Telegram campaigning

Telegram campaigning is the technique used to gather political support (in the forum of UN delegate endorsements) for UN proposals. Any nation with two or more endorsements from other UN members or UN delegates, may submit a proposal. In order for a proposal to achieve quorum, i.e. reach the UN floor as a resolution, it must have at least 6% of the current UN delegates endorse the proposal.

Proposals stay in the proposal queue for up to four days after being submitted. The time of day that a proposal is submitted impacts how long it will remain in the proposal queue. For example, a proposal submitted early on a Monday will remain in the proposal queue until the end of a Thursday unless that proposal gets more than 6% of the total number of UN delegates to endorse the proposal. If instead of submitting that proposal early on a Monday, it is submitted late on a Monday, it will still expire late Thursday unless it gets enough UN delegate endorsements.

If a proposal gets 6% of the UN delegates to endorse the proposal, then it moves to the resolution queue and will wait there until its turn to reach the UN floor as a resolution or until the game moderators delete the proposal (which is only done if the proposal violates a NationStates rule).

The problem is that it is difficult to get 6% of the UN delegates to actually endorse a proposal in 3 to 4 days time. In order to get more endorsements, many proposal authors (and their allies) will send telegrams to UN delegates. These telegrams generally will ask UN delegates to consider endorsing their proposal. The process of sending out these telegrams is called telegram campaigning.

Many proposals fail to achieve quorum in their first few times through the proposal queue. Proposal authors end up resubmitting their proposals, sometimes making changes to the text between submissions. In order to increase the likelihood that a proposal will achieve quorum after its first pass through the proposal queue, the telegram campaign is often targeted towards the UN Delegates that previously endorsed the proposal. Many proposal authors save a list of the names of the UN Delegates that have endorsed their proposal or similar proposals to use in their telegram campaign.