If the 118th Congress' first week is any indication, 2023 and 2024 are going to be tough sledding. Even though House Republicans finally solved their leadership question (for now), partisan fights over raising the debt limit, passing a budget, etc. promise to limit opportunities to advance less contentious legislation.

Of course, there will be exceptions, but meaningful opportunities to advance your legislative priorities are likely to be slim to none. That’s the bad news. But consider this. Someone once told me, “The worst time to coach players is when they are on the field.” If your advocates are going to have a long wait before Congress starts considering your legislative priorities, why not take advantage of the opportunity to get them ready for that momentous day? Here’s how.

Moneyball Advocacy

If you know the 2011 film, Moneyball, feel free to skip ahead. For those who don’t, it’s a story about the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane. His challenge is how to overcome his team’s budget challenges to compete with big-budget teams like the New York Yankees. He meets a Yale economics graduate, Peter Brand, who convinces him that homerun hitters are overvalued. What players are undervalued? Those who get on base. Beane rolls the dice by trading off his big-name players to field a team of players who consistently get on base. (Watch the film if you want to find out how it turns out.)

So how can advocacy organizations apply the lessons learned from Moneyball to their advocacy?

Scout your network for advocates who can get on base: You likely can name several of your organization’s best (homerun hitting) advocates off the top of your head. But can you name your base-hit advocates? They are likely hiding in plain sight. Take a Moneyball approach to find them by mining your grassroots database, looking for advocates who have taken the action requested in at least 2 recent campaigns. Offer them opportunities to engage in advocacy tactics that are more effective than sending a form email. (Personalized messages, in-district events, letters to the editor, digestible advocacy trainings… whatever you can do AND TRACK.) Pay attention to who takes those more effective actions. Those are your base-hit advocates.

Send your recruits to training camp: Advocacy training can be done in countless ways. Yes, a handful of organizations have the resources to spend tens of thousands of dollars to conduct condensed and intense in-person advocacy academies. But most don’t. The good news is that there are many ways to train advocates without breaking the budget. The important thing is to take advantage of the time you have “off the field” to get your grassroots advocacy team ready for game day (whenever that day comes).

Intrigued, but not sure how to start?

AdvocacyWorks 535 was founded on the belief that advocacy networks aren’t organic – they are FORGED. Unfortunately, most advocacy organizations don’t have the resources to focus on forging their networks. Let’s talk about how AdvocacyWorks 535 can help. Since AdvocacyWorks 535 was launched just one year ago, it has worked with several clients on a diverse range of projects. These include the following.

• Developing case studies and and producing videos about grassroots advocates' advocacy best practices
  Assessing and aligning an organization's policy priorities and its staff's capacity to achieve its policy goals
• Developing strategies and metrics to identify an organization's base-hitting advocates
• Assessing and streamlining an organization's CMS platform (Salesforce) and cleaning and updating its grassroots advocacy data

Contact us to schedule a time to discuss your advocacy needs.  

Show me a film about elected officials and lobbyists, and I’ll show you a story about corruptible politicians and seedy lobbyists leading them down the road to perdition. To be fair, when it comes to storytelling, a compelling narrative trumps getting all the details correct. As I like to say, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Nonetheless, when it comes to accurately depicting advocacy, Hollywood usually gets five out of five Pinocchios.

Then I watched Worth (available on Netflix).

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t seen it. Admittedly, it was on my watch list for more than a year before I finally exhausted all other content that didn’t cover the very unpleasant and disturbing topic of determining the value for each of the lives lost to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The true-to-life story depicts renowned attorney, Kenneth Feinberg (played by Michael Keaton), appointed “special master” to implement the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Feinberg dives into the challenge with a logic-based, letter-of-the-law approach that uses a rational formula to calculate the financial worth of each life lost on September.

There will be no math in THIS blog. But bottom line, the families who lost Presidents and CEOs in corner offices of the World Trade Center stood to get six-figure payouts, while the families of the first responders who rushed into the inferno to save them stood to get much less.

When Fienberg unveils the formula and the process for applying for compensation, he’s caught flatfooted by the audience’s outrage. Then Charles Wolf (played by Stanley Tucci) stands as the voice of reason. Although he lost his beloved wife in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, he implores the mob to be civil and allow Fienberg to complete his remarks without interruption. Fienberg then approaches Wolf after the event to thank him for calming the audience. Wolf replies, “I think you’ll find that I will be your harshest critic,” before handing Fienberg his markup of the Compensation Fund’s announcement in the Federal Register and talking points criticizing the Fund’s formula.
What follows is a compelling story (and a refreshingly uncharacteristic Hollywood illustration) of citizens engaging and building influential relationships with policymakers.

With a deadline looming (December 22, 2003), Feinberg struggles to persuade enough eligible families to participate in the Fund. While he is sympathetic that the formula fails to account for messy real-life circumstances, he resists going down the slippery slope of making individual exceptions; he denies that the law gives him the authority to be more flexible; and he insists that he doesn’t have the time and resources to change course.

In the meantime, thousands of people sign up for notices about updates posted on Wolf’s website, fixthefund.org. They make phone calls. They send letters and emails. They meet face to face with Feinberg and his staff. Wolf’s advocacy network grows. When the Feinberg’s staff discovers it, they immediately recognize that he is uniquely positioned to convince his readers to submit their applications before the looming deadline. 

(Note for Professional Advocates: Check the site out. It’s very basic. It simply provides facts, explains why it’s important for victims to apply and how. It shows that don’t need a polished website complete with a third-party-vendor’s legislative action center platform to earn trust and recruit advocates.)

In the process, Feinberg develops relationships with stakeholders, including the brother and wife of a firefighter who died in the Twin Towers. They tell him personal stories about the victim – He was a father, a husband, a brother, a son. But the firefighter kept a secret. He had a mistress and two more children too. And since the firefighter’s paternity hadn’t been established, the Fund could not help his daughters.

Feinberg’s staff gets to know the domestic partner of a person killed in the Pentagon. He explains how, despite the victim’s conservative parents’ refusal to acknowledge their relationship, they loved each other and shared a life together. Since the parents and state law did not acknowledge the true nature of the Pentagon victim’s relationship, the Fund could not help his partner (and thousands of others like him).

These are just two of the 2,996 stories about the people who died on September 11, 2001. But their stories, and the effort made to tell them, makes a difference. They influence Fienberg, causing him to question his role, his authority and his logic-based approach. What’s more, despite the overwhelming challenges and the political pressures, he gains the will to do something about it.

Of course, Worth isn’t a documentary. It’s a Hollywood film, so “all characters and events in it – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional.” And the topic is dark and complicated. If tonight’s mood calls for watching something like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (“Stay Classy San Diego”), keep Worth on your short list of things to watch when you are in a more appropriate head space.

Nonetheless, at a time when trust in government is at historic lows and civil discourse seems to be dominated by anonymous trolls posting derogatory comments on websites, Worth is a refreshing illustration of common people engaging in civil discourse to exercise their Constitutional right to petition government for redress of grievances.

It’s “worth” watching and should be required content for anyone who practices, teaches or studies civic engagement.

Like any lobbyist, I quickly learned to expect curveballs during my meetings on Capitol Hill. Here’s one I never saw coming. I started the conversation with a typical windup.

“I’m the senior lobbyist for Goodwill. I represent the views of local Goodwill agencies across the country, including the one that operates in your district…”

“Let me stop you there,” she said. “The Goodwill agency in our district really doesn’t have much presence, if any. It doesn’t operate any stores or programs in our district, so why should I keep listening to you?”

(Long awkward silence)… “Well…. Uh…” (More awkward silence)… “Thank you for your time.”

STEE-RIKE!

At first, I tried brushing off my embarrassment by blaming the legislative director for being rude. Then I realized she simply had the confidence and honesty to say what most Hill staffers are too polite to say.

Research conducted by the Congressional Management Foundation backs up my assertion. Of the congressional staff who participated in a CMF survey, fewer than 10% agreed that meetings with lobbyists have a lot of influence, yet more than half agreed that in-person meetings with constituents have a lot of influence. In other words, many lobbyists claim to represent their supporters’ views, but most don’t substantiate those declarations by mobilizing their grassroots advocacy networks.

Early in my tenure at my first government relations job at Catholic Charities USA, my friend and mentor taught me a term of art for lobbyists who claim, but cannot prove, to represent their supporters’ views – “Paper Tiger.” You’re not alone if you’ve never heard the term before? I’ve rarely heard the term referenced since she first introduced me to it.

That’s a problem!

Paper-tiger advocates don’t have the influence they think they have. So you’d think being a paper tiger would be a top concern for every lobbyist from K Street to Main Street. Best case, paper tigers just waste time – theirs and that of the Hill staff they meet with. But worst case, they allow Congress to pass legislation that fails to account for important constituent views. Fortunately, the paper-tiger population on Capitol Hill can be controlled. Here’s what can be done.

• Congressional staff can be empowered to throw the occasional paper-tiger penalty flag. When lobbyists claim (but haven’t proven) to have the backing of their supporters, congressional staff should feel licensed to politely ask them to prove it before any future meetings.
• Association members can do the math. Membership dues only pay for a handful of lobbyists, when 535 (one for each Member of Congress) are needed. Association members should develop relationships with their elected officials and keep their professional lobbyists informed of their advocacy activities.
• Associations can recognize that influential advocates rarely develop in nature. Associations should invest time and resources to FORGE newly-minted grassROOTS advocates into influential grassTOPS advocates.

The good news is that most advocacy organizations have the tools they need to transform their paper tigers into fierce ones. The bad news is that most government affairs professionals lack the interest, skills, time and patience to forge paper advocates into influential ones.

Find out how AdvocacyWorks 535 can help your association, nonprofit or company to forge its streak* of fierce tigers.

* A group of tigers is called a “streak.”

It’s no surprise that a recent survey found that the majority of trade associations feel advocacy is an extremely or very important priority. What IS surprising is that the majority of respondents also believe their organization executes advocacy efforts very well. In examining CMF’s research with congressional staff on THEIR perceptions of advocacy, there is clearly a disconnect between the two sides of these public policy efforts. But here’s a way to verify whether YOUR organization is truly effective. #advocacymatters 

Like other parents, I fell into the travel-soccer trap. I spent a lot of time thinking about the ins and outs of soccer all those countless hours watching their games from the sidelines. One day, it struck me that there's a lot of overlap between their sport and the "sport" of advocacy. I realized that there are three lessons that soccer can teach us about advocacy.

Looking back at my 20-plus-year government affairs career working at organizations such as Catholic Charities USA and Goodwill - identifying advocacy leaders within the network was always a headache. While local agencies had a footprint in key legislative districts, we often didn't know who within the agency to contact when we needed someone to reach out to their Member of Congress about an important issue. Furthermore, many of our supporters lacked the relationships needed to effectively engage them.