Legislative Advocacy 101, It's Time to Take a Stand
Legislative Advocacy 101:Legislative Advocacy is important because there comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to take a stand. While this moment is always more dramatic in the movies, it’s possible that you’ve come to this realization regarding a particular policy or issue in your locality. And if you’ve decided that you want to make a change in policy and advocate for your issue in your local legislature, it’s time for a little Legislative Advocacy 101. While the list below is far from comprehensive, it’s a general outline of the process to help get you started with legislative advocacy.
Member public affairs strategies can be an amazing way to move your issue forward. Membership organizations should have a head start when it comes to public affairs strategies, but that head start is often complicated. Membership organizations tend to have bureaucratic structures that make it difficult to work nimbly, especially when it comes to public affairs. Because of this, some member organizations have avoided using member-based public affairs strategies and they are missing out.
Here are some ways to use your membership to enhance public affairs strategies by turning them into member public affairs strategies.
How Democrats Can Jumpstart Their Campaigns for the Future
Races are heating up, but there are a number of exciting opportunities for Democrats up and down the ticket. Here are some tips to jumpstart your Democratic campaign:
1. Do a thorough self-assessment. Are you ready to run? Does your family support you? Does your community support you? Have you done your politics? These are important questions to ask and know the answer to before you even file to run. If you can confidently answer, “yes” to these questions, you are ready to jumpstart your campaign.
2. Plan, plan, plan! The biggest mistake a candidate can make is failing to create a campaign plan. Your campaign plan should include a vote goal, budget, timeline, and message. Campaigns themselves are living, breathing animals once they heat up, but your campaign plan should pretty much stay the same.
3. Focus on the right stuff. It’s really easy to get caught up in the back and forth of a heated race and allow that to throw you off course. The best Democratic campaigns stay focused on directly communicating their message with targeted voters and turning them out. Period. Everything else is just noise.
4. Do the work. Running for office is hard. Doing what it takes to win is often even harder. Spending hours on the phone, asking for money every single day, is tough. Knocking on every targeted voters door is exhausting. But this is usually what it takes to win. The best way to jumpstart your campaign is to embrace the work and lean into it. You’re probably running because you want to represent your community—use this time to get to know them and ask them to join your campaign.
Some of the Most Innovative Nonprofit Marketing Campaigns to Inspire Your Creativity
Our third installment of our picks for innovative nonprofit marketing campaigns is here to inspire your creativity. This time, we have chosen four creative advertising campaigns that incorporate direct mail, video, and print advertising to convey important messages.
Advocacy Fundraising Isn't as Different as You May Think
We have written a lot about political fundraising but not on advocacy fundraising, so here we go. Whether it is for advocacy or for political campaigns, fundraising is largely similar and shares a number of characteristics. For both, the ask is a core component of your fundraising technique. Below is a look as some of these shared characteristics.
Advocacy strategies have changed a lot over the last 20 years. When I was a chief of staff in the New York State Legislature, I don't remember there ever being a real advocacy campaign around public support of an issue that focused on legislators. The main way groups moved legislation was to hire a lobbyist and that was really it. There were occasional print ads and lobby days, but day-to-day mass contact from constituents that were driven by member groups were few and far between. Today, we spend a lot of time running advocacy campaigns on the state level. Issue advocacy tactics that were once only used on large, federal issues are now seen on smaller federal issues as well as state and municipal issues.
Open up Your Campaign Toolbox, What Will You Find?
We understand what it’s like to operate a campaign on a tight budget, so we’ve found some free tools to include in your campaign toolbox to help you along the way. We hope you will find them useful as you launch your campaign or look for ways to better organize it. to ve clear no campaign tool will solve all of your campaigns problems. Whether fundraising for a nonprofit, managing an independent expenditure campaign, or seeking office, a few of these tools will surely help you along your way.
Advocacy campaigns get inspired by GOTV. Get Out The Vote, has come a long way. A good GOTV program can give a political campaign a big lift and those tactics are now being used for advocacy. you can read more about GOTV techniques here and here. GOTV techniques have transcended their former use as “valued election tools”, and are now the core component of modern GOTV Tactics. They are being turned into engagement plans and are being used in advocacy, nonprofit organizing, and the corporate world.
These days, everyone is online. And if your nonprofit isn’t online, it should be! It’s easy, cheap and one of the best ways to stay engaged with your supporters. Here are five things we think every nonprofit should be doing online.
1. Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr. All of these are free for you to use, so why not? They are a fun, interactive way to communicate with your supporter base (who—spoiler alert—are already spending all their time on these platforms anyway). People love to promote causes they care about on Facebook especially, so make sure your cause is in the mix!
2. Online Fundraising: Online fundraising is a zillion times cheaper than other forms of fundraising. And many times, all it takes is adding a link to your website where people can donate. The trick is, you need to make sure that link is visible and easily accessible to people.
Over the last two Presidential election cycles, the Obama campaign has done some really innovative work online. There has been a lot of discussion in the progressive community about how other campaigns and organizations can take some of these tactics and apply them to their own causes. While it’s true that not all campaigns will have access to the same resources – budget, consultants, in-house staff – that the Obama campaign did, there are still some great lessons that can be applied to your campaign, regardless of size. One of the biggest takeaways from the campaign that can easily be applied to campaigns and organizations of all sizes is testing. The Obama campaign took testing to another level and tested everything from emails to online ads.
Our team is made up of amazing creative, organizational, and political consulting talent committed to achieving political and advocacy goals. We have worked for candidates and causes, big and small, all across the country.
