The Email That Gets Nonprofits in Trouble Doesn't Mention the Election

You are not running a voter registration drive. You don’t publish a voter guide. You have never once put a candidate's name in a message to your supporters. So when election-year rules for charitable organizations come up, you reasonably conclude this is somebody else's problem.

Often it is. But the line does not fall where most people assume it does. Some of the communications the IRS has found on the wrong side of it never mentioned an election, a campaign, or voting at all. Some of what it found perfectly acceptable named a sitting senator and told readers his position was wrong.

Before going any further: we are not lawyers, and none of this is legal advice. Alpine builds and runs outreach programs, so we live on the operational side of these rules — what gets sent, when, and to whom. The tax questions belong to counsel, and any organization weighing a real decision here should talk to an attorney who practices in this area. What follows is meant to help you recognize when that call is worth making.

Two nearly identical ads, opposite outcomes

The IRS guidance that governs this area works through twenty-one examples. Two of them sit close together and are worth reading side by side.

In the first, an organization that educates the public about school funding runs radio ads urging its state to increase education spending. The ads cite statistics showing schools are underfunded. They close by telling listeners to tell the governor what they think about underfunded schools. They run shortly before an election in which the governor is a candidate for reelection. The IRS concluded the organization engaged in prohibited campaign activity.

In the second, a university runs newspaper ads shortly before a primary in which a sitting senator is a candidate. The ads say a pending bill would expand college access for state residents, and that the senator has opposed similar measures in the past. They close by telling readers to call or write the senator and ask him to vote for the bill. The IRS concluded the university did nothing wrong.

Read those again. The second ad is the more pointed of the two. It identifies an officeholder, states his position, and tells the reader that position should change. The first one never criticizes anybody. And the second one is the permissible one.

The difference was not the words.

What is actually being weighed

There is no list of forbidden phrases. The standard is what lawyers call facts and circumstances, which in practice means the entire situation gets weighed together — the message, the timing, the context around it, and what else was happening when it went out. Two identical sentences can land on opposite sides of the line depending on everything surrounding them.

Three of those factors are where a normal advocacy program lives.

The first is whether the communication is part of an ongoing series or appeared out of nowhere. The university had been advocating on college access as a matter of standing practice. The education organization's radio campaign was not part of any sustained effort on the issue.

The second is whether the timing points to something other than the election. The university's ads ran immediately before a scheduled Senate floor vote on the specific bill they were about. The education organization's ads were timed to nothing in particular — no hearing, no markup, no vote.

The third is whether the issue is one the candidates are already fighting about. School funding was a live dispute between the governor and his opponent, who had made an issue of the governor's veto of a tax increase for schools. College access was not distinguishing the senator from anyone.

None of that is about copy. All of it is about programming.

It is also worth saying plainly that nothing here loosened recently, because a fair number of organizations believe otherwise. A 2025 settlement in litigation brought by religious broadcasters was widely reported as the IRS stepping back from the prohibition. A federal court dismissed that case in March 2026 for lack of jurisdiction, so the settlement never took effect. Treasury and the IRS have said they intend to issue clarifying guidance for houses of worship. Until they do, the existing rules apply in full through the November election.

Your editorial calendar is a compliance asset

This is the part most organizations miss, and it is genuinely good news.

Two of those three factors are calendar decisions. Whether your advocacy is part of an ongoing series, and whether it is anchored to a legislative moment rather than an electoral one, are both things a communications director controls months in advance. Nobody else decides them for you.

Which means the organization in the best position this fall is the one that has been talking about its issue consistently all year. If your supporters have heard from you about housing policy every six weeks since January, an October message about housing policy is obviously the continuation of a program. If you went quiet in the spring and resurfaced in the fall when the issue got hot, the same message is a spike with no explanation behind it except the calendar.

The hardest part of rapid response is the work you do months before the news ever breaks. The same is true here. Consistency is not just better programming. It is what makes everything else defensible.

And then there is who you sent it to

The other half of the situation is the audience, and this is where we spend most of our time.

Another example in the same guidance describes an organization that runs a phone bank before an election. The script is neutral — callers ask people about environmental issues and nothing else. But when someone agrees with the challenger's position, the caller reminds them to vote and offers a ride to the polls. When someone agrees with the incumbent, the caller thanks them and hangs up. The IRS concluded that was prohibited campaign activity.

Nothing in the script was partisan. The script was clean. The segment was not.

That principle carries into every list you build. Targeting on neutral criteria — geography, or areas with historically low turnout — is fine. Targeting on party affiliation, ideological identification, or how close a particular race is, is not. Each of those is a field in a database rather than a sentence in an email.

Which raises something worth being careful about, because the wrong lesson is easy to draw here. Rich data is an asset. Knowing who your supporters are, what they care about, and how they have engaged is what lets you send someone something relevant instead of blasting everyone with the same thing, and it is most of what separates a program that works from one that does not. We build files with more than 400 targeting attributes and run 15 or more distinct audience segments on a single program precisely because that depth is what makes the work good. Nobody should read this and go delete fields.

The issue is not that a nonprofit has too much data. It is that a handful of specific fields carry an election-year restriction the rest do not, and the person building the segment usually has not been told which ones. Party identification arriving through a data cooperative, a partisanship score bundled into a vendor enrichment, a likely-voter flag riding along in a wealth screening — these turn up in nonprofit files constantly, often without anyone having decided to acquire them. If the field is in the file, it is available to whoever opens the segment builder.

The organizations most exposed are not the ones with weak data operations. They are the ones with strong data operations and no written record of how audience decisions get made.

What to do between now and November

None of this requires a new platform or a new vendor.

Keep your issue content on a consistent cadence, and resist the urge to go quiet and then surge. Where you can, anchor advocacy to a real legislative moment — a hearing, a markup, a scheduled vote — rather than to the general temperature of the news. Find out what is actually in your file by asking your CRM administrator or your data vendor which fields were appended and where they came from, because most organizations have never asked. And write your targeting criteria down before you build the segment instead of reconstructing your reasoning afterward. A neutral rationale documented in advance is worth considerably more than a clean-looking email.

The review most organizations schedule is the wrong one

Plenty of organizations handle this by having someone senior read the newsletters in October and confirm no candidate is named. That review is not useless. But it is examining the one element least likely to be the problem.

The decisions that determine how these messages land were made earlier — in the editorial calendar you set in August, and in the segment builder before that.

One last time, because it matters: we are not attorneys and this is not legal advice. If your organization is weighing anything close to the line, talk to counsel who practices in this area before you send. If you want to think through what is sitting in your file and what your fall calendar looks like, send us a note.