Step by step instructions and files for setting up letter campaigns for contacting Australian Members of Parliament MPs using Action Network. Includes how to access files for setting up in Action Network, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel!
Introduction
Action Network is a fantastic tool built for progressive campaigners to engage our communities, build power, and raise the heat on decision makers.
It was developed in partnership with US unions, and opened up to the rest of the world’s progressive organisations. This makes it possible for many community organisations to access quality tools at a much lower price than alternatives, which is an incredible contribution to social movements worldwide.
However, some of Action Network’s built in configurations are geared towards the US and Canada. Letter campaigns, which allow people to enter their address and email their representative, are set up for various US & Canada governance bodies. We can adapt this tool for use in Australia by using an Action Network feature called custom targets.
Custom targets allow you to import a list of decision makers via CSV, which supporters can then contact. You can do this by assigning decision makers to different postcodes – however, many postcodes are divided between two or more electorates.
Action Network allows us to assign decision makers (in this case MPs) to electorates through the use of ‘shapefiles’ – basically a file format that allows us to refer to a shape on a map. Once shapefiles have been imported and validated by Action Network, we can import custom targets to electorates that make reference to the shapefile names instead of postcodes – and voila! The letter campaigns tool works for different Australian electorates.
Currently, there are files available for you to use for the following:
- Federal House of Representatives
- Federal Senate
- NSW Legislative Assembly (Lower House)
- NSW Legislative Council (Upper House)
- Northern Territory Legislative Assembly (unicameral)
- Queensland Legislative Assembly (unicameral)
- Western Australia Legislative Assembly (Lower House)
- Western Australia Legislative Council (Upper House)
Step by Step Instructions for Enabling Letter Campaigns to Australian Federal MPs
(1) Request access to the Australian state/territory and federal parliamentarian custom target import CSVs on Google Drive by clicking here. When you request access, please include a little about your campaign. Action Network and these files are for progressive campaigns only.
(2) Check that the data is up to date. There are a number of different reasons it could be out of date – for example, byelections and elections meaning politician contact data needs an update, or boundary changes which means that the map data in Action Network requires an update. Once your access request to the files has been approved, you can review when each jurisdiction’s data was last updated in this helpful table, kindly shared by Tim Singleton Norton and Connor Slight of Pew Charitable Trusts.
(2a) Check that the Action Network electorate shapefiles are up to date.
Australian Federal electorates have been imported as shapefiles in GeoJSON format into Action Network as of July 2024. The imported shapefile is available for download here – however, you don’t need to send this to Action Network yourself as it’s already been set up. State and Territory Government shapefiles are up to date at the dates listed in the table linked above, and similarly are already in Action Network and don’t require you to import them.
This data will become obsolete once any electorate boundary changes come into effect. There are a number of boundary changes that have been proposed – you can learn more at the Australian Electoral Commission website here. This page is maintained by volunteers – if you find that the shapefiles are no longer up to date, you can create your own and email them to Action Network by following the instructions at the bottom of the page (it’s easier than you’d think!).
(2b) Check that politician contact details are up to date. Compare the date the files were last updated in this table against the dates of any elections or byelections that may have occurred since. If you find anything out of date and you can update it, please do, and let me know.
If you’d like to assist in keeping these files up to date or you notice any errors, please feel free to email [email protected].
(3) Import the CSV to Action Network. Download the CSVs of the jurisdictions you’d like to add custom targets for from this table. Then, in Action Network hover your mouse over the ‘Details’ menu item, then click the plus icon next to ‘Custom Targets’. From here, you can add the CSV file you just downloaded.
Note: Don’t make any changes to the columns in the CSV file. They need to remain in the same order, with none added, moved, or taken away for the import to work.
(4) Test it out! Make a letter campaign and test out different addresses, make sure you’re satisfied. If you notice any issues, let me know at [email protected].
How to Make Shapefiles for Action Network
This guide is handy if you want to make state or council electorate custom targets, or if the federal electorate guide above is out of date due to boundary changes. This guide is focussed on Federal Electorates, but the same process applies for state/territory or council too.
Here are Action Network’s help guides, which are really useful but not specific to Australia.
(1) Download up to date shapefiles. The Australian Electoral Commission maintains a helpful page called ‘Federal electoral boundary GIS data for free download’. For Federal MPs nationally, download the National file in ‘ESRI (.shp)’ format. This will download a ZIP folder.
(2) Turn the .shp file into a .geojson file. Action Network requires the file to be in a format called GeoJSON. To do this, first unzip and then upload all the files in the folder you downloaded from the AEC to this .shp to geo.json online converter. You can also do this by opening the file in GIS mapping software like QGIS and exporting/saving as a .json file if you’d like to, but it’s overkill.
(3) Choose a field you’d like to use to create unique IDs. A field is similar to a column header in a spreadsheet – the name of a type of record or property in the dataset. In this case, you’d most likely want to use electorate name (as the key thing that differentiates the different regions).
To find out what the electorate name field is called, you can open the .geojson file in a text app and see what precedes electorate name for the first electorate. In the example below, the first electorate is Banks, and the field name just before it is “CED_NAME21”. You can also open the file in GIS Mapping software like QGIS and review the properties to identify which field you’d like to use, but once again, you shouldn’t really need to.
(4) Email your .json file to Action Network saying you want to use a shapefile to create custom targets, and let them know which field you would like used to create unique IDs – in the example above, “CED_NAME21”. They’ll take a week or so to set this up, so make sure to do it in advance of when you need to send out a letter campaign.
(5) You’re finished! Once Action Network support gets back to you with a green light, you can then get onto importing your custom targets (MPs and their contact details) using your new shapefile data.
(6) Share the up to date shapefiles with the Commons Library! If you’ve found this guide useful, and you’d like to contribute so that progressive campaigns aren’t recreating the same datasets over and over, please consider sharing the files you’ve made with the Commons librarians so we can include them on this webpage.
You can also email [email protected] with questions and updates. Thanks to Tim Singleton Norton & Connor Slight of Pew Charitable Trusts for their contributions.
Explore Further
- Digital Campaigning
- How to Contact Australian Members of Parliament
- Writing to your MP
- Email tips and worksheet when writing to or asking something of your supporters
- Eleven websites about the Australian Federal Government and MPs
- Working with your Elected Representatives
- How to get your Local MP to Listen to Your Community: ACF Community Toolkit
- Creating Change with Letter Deliveries
- Email Best Practices
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