Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
Table of Contents
Introduction
About the Authors
1) Have an advocacy plan with a mission and goals
2) Fill your advocacy toolbox
3) Execute your advocacy plan
4) Follow up and share the results
Conclusion
3
4
5
7
9
11
12
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
Introduction
According to the 2014 M& R Benchmarks Study of the latest nonprofit trends for online fundraising, advocacy and list building, nonprofits are reaching more people through email, their own websites and social media. Not a big surprise.
But what is surprising is that nonprofits are not tying advocacy and fundraising together as a means of engagement. For some, it is the lack of tools and for others it is a lack of strategy. Regardless, it is no longer a question of IF you should, but HOW you should.
Policy shaping, often referred to advocacy or lobbying, can be an important component of an organization’s mission. While some organizations rely on direct lobbying - organizational leaders and staff meeting with elected officials and their staff - many non-profits and membership associations rely more on grassroots lobbying or grassroots advocacy. Grassroots advocacy is when an organization encourages its members and stakeholders to lobby elected officials on issues that are important to both the organization and its stakeholders.
Votility commissioned this checklist to help you win public policy issues. It’s designed to help you layout the steps for your own grassroots advocacy campaign strategy that will align with the legislative process and help move your advocates from activist to donor.
Photo credit: mrbenchmarks.com
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
About the Authors
Carole Mahoney, Sales & Marketing Coach & Consultant.
Carole has over ten years of experience as a growth strategist with startups and small businesses in both for profit and for purpose (not profit) sectors. She is currently writing her first book on startup sales.
Michael O’Brien, Founder & Principle, MOB Advocacy
With more than ten years experience as a state and local lobbyist, Michael has lobbied governors, mayors, legislators, state and local agencies and regulators in more than 40 states.
To help simplify the advocacy process, we have distilled this complex process down to four areas of focus with specific action steps.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
1) Have an advocacy plan with a mission and goals.If you are going to launch a grassroots advocacy campaign, whether it is local, regional or national, you have to plan ahead.
✓ Set the goals. First, what’s your goal? Do you want to impact the legislation, inform the public and shape opinion, or build a list of supporters for future actions? How does this legislation tie into your mission and business goals?
✓ Define the criteria and guidelines for which legislative topics you are going to research and track to keep your stakeholders informed.
✓ Survey your stakeholders and advocates to learn how soon they want to be notified of potential legislation and which legislative topics are of the highest interest to them. Know what content your stakeholders want to consume.
✓ Research and track the bills that will impact your organization, members and stakeholders. Use legislative tracking software to look at past legislation for an idea of what might be introduced in the future, or look to for ideas for sample language from other jurisdictions that you might want to use.
✓ List your resources for financial, technology, and human capital. How much are you going to have to spend and where is it going to come from? What tools do you have to help automate to save time? Which partnerships, affiliates and internal relationships do you have? If you are lacking resources, where will they come from?
✓ Create the communication plan for online, offline, grassroots, and grass-tops actions. How many emails, which social media channels, and what web pages are needed? Will you host an advocacy day, a flash mob, or a press conference? Who are your grassroots advocates, where are they located and how will you reach them (online, social sites or offline) and who are your top-level legislative influencers? Do you have a segmented list for these folks so you can communicate to them things you might not communicate to the broader stakeholders? Advocacy works best when it is a combination of activities at multiple levels.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
1) Have an advocacy plan with a mission and goals.
✓ Develop your messaging. What are the key talking points? Draft sample language for letters and emails to be sent from stakeholders to representatives.
✓ Segment your audience based on who will be impacted by this legislation and who has expressed interest in this issue.
✓ Train your team and advocates on the reasons why this legislation is important, coach them on the talking points for each of your segments, and prepare them for what you expect to come.
Your grassroots activities should complement any direct lobbying activities being conducted by your organization. Your direct lobbying activities start once a bill has been introduced, referred, considered and reviewed by committee. This is when your organization should be directly involved in crafting the legislative language or providing input through your affiliations with trade organizations, civic organizations or political action committees.
Engaging influential advocates and industry experts early on can help steer the legislation in a direction your members can enthusiastically support. Use legislative tracking software to internally notify you of bills by keyword or bill number and to keep you up to date on changes, movements and upcoming voting dates and history.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
2) Fill your advocacy toolbox.
If you’re going to successfully educate and mobilize people to win public policy issues, you will need some basic engagement tools. Advocacy software that educates and connects your advocates to their elected officials might be the most important, but there are many other tools that your organization should have in place before you launch your advocacy campaign.
✓ Website: Your website is one of the most important tools in your advocacy tool box. It is where your activists and policy makers will go to find information about your issue. Make sure the information is easy to find, and easy to share. Have an area to sign up for more news and advocacy alerts. If necessary, create a separate website specifically for your advocacy campaigns.
✓ Legislative landing page: Create a webpage for the action alert to link to that connects who the committee members are and summarizes the bill in simple terms that are easily understood and shared. Place links to the blog post or embed the video in your legislative landing page. There should be one, clearly defined action step on this page.
✓ Social Media: Social media is a major component of your communication plan. It can help you organize and build support, reach the media and better inform public opinion, and most importantly reach policy makers. Consistent posting, with relevant content, helps build an audience. Use a social media platform to schedule posts ahead of time, but also be flexible - post any breaking news and be sure to interact with your audience.
✓ Email: Use the link of the legislative landing page to send in your email communications to your segmented lists. Refer to your communication plan on how often to send emails and when. Let your recipients know how often you will be communicating with them and why.
✓ Blog: Blogs are great ways to share information with your advocates and policy makers. Consistent blogging, fresh topics and inviting guest bloggers are great ways to build an audience.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
2) Fill your advocacy toolbox.
✓ Video: Almost anyone today can create great video content. Record videos interviewing your organizational leadership, issue experts or someone impacted by your issue. Remember that visuals and personal stories can be very powerful advocacy tools. Post the video to YouTube and include a description that has a link to your fundraising page and/or legislative landing page.
✓ Survey. Never assume that what you know where your audience stands on an issue, and never, ever make up statistics to back up your advocacy claims. Create a series of surveys to test the awareness level of the issue and the general sentiment. Include a link to the survey on your landing page, or use an advocacy platform that has built in voting and commenting features. Share your results (if they are favorable) with policy makers and on social media. If they’re not favorable, no one knows but you and you can adjust your communications to address it to hopefully swing stakeholder opinion your way.
✓ Events: A mix of online and offline tactics can help spread your message and show the strength of your support. Press conferences, advocacy days, marches and protests can all be offline tools that can raise awareness of your issue. Integrate your social media and other online tools to promote these events and spread your message beyond just the original attendees.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
3) Execute your advocacy plan.
A plan is only as good as the execution and that execution begins and ends with marketing. If your members, advocates and donors don’t understand your strategy and goals and how their involvement helps all stakeholders and the overall mission, they are less likely to participate.
Make sure your organization can also adjust on the fly. Legislation can move and change at a moment’s notice - especially at the state level where sessions can be short and legislative processes might be unique and subtle.
Your legislative tracking software will notify you when these events occur. Automate the education, communication and stakeholder mobilization process using advocacy software that ties in your website, email, and social media activities in one place.
✓ Website: Update the action alert on your website that lists the bill to include the dates for scheduled action to create a sense of urgency.
✓ Blog: Write a blog post or series of posts of no more than 500-600 words that summarizes the intent and scope of the legislation and its impact on / to existing laws, the organization or the reader.
✓ Video. Have your advocates create and share videos telling why your issue is important to them. Upload it to YouTube, share it on social media, and embed it in your landing page or website. The organization’s leaders can do this as well for educational purposes.
✓ Legislative landing page. Update the landing page to include a link where visitors can email or call their legislators directly without having to search for their contact info.
✓ Social Media. As a bill moves through the process, your social media should move from educating and organizing to mobilization with specific calls to action. Remind people to share and spread the message to others.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
3) Execute your advocacy plan.
✓ Email. Aggregate all the actions that have happened on your legislative landing page and email it directly to legislators prior to their vote. Send it also to your audience and let them know that you have sent their actions on to their legislators. Everyone wants to know the results of their actions and be kept ‘in the loop’.
Elected officials respond best to messages from people they know well and from the people they represent, their constituents. While your top level (grasstops) advocates might be meeting and talking to many different elected officials, your “front line” (grassroots) supporters should be mobilized and directed to the elected officials that represent their districts. Make sure you choose an advocacy software platform that enables you to connect your audience directly to the representative that they need to contact.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
4) Follow up and share the results
Close the loop with advocates and supporters by letting them know what happened (win or lose), what it means to them and the organization, and what they can expect you to do. Also, use your tools to thank the elected officials that supported your position with their vote.
✓ Website: Update the action alert on your website that lists the bill to show what the outcome was and where you stand on it.
✓ Blog: Write a blog post or series of posts of no more than 500-600 words that summarizes the outcome and what it means. Include a call to action to your fundraising page asking people to continue to support your cause and mission.
✓ Social Media. Share your blog post on social media to and encourage them to share it with others.
✓ Email. Let both your advocates and supporters know directly what happened and link back to your blog post. Include a call to action to your fundraising page asking people to continue to support your cause and mission. Also, ask your advocates to personally thank the legislators that voted with you which can easily be done with an advocacy software platform.
Whether you win or lose the legislative battle, the follow-up is critical to the overall success of the campaign and to the success of the next campaign.
Remember that those advocates that have engaged with you during the campaign are the best candidates to also become financial supporters or members of your organization. Take the time to cultivate your advocacy base, and get them more engaged in the other aspects of your mission. Statistics show that folks who take actions on your behalf are 7 times more likely to donate.
eGuideAdvocacy Campaign Strategy Checklist
Votility Inc. - 104 East Park Dr. Building 300 Brentwood, TN 37027 - www.votility.com - 615-371-6666
Conclusion:
Advocacy is an on-going and ever evolving process. Sometimes it’s proactive - with organizations working to get legislation introduced and passed. Sometimes it is reactive - with organizations trying to change or defeat legislation that would negatively impact it or its stakeholders. Grassroots advocacy is one tool to impact that legislation. The good news: grassroots advocates (your members, advocates and donors) want to help and all you have to do is engage them and provide the tools.
Grassroots advocacy is an important tool for any organization that wants to influence public policy and engage members, donors, or stakeholders. When done correctly, grassroots advocacy is a powerful tool that not only can influence votes, but can also help change minds.
Organizations that are focused, and make sure that their advocate’s experience is a good one, will gain grassroots supporters that continue to engage with the organization’s advocacy activities. Those grassroots supporters are also more likely to grow from being activists to becoming donors.
Request a demo of Votility and see how you can seamlessly integrate marketing, fundraising and advocacy in one system.
