Advocacy and communications tactics have evolved over the years thanks to advances in technology, and while some tools we use may be newer, why we use them isn’t.
When you need a friend, it’s too late to make one.
Widely attributed to Mark Twain, this adage is the gold standard for building any successful advocacy campaign, be it coalescing people to support their veterinarian or champion consumer rights. Developing relationships with your key stakeholders long before you may need their assistance is key to achieving your win.
Building, implementing and sustaining advocacy campaigns is both art and science. It takes a combination of building interest and motivation in the public, pressing policymakers in the corridors of power, mining data to determine audience, message and channel, and igniting the action at the right time.
People won’t just do what you want because you ask them to, even if they are your friends. After nearly a quarter century of moving people to action, we know the sequential path – the advocacy funnel – to follow for any successful grassroots advocacy campaign is to prospect, educate, motivate, mobilize and analyze.
Prospect:
You need to find who is open to your point of view. A suite of data, technology and analytics tools not only help ferret out the grassroots and grasstops advocates who support your cause or who are open to entertaining your arguments, but also give you the means to know and marginalize the messages of your opposition. Once a connection is made, it’s critical to discern where supportive individuals are on their journey to your end goal so you can determine how to meet them there with a message they want to hear.
Educate:
Forming a coalition of advocates takes more work than just finding people who agree with you and asking for their help. That’s a transaction. It’s the relationships that matter. Build legitimate connections by trading items of value, in this case information in context of how people’s lives will be impacted.
Motivate:
As you develop and educate a core group of supporters on your issue, you need to be marching toward something more than building a well-informed electorate. Hand-in-hand with providing education, your ads and message must motivate your audience to actually care about the issue. An audience that understands and agrees with your position is one thing; one that feels it is part of an invested relationship is the key to planting the seeds for mobilization.
Mobilize:
This is the light-the-fuse moment. You’ve built the relationship with your motivated, educated, invested core of supporters to the point where you can ask them to take action. Call, text or email a legislator. Attend this rally. Sign the petition. With sophisticated data analysis, we can even identify super-motivated supporters and ask for more individualized support, like writing a letter to the editor or meeting face-to-face with lawmakers. Mass action and targeted execution both have a place in grassroots advocacy.
Analyze:
Your advocates are activating and legislators are hearing the message. Is it time to sit on your laurels and pat yourself on the back? Of course not. You need to analyze every scrap of data being collected and continue to iterate on your approach. We do this with the help of cloud-based, interactive dashboards that allow you to see your campaign’s results in real-time. Having this data at your fingertips ensures that your decision-making always aligns with your mobilization goals.
Taken as a whole, this approach is not only authentic and effective, it is cost-effective. Targeting your spending early to determine the people, channels and tactics that will move your strategy forward gives you a strong, educated and engaged base that’s battle-ready.
Our nuanced formula has won policy changes, stopped issues in their tracks and developed loyal groups of advocates always at the ready. We know the importance of friendships.
