Public Affairs

Grasstops - to Step Up Your Advocacy Campaign

May 31, 2021

Grasstops Will Grow Your Advocacy Program

A grasstops campaign seeks to persuade the people who can influence key decision-makers. Legislators are often inundated with calls, emails, petitions, meetings, and other communications about a wide variety of issues. Breaking through that noise is tough, and grassroots campaigns, unless they reach critical mass, may not be enough on their own. When those efforts are paired with the authority of grasstops supporters, their impact will be greater, and your campaign will be more likely to succeed.

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Advocacy Video That Won't Break the Bank

Mar 22, 2021 by Ben Holse (he/him)

Advocacy Video On a Budget

Advocacy video is all over social media and across the internet. Video has really become an essential channel for leveraging support on an issue for nonprofits. It’s no wonder why, many advocacy organizations and nonprofits have supporters with compelling narratives, and video is a great medium for storytelling. But we’ve seen too many small or mid-sized nonprofits that still choose to avoid creating an advocacy video strategy because they have a limited budget.

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Advocacy Engagement Funnel

Mar 08, 2021

Advocacy Engagement Goes Further with A Funnel

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User-Generated Content for Everyone -Storytelling for Advocacy

Feb 08, 2021 by Joe Fuld (he/him)

User-Generated Content Tools to Build Storytelling for Advocacy

During the time of COVID -19, getting together and sharing stories is an impossibility. So, when my mom turned 80, my sister came upon an easy user-generated content tool to organize friends to send a message to my mom for her friends and family. Five days and a few tutorials later, using Video Hug, we had organized a couple dozen 80-year-olds to send a message to my mom you can see the finished product here.

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Advocacy Campaign Tips

Jan 04, 2021 by Joe Fuld (he/him)

Running an effective advocacy campaign takes skill and planning. No matter how big or how small your effort is, having some basic structure can make a huge difference in your assets and results. Here are fifteen tips to run a winning advocacy campaign:

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Lobby Visits For Advocacy: Planning a Virtual Lobby Day

Dec 07, 2020 by Joe Fuld (he/him) and Martín Diego Garcia (he/him)

Lobby Day Tips: Make Your Virtual Lobby Days Impactful

How can you get the most out of your Virtual lobby day?

Every year groups go to Washington, D.C. or their state Capitol to try and impact legislation. At the same time, they are there with a dozen other groups doing lobby visits and it’s even hard to get nonprofit lobby days on the calendar. Lobby days can be a complicated business, but we’re here to help.

Bottom line: If you want to make virtual lobby visit count, you need to think ahead and have a real plan.

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Advocacy Training: Find the Right Training For You

Feb 24, 2020 by Martín Diego Garcia (he/him)

We strongly believe in continued learning and leadership development and advocacy training at The Campaign Workshop. We even budget resources for our own staff to continuously learn throughout the year, ensuring they’re constantly growing in the areas that they’re interested in.

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Power Mapping: Understanding Your Political Landscape

Jan 28, 2019 by Martín Diego Garcia (he/him)

Power Mapping for Advocacy: Define Targets and Achieve Your Advocacy Goals.

What is power mapping?

Power mapping is a very useful advocacy tool especially when you and your organization have limited time and resources. Power mapping can be used to target the key decision-makers or influencers needed most to achieve policy wins, allowing you to map those with voting and decision-making power over an issue you are advocating for.

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Member Public Affairs Strategies to Remember

May 16, 2016 by Joe Fuld (he/him)

Member Public Affairs Strategies to Remember

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.

Membership Storytelling

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Advocacy Research —Know Your Options

Jun 11, 2015 by Joe Fuld (he/him)

Advocacy Research Options

Advocacy research is an important step in building a public affairs campaign of any size. Advocacy campaigns come in all shapes and sizes from multi million dollar public facing campaigns to small grassroots community advocacy campaigns and many sizes in between. The advocacy research you need to build a good campaign strategy also comes in many forms and budget options. You can and should know your options for advocacy research. In this post we explore the panoply of advocacy research options out there including: polling, focus groups, and experimental testing.

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