Press & embargoes
Press releases carry a status (draft, published) and an embargo-until timestamp: internal until it passes, then live on the public press feed automatically. Drafts and embargoed releases never leak through the public endpoint.
Set a Sunday 5 PM embargo for a Monday rollout and the release handles itself — no one has to remember to push a button at dawn, and reporters holding the embargo copy see it go live exactly when you told them it would.
Newsletters
Each newsletter targets a segment (or everyone), and every send reports its delivery funnel — queued, sent, delivered, failed — per recipient, with an open aggregate. Start from a template, blank, or a duplicate of the last issue.
The funnel is the honest number. “Sent to 4,812” means little; “delivered to 4,756, 45 failed, here they are” is a list you can fix. Failed addresses accumulate quietly — clean them quarterly.
No blasts to voter universes, no SMS, no fundraising appeals — the office sends only to people who asked. The campaign side lives on Romulus, on the other side of the wall.
Opens & unsubscribes
Every newsletter carries a tiny open pixel and, on subscriber sends, a one-click unsubscribe footer — so the open rate is real per-recipient data rather than a guess, and a constituent can leave the list themselves without emailing the office. An opt-out takes effect the moment it's clicked and is honored on the next send automatically, no staff step in between.
Those numbers don't just sit on the send. Newsletter opens, together with events, visits, and portal activity, roll up into the engagement block on Analytics — so “are people actually reading us?” has an answer that isn't anecdotal.
Segments
Segments cut the subscriber list by geography (ZIPs), topic, or engagement, each with a name, a description, and a live member count that updates as people subscribe and opt out.
A relevant newsletter to 500 beats a generic one to 5,000. A “Garfield transit” segment that gets every 762-line update will hold its open rate for years; the everyone-list won't.
Subscribers & opt-outs
The list holds name, email, ZIP, tags, and the opt-in date — legally the office's own, never imported from supporter lists without fresh opt-in. The opt-out list sits alongside and is enforced automatically on every send.
Treat the opt-in date as sacred; it is the paper trail that separates a constituent newsletter from campaign mail. When in doubt about a list someone hands you, don't import it — invite those people to subscribe instead.