From Zero to 50,000 Engaged Constituents in 12 Months: A Senate Email Case Study

What happens when a Senate office decides to stop treating constituent email as an afterthought and starts treating it like the powerful engagement tool it actually is?

Over the course of 2025, we partnered with a U.S. Senate office to completely transform their constituent email program. We moved them off a legacy platform, migrated them to one of our partner systems, brokered the acquisition of 300,000 new constituent contacts, and built a sophisticated engagement operation from the ground up — starting from roughly 2,000 migrated contacts and zero infrastructure on the new platform.

Twelve months later, the program had grown to over 50,000 engaged constituents, delivered more than 841,000 emails, collected 12,000+ survey responses, and maintained open rates that consistently tripled the industry average.

Here's how we did it — and what it means for offices thinking about doing the same.

Where We Started

The office brought us on to assess their existing communications program and figure out how to take it to the next level. Our first recommendation: move off their legacy email platform and onto one of our partner platforms better suited for the kind of sophisticated, targeted outreach we had in mind. That migration meant starting fresh — about 2,000 contacts made the move, and the rest of the infrastructure needed to be built from scratch.

We also brokered the acquisition of 300,000 new constituent contacts through our trusted data partners, giving the office a massive pool of potential engaged constituents waiting to be activated. The challenge wasn't just "send more emails" — it was building the entire ecosystem: sender reputation, content strategy, audience segmentation, warming sequences, and compliance frameworks, all while working within the realities of a Senate office schedule.

Most Senate offices have the budget and the authority to run sophisticated constituent communications programs using official funds. Very few actually do it well. This office wanted to be one of the few.

The Approach

Building the Foundation (Weeks 1–8)

Before we could send a single constituent-facing email, we needed to establish sender reputation with inbox providers. Skip this step — or rush it — and you risk getting flagged as spam before you even get started.

We ran 12 warmup campaigns over eight weeks, starting with just 106 contacts and scaling to about 2,350. Open rates climbed from the high-20s to the mid-50s as the sending infrastructure proved itself. By early March, we were cleared for real operations.

Targeting Over Blasting

With the infrastructure in place, we built 15+ audience segments based on policy interests, engagement patterns, and demographics. Every mailing was matched to the people most likely to care about that particular topic. Agriculture content went to farmers, ranchers, and constituents in predominantly agrarian communities. When the Senator secured funding for local schools, parents of school-aged children got a dedicated email about it — not a buried bullet point in a generic newsletter. Energy policy updates went to people who'd engaged with energy content before.

This sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many offices still send every email to every contact. That approach doesn't just underperform — it actively damages your sender reputation and trains inbox providers to deprioritize your messages.

Warming 300,000 New Contacts

You can't just drop 300,000 newly acquired contacts into your regular email stream. Each batch of the contacts we'd brokered went through a three-email New Contact Engagement (NCE) sequence designed to introduce them to the Senator's work, collect segmentation data through surveys, and graduate engaged contacts into the regular program.

We started with batches of about 1,000 and scaled methodically. By December, we'd validated the process at 25,000+ per batch — a 25x increase — while maintaining consistent engagement rates the entire way up.

The Numbers

Here's what twelve months of disciplined, data-driven execution looked like:

January and February were dedicated entirely to IP warmup — small, methodical sends to establish sender reputation. We ended February with about 2,000 engaged contacts and roughly 5,000 total emails delivered.

By March, we'd completed warmup and transitioned to real issue mailings, pushing past 3,000 engaged contacts with about 37,000 emails delivered. April saw steady growth to around 3,500 engaged contacts. Then things started to accelerate.

May brought us to about 6,000 engaged contacts as our NCE batches scaled up. June was the breakout month — we hit roughly 15,000 engaged contacts and delivered about 76,000 emails. July pushed past 20,000 engaged contacts with over 92,000 emails delivered.

August told an honest story: a three-week operational pause held us flat at around 20,500 engaged contacts, with only about 28,000 emails going out. But we recovered. September brought us to roughly 23,000, October accelerated to about 27,500 with our biggest monthly send volume yet at around 160,000 emails, and November pushed past 33,500.

Then came December: approximately 50,000 engaged contacts, about 239,000 emails delivered, and a growth rate of roughly 2,400% from where we started in January.

And the engagement metrics weren't just good — they were exceptional. The program averaged a 67.8% open rateacross the year, more than triple the industry average of about 20%. The single best-performing mailing hit 81.7%. Our new contact conversion rate — the percentage of newly acquired contacts who became engaged constituents — landed at roughly 31%, compared to the single-digit rates most programs see. And we maintained a 98.7% delivery rate across more than 841,000 emails, well above the industry benchmark of about 95%.

Even during the program's toughest month, open rates still nearly tripled industry averages. That's what happens when you combine quality data, strategic targeting, and content that actually resonates.

Scaling Without Losing Quality

One thing we're particularly proud of: engagement held steady even as we scaled batch sizes by 25x. Our earliest batches of about 1,000 contacts converted at 32–37%. When we scaled to 5,000, engagement held at 33%. At 10,000, still 31–34%. Even at 15,000 and 25,000 contacts per batch, we were seeing cumulative engagement in the high-20s — right in line with our targets.

A lot of programs see engagement crater as they scale. Ours didn't — because the infrastructure, content frameworks, and targeting approach were built to handle growth from the start.

It Wasn't All Smooth Sailing

We'd be doing a disservice if we made this sound effortless. Senate offices don't operate on predictable schedules. Recesses happen. Floor votes happen. Breaking news takes priority. Content approvals get delayed.

This program experienced multiple periods of disruption, including one three-week gap that required full emergency recovery protocols. The cumulative impact: an estimated 200,000+ missed engagement opportunities, 15+ campaigns canceled or delayed, and a three-month extension of the NCE timeline.

But here's the thing — we built for this. Emergency recovery tools preserved engagement rates after pauses. Ultra-targeted audience filtering protected sender reputation during recovery. And a list seeding solution we implemented provided ongoing protective infrastructure for inbox placement during irregular sending periods, with a +6.8 percentage point recovery the following month validating the approach.

The takeaway for any office considering this: schedule disruptions are inevitable in Senate life. The question is whether your program has the infrastructure to weather them. Ours does.

What Made the Difference

Looking back at what drove these results, a few things stand out:

Quality data from the start. We brokered contact acquisition through trusted, high-quality providers and ran every record through comprehensive hygiene — email validation, address standardization, demographic enhancement. Less than 1% invalid addresses at acquisition. That's the foundation everything else was built on.

Targeting over volume. Fifteen-plus audience segments. Content matched to interests. Geographic targeting for local relevance. The result was open rates 3x above industry average — because people were getting emails they actually wanted to read.

Patience with scaling. Whether warming a new IP or engaging new contacts, we never rushed. Every increase in volume was validated by performance data before we moved to the next level. This discipline is what prevented the deliverability crises that plague programs trying to grow too fast.

Content that connected. Victory messaging outperformed crisis content. Personal stories connecting policy to real constituent impact drove engagement. State-specific economic data resonated. Third-party validation enhanced credibility. We refined these frameworks across dozens of mailings throughout the year.

Compliance as architecture, not afterthought. Every element — data acquisition, content strategy, targeting, send cadence — was designed within Senate rules and regulations from day one.

What's Next

The foundation built in Year One positions this program for dramatic continued growth. We've already brokered 500,000 new contacts for Year Two — a 67% increase over the initial acquisition. Batch scaling is proven at 25,000+. Protective infrastructure is active from day one. Content frameworks are refined by a full year of performance data.

Conservative projections put the program at 210,000+ engaged contacts by year's end. Optimistic scenarios project 235,000+.

Either way, that's a program that went from 2,000 contacts and zero infrastructure to potentially a quarter million engaged constituents in two years — all funded through official resources, fully compliant with Senate rules, and delivering engagement rates that consistently triple the industry standard.

The Bottom Line

Most Senate offices are leaving enormous constituent engagement potential on the table. The tools, the data, the strategies — they're all available. What's usually missing is the specialized expertise to put them together and the discipline to execute consistently.

This case study is proof of what's possible when you commit to doing it right: quality data, strategic targeting, methodical scaling, and content that treats constituents like the real people they are — not just names on a list.

If your office is ready to build something like this, we should talk. Get in touch →