When Ariadne Vromen and I started talking about researching civil society organisation activity in the 2025 federal election, one of the methods of analysis that I wanted to add (from what she and Serin Loane had done in 2022) was the supporter emails these organisations send.
In my mind, CSOs use emails as a key mobilisation tool. The people on these e-lists (besides the inevitable lurkers like me) are there following some kind of positive interaction with that organisation – they’ve signed a petition, made a donation, attended an event, at the very least they’ve signed up for updates.
Typically, CSOs email their supporter lists either to mobilse them, through some kind of “call to action”, or to pass on information about the organisations’ activities through the organisation’s preferred frame. With these supporters being actual or potential cheerleaders for these organisations, these frames are important. They are teaching the organisation’s supporters what songs to sing.
(Climate 200 fundraising supporter email on 2 April pushing the emotional buttons)
All organisational communications have some kind of frame like this. The difference with the frame for supporter emails is that they are designed specifically for the supporter, not necessarily for the “persuadable middle” that are found in more public forms of communications
The first 16 days of CSO supporter emails
Across the first 16 days of the election campaign, 28 March to 12 April, we tracked 74 election-related emails from CSOs to their supporters. These are based on emails sent to an email address that was created solely for the research, and we signed up to be on the supporter email lists through the CSOs’ public websites.
The most popular days for sending supporter emails was Day 1 of the campaign, March 28, when 15 organisations sent 17 emails. The ACTU send three on this day – all of them related to an online election briefing on the evening of the first day.
Politically, those 15 organisations split 11 (progressive) to 4 (conservative). Generally, across the whole period, we have received emails from 18 progressive CSOs and 5 conservative ones, so roughly a 4:1 ratio.
Removing that first Friday from the analysis, Tuesday to Friday appear to be the most popular times for sending emails.
Table 1. Day CSO supporter emails were sent – 28/3 to 13/4
| Day | Emails |
| Monday | 6 |
| Tuesday | 10 |
| Wednesday | 12 |
| Thursday | 11 |
| Friday | 12 |
| Saturday | 2 |
| Sunday | 2 |
The only organisation to send emails on both a Saturday and a Sunday has been the conservative anti-Greens and anti-Climate 200 organisation Australians for Prosperity. These were received on 12 and 13 April and the call to action for both of these was for supporters to donate.
The Calls to Adventure (Action)
My received wisdom about these kinds of emails is that the best way to increase engagement is to have only one call-to-action (or CTA) per email. Most emails received followed this rule. Even where emails had two or (shock horror) more CTAs, I only recorded the primary one.
Table 2. Calls to Action in CSO supporter emails – 28/3 to 13/4
| Call to Action | Total | % | L:R Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact Candidates (via web-mailer) | 5 | 7% | 1:0 |
| Donate | 28 | 37% | 3:2 |
| Enrol to Vote | 1 | 1% | 1:1 |
| Register for Webinar | 15 | 20% | 9:1 |
| Sign E-petition | 2 | 3% | 0:1 |
| Sign up to Volunteer | 8 | 11% | 1:0 |
| Visit Website | 9 | 12% | 2:1 |
| Watch and Share | 3 | 4% | 1:0 |
| No CTA | 4 | 5% | 1:3 |
Unsurprisingly, donations are the most popular CTA, at 37 per cent. This was even more pronounced on Day 1, when 60 per cent of the CSOs who sent emails to supporters asked for donations. More interesting is the 3:2 (progressive conservative) ratio of donations overall, considering that for the orgs themselves in the dataset it is 4:1. This suggests conservative CSOs are more likely to solicit for donations than their progressive counterparts in the context of this election.
Advance was the only CSO to ask its supporters to sign an e-petition. The only reason I can think of for them to have this CTA is to then ask the person to share the petition and try and get more email leads for Advance. I didn’t sign the petition to find out, because eww (David).
In contrast, progressive CSOs appeared more likely to have CTAs which we might regard as more “traditional” election campaign asks, including contacting candidates (via a web-mailer), attending an election briefing / webinar session (the Australian Christian Lobby was the only conservative organisation to do this) and sign up to volunteer. These may suggest that these organisations are more traditional CSOs than explicitly political groups like Advance or Australians for Prosperity.
(Leader image from the ACTU’s supporter email on 1 April 2025, highlighting activity from an ACTU Day of ACTU with a CTA to sign up for the next one)
Of the notable progressive CSOs who sent supporter emails in this period, the ACTU (6 emails) and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC, also 6), neither CSO asked their supporters donations. Instead, these organisations were focussed on getting people to attend online campaign briefings and to sign up to volunteer. The AYCC also had a focus on encouraging their supporters to enrol to vote.
Table 3. Primary Calls to Action by CSO* – 28/3 to 13/4
| Organisation | Politics | Emails | Main CTA | Main CTA % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACL | Conservative | 5 | Donate/ Register for Webinar | 80% |
| ACTU | Progressive | 6 | Sign up to Volunteer | 50% |
| Advance | Conservative | 7 | Donate | 43% |
| AYCC | Progressive | 6 | Register for Webinar | 67% |
| Australia Institute | Progressive | 3 | Donate | 67% |
| Australian Democracy Network | Progressive | 3 | Donate | 67% |
| Australians for Prosperity | Conservative | 4 | Donate | 100% |
| AYCC | Progressive | 6 | Register for Webinar | 67% |
| Better Renting | Progressive | 4 | Register for Webinar / Sign up to volunteer | 100% |
| Binary Australia | Conservative | 3 | Donate | 67% |
| Climate 200 | Progressive | 6 | Donate | 100% |
| Climate Council | Progressive | 6 | Donate / Visit Website | 100% |
| GetUp! | Progressive | 7 | Donate | 43% |
* based on CSOs who have sent more than one election-related email per week.
The supporter emails sent by Australians for Prosperity (4) and Climate 200 (6) in the period were exclusively about soliciting donations. This is interesting as these two orgs appear to be in direct competition with each other – e.g. 3 of Australians for Prosperity’s 4 supporter emails so far have anti-Teal subject lines. The Australia Institute, Australian Democracy Network and Binary Australia all have also sent more donation emails than other kinds so far.
In previous posts, I’ve highlighted notable differences between digital campaigning organisations Advance and GetUp! (i.e. Advance is doing heaps, GetUp! appears not to be), both CSOs asked for donations 43% of the time (in 3 out of 7 emails). Again, from my experience, this percentage is what I would expect a email campaign to send during an election period – with others relating to activating volunteers and sharing important information.
(Screengrab of Advance’s fundraising supporter email on 8 April – squeezing in all the messages)
Knowing how successful these donation CTAs are is a different matter entirely. In Climate 200’s supporter email on 10 April, a fundraising follow-up email with the subject line “FWD: I don’t like feeling helpless”, Climate 200 wrote “yesterday, more than 700 people chipped in and together raised $81,921,” an average of $117 per donor.
In comparison, on the same day GetUp! received 1175 donations for a total of $31,820, an average donation of $27 (GetUp! publish their donation data on their website). Their fundraising email on 9 April (the same day Climate 200s initial email was sent) had the subject line “What Dutton said last night can’t go unanswered”.
From this, we can clearly say that Climate 200 raised a lot more money from a lot fewer donors than GetUp!, possibly from a smaller list of supporters (GetUp! claims 1 million “members”, which is basically just the number of people whose emails they have – not sure of Climate 200’s numbers here).
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Climate 200 are better fundraisers than GetUp!. I suspect that the urgency and stakes around Climate 200’s donate asks – save Teals / elect Teals / we’re under attack – are a lot higher than those of GetUp!’s – anti-Dutton.
The Truth of the Matter
When it comes to thinking about the framing that the different CSOs are using, the analysis that I’ve done so far has been to observe the use of particular keywords from the four core CSOs – Albanese (or Albo), Dutton, Greens and Truth.
It was “Truth” that got me interested first. Back at the beginning of the year when I started signing up to all of these e-lists, I noticed that three of the conservative ones – Advance, the ACL and Binary – all seemed to talk about “truth” a lot. I connected this to framing coming out of the right in the US – Trump’s Truth social, and perhaps there’s something in that, but there’s also obviously a religious element to it.
Table 4. Core CSO keyword mentions – 28/3 to 13/4
| Organisation | # emails | Albos | Duttons | Greens | Truths |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACL | 5 | 1 | 1 | 23 | 60 |
| ACTU | 6 | 2 | 22 | 0 | 0 |
| Advance | 7 | 16 | 0 | 46 | 16 |
| GetUp | 7 | 2 | 66 | 0 | 8 |
Yes, the Australian Christian Lobby has used the word “truth” 60 times in 5 emails. It appears in phrases like, “vote with truth and conviction”, “spread God’s truth and light”, and the customary sign off from ACL CEO Michelle Pearse “In truth and grace”. This is a slightly different context to how Advance uses “Truth” (a not insubstantial 16 times in 6 emails), which largely resolves around the importance of making sure that voters know the “truth” about the Greens. Or Binary’s “truth” about gender (6 mentions in 3 emails).
(The ACL manages to get three ‘truths’ into their email banner (which don’t even count in the stats ‘cos they’re in an image)
The common denominator here is the idea of the “truth” used as an emotive rallying cry to spur people to action (in these instances in defence of some conservative ideal). For Advance, the truth about Jesus isn’t nearly as powerful an impetus for their supporters as the truth about the Greens is, or even just repeating the word Greens 46 times across 7 emails. The Greens are the emotional trigger to get Advance’s audience engaged and acting – whether signing petitions or making donations.
Of course, it’s not only the conservative ACL and Advance that make use of emotional triggers in their emails. For the ACTU and GetUp!, that trigger word is “Dutton”, although the ACTU’s 22 mentions in 6 emails pales when compared to GetUp!’s 66 references to Dutton in 7 emails – almost 10 times per email. This includes the subject lines, “Our movement vs Dutton’s wrecking ball” and “Who is the real Dutton”, two emails which contained 28 references to Dutton and six references of their own to the “truth”.
(Screengrab of GetUp!’s Day 1 supporter email, with 5 of 11 Dutton’s highlighted)
For what it’s worth, I think the idea of “truth” is horseshit. Having grown up in the Catholic Church and having the phrase “I am the Way, the Truth and the Light” drummed into me ad infinitum, I’ve been sceptical of the idea of truth since I started questioning the Catholic Church’s version of it. The way I see it facts are real – truths are stories that are created from facts, tinged by the storyteller’s beliefs. And the more power that storyteller has; the more people will believe that version of the truth.
Anyhow, enough philosophy.
What’s next?
I’m going to be interested to see how the patterns in these supporter emails shift over the remainder of the campaign. I’m curious whether the shift in polls away from Dutton will affect anyone’s strategy, or whether they’ll just double down. The main case study we’re doing for the research is based around climate campaigning / activity, so I’ll be interested to look closer into how those orgs are framing their messages to their supporters.
I’m particularly looking forward to seeing how all the CSOs frame the results of the election – on Sunday May 4 and in the following week. We used to call this the “claim and frame” supporter email, where the job was finding the most positive story in the results (even in a loss) and set a tone which in a way guides and regulates the emotions of your supporters.
Having spent the last five weeks revving them up – getting them angry or enthusiastic about Dutton or Albo or Teals or the Greens – there’s an important job to do in guiding how these emotions are acknowledged, validated and then to some degree parked until the next mobilisation.
There’ll be plenty of truth-bombs to be let off post-election, that’s for sure.
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