For most Californians, understanding what their own elected representatives are doing in Sacramento is way too hard. CalMatters created a personalized weekly newsletter to close that gap.
California has 120 state legislators — 40 Senators and 80 Assemblymembers. They consider ~5,000 bills during each two-year legislative session, and these bills impact almost every element of people’s everyday lives, from education to criminal justice to health care in the nation’s most populous state and world’s fourth largest economy.
To make state government accessible to everyday Californians, and to help them hold their lawmakers accountable, CalMatters launched My Legislator. It’s a custom, weekly report on what your state Senator and Assemblymember did that week — every word they said in public hearings, every bill introduced, every vote cast and more.
Some Californians don’t know who their state representatives are, so we built a sign up that lets you enter your home address and find out, and then sign up to follow them.
We knew that it had to be beginner friendly, so each newsletter takes a massive amount of information and distills it down to something concise that readers can scan.
My Legislator breaks down:
Every week, we customize what we share about each legislator based on what’s going on. For example, we highlight recent reporting from CalMatters and partner newsrooms if it’s related to the information a reader is seeing about their legislator. To build context for readers without overwhelming them, we rotate in information about lawmakers’ campaign donors, how often their votes align with specific organizations, and how they ranked in previous sessions.
Building My Legislator also pushed us hard. We built a system that dynamically puts together one of 3,200 possible newsletters each week for every single subscriber (we let readers customize exactly which legislators they’re following, if they want to). It uses a combination of custom RSS feed architecture, personalization logic, and district-level subscriber data. The scale and complexity of this project even pushed the technical limits of our email platform, leading us to make several platform-level upgrades so we could reliably get this highly customized email to our now more than 10,000 subscribers.
My Legislator’s unique voice stems from how, every week, it tears down the barriers between everyday Californians and their government, and empowers them with the ability to hold their representatives accountable. There is no take. There isn’t even a story. Just the facts people need to watch their lawmakers like a hawk, and to engage with their lawmakers on what they’re doing.
The incredible thing is: we know it’s working.
