Preparing for the 111th Congress
Welcome to the first in a series of five posts outlining strategies for preparing for the 111th Congress. Believe it or not, the elections are finally over and we’ll have a new Congress and a new Administration in 2009. Regardless of whether your party was wildly successful or not so much, it’s important for advocate leaders to be fully prepared with their grassroots, grasstops and coalition building efforts as early as possible.
Why are the grassroots so important this time around? Well, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that “Joe the Plumber” is in and “special interests” are out in Washington, DC these days. Only those organizations that have effectively incorporated their own “Joes” (i.e., citizen advocates) into their government relations plan will have their message heard and even perhaps acted on in this environment.
That’s why this series of posts is designed to help you hit the grassroots advocacy ground running in January 2009. We’ll look at five different strategies for preparing the network, starting with our first strategy, which is to wrap-up the 110th Congress. Are you ready? Let’s dive in!
Advocate leaders should take some time now to close the books on the 110th Congress. Take a moment to undertake the following three activities:
- Clean out and update your database list: Review e-mail addresses, advocate address information, affiliation information and grasstops contacts and connections to be sure that you have the right advocates communicating with the right elected officials. Remember that it’s better to have fewer active advocates in your database than thousands of individuals who aren’t interested in policy debates – or worse, aren’t receiving your communications! Now is the perfect time to update and clean out.
- Update your legislative agenda/advocacy materials online: When was the last time you took a really good look at all the materials available on your site? Even if you update information regularly, much of the older information is often left on the site for search engines to find. For many organizations, the advocacy section of the website is the first impression a potential advocate will see. Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward.
- Create a list of successes from the 110th: Most organizations will want to put together a legislative summary outlining the work of the previous Congress. Be sure to include in that summary a clear section highlighting successes – and be sure to define success as broadly as possible! While an ultimate success may be passage of a particular piece of legislation, incremental accomplishments such as increasing the numbers of cosponsors for legislation, expanding the reach of the grassroots network or even getting a bill to the hearing stage should be celebrated. Given the length of time it takes to move legislation through the process, it’s important to stress when some progress (even limited progress!) is being made.
Once you’ve finished wrapping up for the 110th, you’ll be able to move on to our next strategy, Preparing Your Team.
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Comments
DO many associations have effective "Joe the Plumber" spokespersons serving as emblems of their advocacy? I always found in my own associations we were taking the high road, primarily working behind the scenes except in rare cases where we needed mass action, say, sending 2x4s to Congress. The idea of finding a "Joe the Camel" type mascot is an interesting one though...
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | December 3, 2008 8:55 AM
Thanks for the comment! In my opinion, to be most successful Associations need to employ several government relations tools, including direct lobbying (i.e., behind the scenes work), advocacy (which I define as grasstops, grassroots and coalition building), public relations / marketing and even political action committees. In this environment, citizen-based approaches (i.e., the advocacy work) are particularly useful. I didn't really mean that everyone should have a "Joe the Plumber" spokesperson or emblem: that would be a little strange (and irritating). Rather, what I meant was that associations should think about ways to incorporate citizen focused advocacy in to their government relations work -- especially at a time when Congress and the Administration is so enthralled with "ordinary people."
Posted by: Stephanie Vance | December 4, 2008 10:04 AM
This makes sense. I often see charities do well with spokespeople on one extreme (often elites we instantly recognize) and on the other extreme they publicize their far more humble beneficiaries well, with name & biographical detail. It sounded as if you were recommending a similar program in associations that generally rely only on senior staff and elected leaders to serve that role, which would represent an intriguing shift.
Over my career I have admired most out of my associations the NAHB, where we were very, very good at supporting and, if necessary, recruiting appropriate parties to represent our causes--to serve as that public face of a campaign, or industry response to a disaster, etc. They were very articulate and represented an industry that wasn't on the ropes (then at least) but they were much more expert than populist in their communications but the first person voice outside our HQ-speak always carried more credibilty with press, Congress, etc.
It helps to be a federation that is beholden to your local chapters becuase then you have at least one nominal leader per site, per congressional district, etc. But of course this is more grassroots, discreet, and behind-the-scenes. I still think it's a great idea to try to tap into the archetype of the "real American." Even if personally, after growing up surrounded them in Idaho, I'm pretty much done with them myself. They DO tend to catch the limelight and rapidly secure book deals. :O)
Kevin
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | December 8, 2008 6:31 AM
I HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO CONTACT MY REPRESENTIVE TO GET TICKETS TO THE INUGRATION. PLEASE, IF YOU CAN ASSIST ME WITH OBTAINING TICKETS IT WOULD BE APPRECIATED.
Posted by: MARIA WARD | December 26, 2008 12:27 AM