Audience: Policymakers

Sending personal emails to elected officials seems more effective than sending bulk form emails. Further, given the low level of constituent messaging to politicians (at least in Canada) on climate change, there may be an opportunity to increase the volume of personal messages to increase the attention paid by politicians to the issue. This field experiment found that sending campaign emails to the Members of the Canadian Parliament asking them to make their own Twitter posts about climate change didn’t have much of an effect (neither when employing different issue frames such as public health nor standard environmental). However, follow-up interviews with parliament office staffers revealed that they’re more likely to pass along information to the politician they work for if there are enough (more than a couple) messages that are personalized by the sender—not bulk emails sent in the same way. Staffers also revealed that they generally don’t receive communication very often about climate change.