Emails with personal stories may be more likely to catch lawmakers’ attention

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Email is one of the easiest ways to contact policymakers, especially for researchers who want to share their expertise on complex topics like substance use, but can an email effectively foster connection? Researchers at Penn State recently found that policymakers were more likely to engage with emails about substance use research when the sender was sharing their own experience with substance use.

“There’s a great deal of competition for policymakers’ attention and very little research on which outreach techniques are effective,” said Elizabeth Long, assistant research professor with Penn State’s Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center and first author of the journal article published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports. “Our goal is to help researchers build non-partisan relationships with lawmakers, and connecting via email can be an important first step.”

The study involved email outreach to federal and state policymakers who Penn State’s Research Translation Platform team identified as “legislative champions” on the topic of substance use, based on factors such as their public statements, social media posts or work on substance use legislation.

This work, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Institute's Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction, involved five randomized, controlled trials where the team sent between 5,946 and 11,212 — depending on the trials — emails with fact sheets about recovery from substance use disorder, prevention and harm reduction to previously identified legislators. The emails either presented the information without a personal story, with a personal story told from the point of view of the sender, or with a personal story told on behalf of someone else.

The research team compared email engagement — measured in opens, clicks and replies — based on whether the email included a story, various characteristics of the story and whether the sender was the author of the story. The researchers found that policymakers’ engagement with the emails about substance use research generally increased when the sender was telling their own story.

The first two trials showed that when the email included a story about the sender’s own experience with substance use or the sender's motivations to study substance use, the fact sheet was clicked significantly more than the control email that did not contain stories.

In subsequent trials, when the email was about someone else’s experience with substance use, the email was opened and replied to less often, and the fact sheet was clicked less often.

“When the sender shared someone else’s story, engagement was not improved and sometimes hindered it,” Long said. “This suggests that when the email sender is telling someone else’s story, it is possible that policymakers may perceive it as inauthentic, thereby decreasing their engagement.”

Based on her experience with email testing, Long advised people wishing to reach policymakers to "keep emails simple, authentic and personal.”

Collaborators on the study included Jessica Pugel, associate director of insights and analytics, Penn State Research Translation Platform; Riley Loria, graduate student with the Evolution and Social Cognition Lab at University of Colorado Boulder, Taylor Scott, director, Penn State Research Platform; Max Crowley, director, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center; Glenn Sterner, Penn State associate professor of criminal justice; Charleen Hsuan, Penn State associate professor of health policy and administration; Camille Cioffi, research professor with the Prevention Science Institute at the University of Oregon; and Patrick O’Neill, predoctoral fellow in Penn State’s Prevention and Methodology Training Program.