Your first round of outreach

The idea

Overview

The end result: each person on your list gets a short, formal email that opens with a sentence about their own role, connects your topic directly to their work, and asks for a short meeting. The opener is written per person; the rest of the email is the same for everyone and written by you. (The worked example throughout is one of mine — reaching a parliamentarian about AI risk — but swap in your own topic and audience.)

The flow, in order:

1. Have Claude build the contact list in your CRM (names, emails, correct salutations, roles).
2. Write your standard email once, and make it good.
3. Have Claude write a personalized opener for each person and export everything to a CSV.
4. Get a Gmail app password for sending.
5. Fill in the send script, test it on yourself, then send in batches.

Step 1

Build the contact list

First get everyone into the CRM with the few fields the outreach needs: full name, a verified email, the correct way to address them (including any title), and their role. These are quick to look up, so Claude can do the whole list in one go — and it should use sub-agents to research many people in parallel.

Emails must be the real, published addresses — a low bounce rate matters. Tell Claude not to guess addresses from a pattern.

Step 2

Write your email

Your email has two parts: a personalized opener (one paragraph, different for each person — Claude writes these in step 3) and a standard body that is the same for everyone. Write the standard body yourself and make it genuinely good; it is the heart of the email. Keep it concise, credible, and specific, and end with a clear, low-friction ask (a 30-minute meeting).

One sentence belongs in your first paragraph: a brief self-introduction and your ask (mine was "As an AI safety researcher and head of a citizens' initiative, I would like to speak with you about the risks of near-future AI systems."). It depends on who you are, so add it to your body yourself — Claude leaves it out of the per-person openers.

Below is one real example — mine, reaching a parliamentarian about AI risk (translated to English). Yours will be about your own topic and audience; this is not a template to copy, it just shows the shape and tone that worked. The first paragraph is the per-person opener; everything after it is the standard body:

My own email also ends with whatever disclosure my context requires (for political outreach in Germany, a one-line lobbying-register line), and where it helps, names a contact I had already reached in the recipient's own circle. Include whatever yours requires.

If your outreach is political advocacy, the Torchbearer Community's Direct Institutional Plan training walks you from your first email to your first meeting with policymakers, with templates and feedback.

Step 3

Personalize and export to CSV

Now have Claude write the per-person opener for everyone, again with sub-agents in parallel, and export a CSV. Each opener follows the same shape as the example: name their role and what they are responsible for, then connect your topic specifically to that field. Your own intro-and-ask sentence (from step 2) follows it in the body.

The CSV the script expects looks like this (one row per person):

email,name,salutation,personalization
jane.doe@example.com,Jane Doe,Dear Dr. Doe,"As head of ..., you ... [your topic] ..."

Step 4

Get a Gmail app password

The script sends through Gmail's mail server, which needs an app password — a separate 16-character password just for sending. This is not your normal Google password, and it is a different thing from the Gmail connector Claude uses to make drafts. To create one:

Step 5

Test, then send in batches

The send script reads your CSV, builds each email (salutation + personalized opener + the standard body), and sends them a few seconds apart. It runs entirely on your machine — Claude never touches your app password. Download it and open it in any editor: fill in the CONFIG block, and write your standard email (everything below the personalization, including your signature) into the build_email() function just beneath it — you can have Claude do that for you.

SENDER_EMAIL   = ""          # the address you send from
APP_PASSWORD   = ""          # the 16-char app password from step 4 (keep secret)
SENDER_NAME    = "Your Name"
SUBJECT        = "Your subject line"
CSV_PATH       = "outreach.csv"
TEST_RECIPIENT = ""          # your own address, used by --test
DELAY_SECONDS  = 6           # pause between sends

# Your actual email lives in build_email() just below the config: the
# salutation and personalization are filled per person; you (or Claude)
# write the standard body and signature there once.

Then preview, test on yourself, and send — one flag at a time:

python3 send_outreach.py --preview          # write every email to preview.txt (sends nothing)
python3 send_outreach.py --test             # send a couple to your own address
python3 send_outreach.py --send             # send for real (asks you to confirm)
python3 send_outreach.py --send --limit 60  # send the next 60, then stop

Every address it sends to is recorded in sent_emails.json, and already-sent contacts are skipped. So you can send a first batch with --limit, watch the early replies, then simply run --send again later to continue with whoever is left — no one is emailed twice, even if a run is interrupted. The few-second spacing keeps you well under Gmail's sending limits.

Then

After sending

Replies will start arriving — meeting offers, polite declines, referrals, questions. That is where the CRM's skills take over: run /process-inbox-[name] to sort the replies, schedule meetings, and draft answers, then /meeting-preparation-[name] and /meeting-follow-up-[name] around each meeting. See How to use it in the setup guide.