Mailboxes by Dwight Burdette licensed under Creative Commons.

Many of you read GGWash for updates and analysis on what’s going on with housing and transportation in the Washington region. Many of you may also advocate, on your own and sometimes through GGWash (which we love), for more, fairer housing and more frequent, reliable transportation.

Having accurate, up-to-date address information for our readers and supporters is important to understanding who’s involved with us, but it’s even more critical to connecting you to what sorts of housing- and transportation-related things are happening in your neighborhood, so that you can support them (or make them better!).

Over the next few months, and more regularly in the future, we are going to be checking in to make sure that we have the right information on file for you. Please help us help you know about what’s going on where you live and update your address today!

Update your info

Some things that throw off our targeting, and make it harder to get relevant information to you about your neighborhood, are:

  • We don’t even have your address: We’ll be honest: Our data is not as robust as we’d like it to be. Lots of people sign up to receive emails from us, but don’t include their address. You can fix that :)
  • You moved, and didn’t update your address: Who among us regularly updates their addresses, especially with nonprofits? I myself do not!
  • You entered the address of any other place besides where you live (and where you vote): We totally understand if you use your office mailing address, for whatever reason. But if you work on K Street, but live in Deanwood, and we only have your work address, you’ll get emails about things that are happening downtown, rather than about things that are happening in Ward 7.

Here’s more detail on why we want to be sure we have the right information for where you live (and where you vote!).

What are you going to do with my address?

GGWash recently moved all of our data to a new customer relationship management system. We are using EveryAction, and it’s an awesome, incredible, fantastically dynamic upgrade from our old system, which we had been using since we, well, got a CRM in the first place. EveryAction has lots of powerful features that will make it much easier for us to organize you and, hopefully, connect you to your neighbors and elected representatives.

At the same time, we’ve been working on some things as part of our advocacy programs that would have been made a lot easier if we could target people to the ward level, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission level, or even the single-member district level. There are a lot of great tools that make that possible, but even the most effective tool won’t get things right if we have the wrong information for you.

Most immediately, we’re trying to get our data in shape for 2020 ANC elections, which are underway now and will be decided on November 3. We want to be able to connect our supporters to candidates running in the single-member district in which they live. Now that people can run as write-in candidates, we want to make sure that voters know who’s on the ballot versus who’s running as a write-in.

Update your info

Further, the District government has been more greatly relying on ANCs lately to provide input to agencies. For example, the Office of Planning treated ANC resolutions about its amendments to the remainder of the Comp Plan with great weight, and emphasized ANC resolutions over individual comments (though, of course, both were valuable, and we encouraged ANCs to submit resolutions while simultaneously asking readers like you to submit comments in favor of greater density, particularly in high-income neighborhoods). And, during the early days of the coronavirus response, Mayor Muriel Bowser asked ANCs to offer suggestions for where sidewalks should be expanded

So, we have been more regularly asking you to contact your commissioners in addition to contacting your councilmembers and relevant departments in scenarios such as the above. Lots of people writing personal emails that are somewhat in tune with each other is, we’ve learned, the most effective way to realize GGWash’s public-policy goals, or bring existing initiatives more in line with our priorities: more housing, more affordable housing, more frequent and reliable transportation, and more equitable land use.

But we need your address so that we can make sure that we’re telling you what’s up, when it matters—and to make sure your emails get to their intended destination. Our goal is get our address data up-to-date enough to be able to target our DC supporters down to the single-member district level. Our new CRM also gives us much greater capacity to correctly sort people by what they’re interested in, by advocacy actions that they’ve taken in the past, by events that they’ve attended, and by reasons they’ve gotten in touch with us.

For GGWash supporters in Maryland and Virginia: We have you in mind, too! While northern Virginia, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, don’t have publicly elected officials at the tiny, tiny scale at which ANCs exist, we can’t effectively deliver content to you, or organize you, unless we have the right data for you.

Update your info

What kind of emails do you send?

Like nearly all organizations that do any level of digital engagement, we have a couple of different channels of communication.

Of course, primarily, we talk to you through our publication (you know, the thing you’re reading right now).

Tied to the publication is our daily email, sent through Mailchimp. If you sign up to receive daily emails, you’re subscribing to daily-digest-style dispatches that aggregate our stories from the previous day. We don’t collect addresses or contact information when you subscribe to the daily email, and we rarely send emails to this list that aren’t the daily email. Currently, we do not add folks who sign up for the daily email into our core database.

Our core database is hosted through our new provider, Everyaction. This is where we keep track of your contact information, what you’ve done through GGWash (like sign petitions or attend events), and where our main email list lives. We periodically send emails to this list with organizational updates and action opportunities.

Historically, we have sent emails with standard nonprofit-y action-alert asks: sign this petition, click to send this letter, etc. Recently, we’ve sent out emails with reminders to register to vote. As I described above, we’re shifting our strategy a bit to more regularly encourage our supporters to email their elected representatives directly and personally, which is the basis of this data clean-up initiative; we want to be able to write Virginians when we are working on something in Virginia, and residents of ANC1D04 when we’re working on something in Mount Pleasant. We don’t send emails too often, but we’d like to send more in the future, and will hopefully be able to target them to specifically highlight action opportunities in your community once we have cleaner data.

Lastly, we’ve got an organizational Gmail account for internal communication. We maintain separate Google lists for our volunteers, contributors, and Neighborhood members. So, some longtime GGWash volunteers, supporters, and friends more regularly engage with us through Google lists than through email blasts. The Neighborhood is our donor program; if you wish to contribute financially to our work, you can do so by joining the Neighborhood today! And, if you’re interested in volunteering with us, get in touch with Kate Jentoft-Herr, our community and program coordinator, at kjentoftherr@ggwash.org.

Of course, we will never, ever share your email address.

So, please update your address with us ASAP — especially if you’re in DC, since we’re doing a lot of work for the upcoming ANC elections, and plan to further develop our Greater Greater ANCs program once new commissioners step into their roles. We will, of course, be in touch — via email — to remind you, too!

Tagged: about ggwash

Alex Baca is the DC Policy Director at GGWash. Previously the engagement director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the general manager of Cuyahoga County's bikesharing system, she has also worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in DC, San Francisco, and Cleveland. She has written about all of the above for CityLab, Slate, Vox, Washington City Paper, and other publications.