ARPA did a lot of citizen engagement on Bill 24. Grassroots Manager Colin Postma says with the quick turn-around on the bill – less than 3 weeks from its first introduction to final passage – a lot of work had to get done very quickly. “We had a conference call the day after the bill was introduced, and put a bit of a plan together. We ran a significant number of Facebook and Social Media ads that went out and reached a couple of hundred thousand people. We got together a significant amount of money and put that towards radio ads; we had 400 radio ads that were put out all across Alberta.” While he admits there’s “some discussion” going on about how effective the campaign was (because ultimately the bill did pass), the campaign showed MLA’s in Edmonton that this is an issue that people are concerned about. He says in the end, that message was sent “pretty clearly.”
The primary way delivery system for that message was through the “EasyMail” system, which generated almost 32-hundred emails on the bill. The vast majority of those emails were sent over the Remembrance Day weekend, which was a long weekend in Alberta. The number also set a record for the greatest number of emails ever sent through that program in the shortest amount of time.
