through the right medium. If I know that this user only signs petitions, only opens emails in the afternoon and only if it’s on this topic — then that’s what I’ll send them and when.
Q. How are you preparing for a new administration in January? What issues are you thinking about?
It’s interesting. This is from a grassroots side, so outside the typical political sphere of lobbying. From our point of view it looks like similar issues more than likely will be brought up in the first 100 days, but depending on the administration, they’ll be addressed from entirely different viewpoints. An example is energy — depending on the administration, one side might push us more towards traditional sources of energy vs. newer ones. It’ll definitely be interesting, that’s for sure. So for us, we’re looking at what organizations are involved in those issues and how they may be approaching them. And of course, congressional and state races will help decide that agenda and what bills or regulations actually make it through.
At the same time, there’s still legislative work left here in DC before the end of the year. What bills are going to be brought up, what will be pushed through before Congress leaves town.
Either way, it’s clear the next four months will be busy for much of DC. Organizations are going to be thinking about election fallout — was one of their Senate champions just ousted in the election — and how are they going to deploy resources post January 1st to move their agenda. What interests me is in the discussions of how can the data they’ve collected help them mobilize their stakeholders quickly to address whatever might be coming down the pike.
For us, that’s what makes it fun. We’re a platform provider that helps these groups build their communities, understand their audience and, in the end, we help both the organization and the advocate affect the change they want to see.
Rapid fire questions — Get to know Bryan Fratkin
Favorite thing about #dctech
The people. There’s all sorts of different businesses getting started here and you have an amazing diversity of people doing it.
What song/music is most played on your iPod/iPhone?
The Killers. It’s just good music and it’s amazing how many songs they’ve put out.
What is the first website/app you access every morning?
Twitter. Gives me a good cross-section of what’s going on in the world.
Who is your favorite person to follow on Twitter?
Ryan Beckwith. I used to work with him. He’ll deny it, but I think he tweets a good mix of wit and political insight.
Three people living or dead you’d like to have over for dinner
Erik Larson — author of Dead Wake, The Devil in a White City, Thunderstruck, all of these books that are historical non-fiction that I just love. He does a great job researching and they’re fun to read.
Novak Djokovic or Andre Agassi — I’m a former tennis player so one of these guys would be a blast. They were or are at the top of the game, they’re great athletes, and there’s no doubt they have fantastic stories to tell
Teddy Roosevelt — I’ve always had a soft spot for the man. His story is unreal, from being a scrawny teenager to President, Vice President, Governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy and more. It’s like he hit for the cycle. The guy had at least four once-in-a-lifetime jobs.
