With 800 million active users, Facebook has earned the title of most popular social network around the globe. At the f8 conference a few weeks ago, CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced some big changes, the latest in the site’s constant evolution. It’s hard for a lot of users to adjust to the new features and, for organizations using Facebook in advocacy efforts, it may seem like things are changing just as they were getting the hang of things. Despite the growing pains, Facebook is a valuable tool that can raise awareness and inspire action.  

Here are a few rules to live by:

1.       A Few Can Activate Many

Engagement, not number of fans, is key. On average, every time someone shares a link to your organization’s website on Facebook, two to five people will visit it. In any online campaign, it’s imperative to utilize social context. People care about what their friends are doing and are heavily influenced by actions. If you can show Facebook users that their friends “liked” or engaged with your page, chances are high that you can get them involved, too.  
So, now the question is, how? 

 
• Use Facebook Questions. Asking your fans a question leads to viral exposure. If you ask a question, it will appear on your fans’ newsfeed. If they answer or follow that question, their friends can also see the activity. This is also a good way to get direct feedback from your fans. 
• Use Facebook to live stream your events or town halls. Free tools like UStream allow you to broadcast your event to all of your fans. Also, if you use event materials to let people know they can tune in on your Facebook page, you are likely to get more fans.
•  Make everything you can an event.  All of your organization’s events should be shared on Facebook. You should also use this tool for virtual events or calls to action (i.e. “Call your congressman by noon today!”).  Again, this allows your fans’ friends to see their action, making them more likely to join in.

 2.       Don’t Be Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

Facebook encourages open communication, something that may seem daunting to organizations because it can indicate a lack of control. If you want to successfully use Facebook as a tool, you have to put some time into engaging with your fans, monitoring your page, and moderating the comments. That being said, most press is good press.

 
• Post a clear comment policy on your page info, and stick to it.
• Don’t delete comments just because they’re negative.  Even negative comments make it more likely for people to see your page. Supporters will defend against these negative comments and drive traffic to the topic.
• Be active. When people know that someone is actively monitoring and responding to comments, they tend to be nicer.

 3.       Be Human

If you let your fans and activists get to know a little bit about the people behind your mission, you give them a way to connect.  When people are more connected to the page, they view it as a legitimate source of information, and will be more inspired and inclined to take action.

 
• It’s great to post a story or anecdote about your staff that’s not strictly related to your organization. Show the personalities behind the work you do.
• If you have a good relationship with your fans, you can raise money without even asking for it
• If you’re posting more than press releases, you can provoke interesting conversation on your site, giving it a lot more personality.

Facebook is evolving, and so should your organization. In your advocacy campaign, be innovative and embrace these tools as a way to reach a wider audience.

The Super Committee is charged with recommending how to reduce the U.S. deficit by at least $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, and has until Thanksgiving to do so. Committee members say comments from the public are being taken seriously (here’s the web form to prove it), though some of them are also limiting participation: for instance, Senator Baucus (D-Mont.) is not taking messages from any one who doesn’t live in Montana — even though the mission is national in scope.

The limited time frame for decisions and the committee’s difficult task makes advocacy especially challenging. What’s an advocacy group to do?

Hopefully, most organizations have plans in place to handle a sudden grassroots need. But if your organization was not quite as prepared as others, don’t despair. Even in this Internet age, all politics is still local.

Meaning stick to the basics and do them well:

1. Key Contacts: Activate the members in your organization that are from these states. They should already be identified as key contacts for the members of Congress, and now is the time to leverage those relationships.
2. District Meetings: Never overlook district staff. These Super Committee members may not make it home very much over the next few weeks, but they will still be getting a daily report from home. Make sure your organization and your members (i.e. their constituents) feature prominently.
3. Social Media: They are listening to social media. Get as many of your advocates as possible to upload content to your YouTube channel, personalizing the issues. Your Facebook and Twitter strategy should be integrated into this campaign as well, for a social media “surround sound.”
4. Coalition Partners: Most advocacy groups are part of a coalition. Are you contacting partners and their followers? It’s imperfect, since your message may not be delivered exactly how you would prefer, but it’s more voices added to your chorus.

At the end of all of this, remember the poor congressional staff of these Super Committee members. You can’t buy them dinner these days, but an honest and sincere thank you for all their work will be (almost as) appreciated.

Why you should host one, and how to do it

Bloggers’ roundtables have been around for a while. They’re especially popular for book clubs, with the Department of Defense, and among politicians. (One wag asked John McCain if he knew the difference between YouTube and MySpace.)

Yet roundtables never really took off as a form of outreach. That’s too bad, because as a vehicle to engage many stakeholders at once, roundtables can be as effective, if not more so, than their headline-grabbing cousins, Twitter and Facebook.

What is a bloggers’ roundtable? Technically, it’s a conference call. Figuratively, it’s a virtual press conference or editorial board meeting. Instead of standing at a podium, the speakers sit by a speakerphone, while the audience—the bloggers—dial into a conference line.

When is a bloggers’ roundtable useful? A roundtable works best when you want to share your story with a small, engaged group; when you want thoughtful feedback; and when you want substantive write-ups. (“Small” can range from a car-full of people to a dinner party to an NFL team.) The conversation is more intimate than a live chat, the invitation is more prestigious than a tweet or Facebook update, and the whole thing is more fun than an e-mail.

What do you need to do? After compiling a media list of pertinent bloggers, send each one an invitation to this “exciting new program.” Just as you wouldn’t invite the guy off the street to your press conference, so it’s best to review each blogger’s work beforehand to ensure that he’s relevant and respectable. (To be sure, this often is a judgment call: What do you do with someone, like a Keith Olbermann or a Glenn Beck, who’s very controversial but who commands a huge audience?)

Given the unwritten rule of RSVPs—of those who are invited, a minority will agree to come; of those who agree to come, a minority will actually show—it’s best to invite at least twice as many people as you’d like to participate.

Once you develop a distro list, you’ll need to set up a conference line. If you have the budget, consider recording and/or transcribing the call, so that you later can publish the audio file and transcript. Not only will this win you plaudits for transparency. It’ll also produce continuing returns on investment.

Now you’re ready to start inviting people. A few best practices:

 
• Make the invite compelling, so that it stands out alongside the dozens of messages that fill up the typical inbox each day.
• Send a calendar invite instead of or in addition to an e-mail.
• Send the invite a week in advance, and dispatch a reminder the day before.
• Instead of trying to cram everything into the invite, use links. Avoid attachments.
• Mention that the number of spots is limited. This engenders scarcity and thus commitment once someone has RSVPed.
• If you sense that a blogger is especially receptive, ask if there are others whom he’d recommend that you invite.

If you have the time, treat your most receptive blogger to an exclusive: A heads-up that you’re launching the roundtable, a pertinent article before it’s published, an advance one-on-one interview with your subject matter expert(s). Then, in your invitation, you can link to what the blogger wrote, which bolsters your credibility and inspires others to follow suit.

If you have even more time, consider conducting media training or murder boards with your expert(s).

How does it work? Generally, a roundtable lasts for an hour. After taking roll call, the host, who is typically the organization’s spokesman, introduces the experts and lays out the guidelines. Sample guidelines:

 
• Everything’s on the record.
• Use mute when you’re not talking.
• State your name and the name of your blog before speaking.

Each expert then provides a brief overview of the subject and his role in it. Then comes the crux of the roundtable—the Q&A.

On one hand, you can control the colloquy by calling on each blogger in the order everyone dialed in. On the other hand, you can let the conversation ebb and flow of its own accord. Or you can pursue a middle ground, which avoids awkward silences and doesn’t put anyone on the spot, by asking each participant to press the pound sign for his phone to be unmuted, after which he’s placed in a queue.

Whichever approach you prefer, while structure is important, don’t straight-jacket the conversation. Cultivate it. Your goal is a fruitful give-and-take.

For brownie points, consider preparing a backgrounder on each blogger, which your representatives can use to great effect when responding: “Hi Peter – Before I answer, let me just say how much I empathized with your recent tweet on the misery of being a Redsox fan.”

How do you judge success? Success comes when the bloggers write about what they heard. When this happens, encourage your expert(s) or spokesman to do something to show support, like leaving a comment on the post or tweeting about it; public displays of affection go a long way on the Web.

The bottom line: There’s more to online outreach than “Twitbook.” Sometimes the best tool is the oldest: The telephone.

What’s your experience with the bloggers’ roundtable? What advice would you add?

Can opinion research help unlock the key to winning your advocacy effort? From free survey platforms and social media polling to state-of-the-art message testing, Adfero Group’s Sue Zoldak will be discussing the research tools that you can apply to increase your campaign’s effectiveness.

Join us as we explore how public affairs campaigns use research to find, reach, and win over their audience. We will take questions from attendees and discuss your case study live.

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The Bay Area Transit Police, amusingly known as BART, show that law enforcement still doesn’t understand the value — and challenges — of social media. The police force reacted to planned flash mobs — protests organized rapidly through social media platforms, Twitter foremost among them — by shutting down cell phone service in the BART stations. Hey, if you can’t talk to one another, how are you going to organize, right? Thank God BART wasn’t around when the Founding Fathers were trying to hammer out the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps the transit agency would have drummed the unruly bastards out of Philadelphia before they could dream up the First Amendment.

You can understand why the transit police were frazzled. There is no question that social media has made communications easier, quicker and more effective. By and large, this is a good thing, put to good use by millions around the world daily. Unfortunately, there are people who put this new generation of communications to bad use, too. And the advent of flash mobs is an example of how social media can be used for hooliganism (I’ve always wanted to use that word) and criminal activity. Just look to Great Britain, where so-called protesters are protesting very little other than doors and windows as they smash them in and loot stores. Power to the people.

However, social media — including flash mobs — is also used for noble causes and nonviolent protests. Just look to the Middle East and the Arab Spring. Look to Iran. Admittedly Iran was less flash and more of a truly spontaneous movement, but new tactics such as flash mobs will become increasingly common as protestors in authoritarian states seek ways to make their voices heard while minimizing persecution from state police.

What law enforcement, national security agencies and others in positions of power over civil liberties must understand is that while social media is a new medium of communication, it is still a medium of communication, protected by the Constitution. If the protests in San Francisco were violent and posed a threat to public safety, then BART had a duty to manage the situation and protect the public. Protestors have no inherent right to endanger the safety of commuters in a busy subway station any more than shout fire in a theater.

That said, they have every right to speak. (And frankly, to organize.) BART, or any other law enforcement agency does not have the authority to prevent speech by physical means — whether that means shooting the horses from underneath the riders of the Pony Express, intercepting and burning mail in the postal system, shutting down Internet connections to block email, physically cutting traditional phone lines or, in this case, shutting down cell phone service.

Protests — violent or nonviolent — are nothing new in American history. The story of the struggle for civil rights is largely a story of organized protests. And whether said protests are revolutionary struggles to advance the human cause or criminal threats to public safety sometimes depends on where you’re sitting. Birmingham, anyone?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the BART protests were the equivalent of the long struggle for equality in this country. Then again, I’m not saying it’s not. Candidly, I’m not all that familiar with the shooting that took place. I know it’s suspect that an unarmed homeless man was gunned down for allegedly trying to skip paying the transit fare, but I don’t know all the details. In terms of the protest itself, should the Bay Area transit police have taken action? The protestors claim their actions were nonviolent. The facts suggest differently. I’ll also leave the question alone for now. What I can tell you is that whatever action BART did take should have dealt with the actual protest and not with the lines of communications used to organize it.

Law enforcement must become more intelligent in its reaction to social media. And that’s what it is: reaction. What law enforcement really needs to do is proactively educate itself on social media and learn to use it to its advantage in a positive way. Social media can be a very effective tool for law enforcement – more than a place to simply post new releases, which is the way most agencies use the medium now.

In  what many in the online world view as poetic justice, hackers recently broke into the BART system and leaked personal data about the police officers. This is no more ethical than BART’s efforts to shut down the First Amendment rights of San Francisco residents (using their own tax dollars no less). Some have pointed the finger at the notorious “hacktivist” group Anonymous. Anonymous — for some reason, nobody seems to know who they are — denies it. Who knows. What we do know is that the hacking certainly wasn’t a coincidence.

Rather than attempting to shut down the entire global Internet in order to control the hackers, I’d encourage BART to reconsider its policies. And then I’d urge them and the law enforcement community in general to get its head around social media.

Cross-posted from Adfero

Last week I gave a presentation at America’s Small Business Summit, sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, about how small businesses and organizations can develop an effective — but manageable — social media strategy.

I deliberately stayed away from talking about the latest and greatest tactics, and the newest and coolest tools.  Why?  It has become far too easy to get caught up in looking at what’s new, interesting, or different.  In reality, what we should be focusing on is what will fundamentally help our organizations achieve their missions on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis.

Organizations too often develop a social media strategy that is not properly integrated into its overarching goals.  So rather than spending time on the latest Twitter app or discussing the merits of Facebook’s latest design changes, I encouraged attendees not to get bogged down in the tactics.  Instead, I urged them to develop their social media strategies in the context of their organization’s key goals.

If your organization is looking to develop or refine your social media strategy, here are six steps to guide you along the way.

1. Clarifying the Organization’s Priorities. Even if you “get” social media, you can’t jump right in to creating a tactical plan.  First and foremost, it is critical to identify your organization’s goals.  For a business, it might be trying to win more customers, to recruit top talent, or increase revenue by a certain percentage.  For an association, a goal might be to recruit and retain members, to increase attendance at a tradeshow, or to achieve a certain policy objective.  Before you even think about tactics, you need to start by understanding what is driving your organization as a whole.  Otherwise, you will be implementing a plan that lacks any real purpose.
2. Setting Social Media Goals. With these key goals in mind, you should move on to develop specific goals for your organization’s social media efforts.  One example: increase your Facebook page’s monthly views by 50%.  Although traditional PR campaigns focus heavily on setting goals for media coverage, we often skip this step for social media efforts because we have no idea what to expect.  But even if social media represents unchartered territory for your organization, forming goals does two important things.  First, it focuses your social media team on what is really important.  Second, it gives your team an idea of what to work towards, even if that goal turns out to be unrealistic.  A corporation would never launch a new product without giving its sales force target revenue goals.  That’s true even if the company is completely unsure of how the product will perform.  Setting social media goals, even if they are somewhat arbitrary, provides direction for your team and sets expectations.
3. Choosing Social Media Tactics. Perhaps the most overwhelming step in this process in deciding where and how to spend your social media resources.  Over the past few years, there has been an explosion in social media sites, especially those designed to facilitate sharing.  But in the past year or two, the dust has settled.  Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have emerged as the three most widely used social media sites and the most important sites for your organization to consider using.  Picking among these sites requires knowing your audience.  Each social media outlet has pro’s and con’s for individual audiences. Facebook, for example, is best for appealing to a broad-based, mainstream audience.  In contrast, Twitter users – although far fewer in number than Facebook – represent a highly engaged segment of the online population and are much more likely to create (rather than just share) content.  Finally, LinkedIn is a professional site that might be right if your organization is hoping to impact the business community or to use working groups.  Choose the right vehicle (or vehicles) for engaging your target audience.
4. Developing an Operational Plan. The next step is taking your goals and your selected tactics to form a comprehensive plan that breaks down what your organization should be doing on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.  This operational plan should lay out each activity and assign each one to a specific person in the organization (in some cases, that may be the same person).  Your operational plan should also detail how you will monitor responses to your online activity and what your approach to engagement will be (for example, it should detail your comment policies).  Finally, your plan should include a process for reporting and evaluating your progress. You might wonder if such a detailed approach will stifle creativity.  It shouldn’t, as long as your plan allows for opportunities to be creative along the way.  The key is to set specific times to reevaluate and refine your tactics and goals
5. Getting Organizational Buy-In. Your strategy will only be successful if it has organization-wide support.  One way to get buy-in is to involve as many people as you can in the planning process itself, which will create a sense of ownership in the employees who participate.  Once you have your plan, be sure to educate other employees who may not have been part of the planning.  You should emphasize that social media success will translate into broader success for the organization as a whole, ultimately benefiting every employee.  Finally, to the extent that is possible, delegate responsibility for the social media strategy to as many employees as possible.
6. Implementing the Strategy. The last step involves executing the strategy you have created.  At this stage, it is best to think of classifying each of the activities listed above into the following categories: research, design (organizational priorities, social media goals, and tactics), implementation (getting buy in), administration (operational plan), and optimization.  As I noted above, implementation will work best if you have carved out time to refine and optimize your strategy as you move forward.  These opportunities will ensure your strategy remains effective and manageable.

By Sheree Anne Kelly, Vice President of the Public Affairs Council

I wouldn’t feel comfortable if our head of IT asked me to disassemble my computer, rebuild it and then go back to using it. I bet I’d enjoy the process of seeing what’s actually inside my PC, and I might even learn something. But how likely is it that my computer would function properly after such an exercise? Odds are pretty slim. When it comes to motherboards, I’ve had no training. I’m flying blind.

Many global companies are also flying blind when it comes to managing their in-country public affairs activities. According to the Public Affairs Council’s 2010-2011 International Public Affairs Benchmarking Report, most country managers (business heads in a particular host country) lack consistent public affairs training. Yet they are often responsible for the public affairs function.

The survey examines how firms organize, staff and resource global public affairs. It also looks at common decision-making processes, activities, challenges and trends in the field. In addition, respondents rated their ability to have an impact on public policy in markets such as China, the EU, Argentina, India and South Korea. Copies of the report can be ordered on the Council’s website at www.pac.org.

Sixty-one percent said their company’s in-country business leaders manage both operational and public affairs activities. This makes sense because of the natural synergy between business interests and public affairs objectives. In fact, respondents said more than 12 percent of the average international public affairs budget is allocated for business development.

What doesn’t make sense is the lack of training provided to these business executives so they know how to engage political leaders and confront public policy challenges. Fewer than 20 percent of companies provide regular (at least annual) training on company or industry-specific business issues. Advocacy skill training is regularly offered by only 18 percent of companies. Education programs on the inner workings of government and national decision-making processes are also rare – only 14 percent provide this type of training. Coalition-building skills are taught and reviewed even less frequently (by only 10 percent of companies).

This is not to say that companies forego training altogether. Anti-corruption training? That’s a priority for many organizations. Seventy-five percent provide instruction at least once a year. Ethics training is also offered on a regular basis by 71 percent of respondents. Those numbers ought to be 100 percent, however. And public affairs-specific guidance is provided regularly in less than one quarter of all companies.

Why is there a dearth of training? That’s a good question, especially when you review other study results. When asked to identify key political challenges in the international markets where they operate, respondents ranked “managing legislative and regulatory processes in host countries” the most difficult. If that’s the case, then it would stand to reason that firms would want to ensure the people charged with managing public affairs activities had the necessary political knowledge and tools to do their jobs.

In addition, preparing country managers well has become critical because of the growing global cynicism about the role of corporations in society.  Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer surveyed thought-leaders around the world to see if they trusted business to do what’s right. In the United States, a dismal 46 percent gave a positive response. That’s down eight percent from last year. Major countries with low levels of trust in business also include France, the UK and Russia.

Other studies have confirmed that the public affairs function is becoming more important than ever. A study last year by McKinsey & Company showed that government is more likely to affect a business’ economic value than any other group except customers. Nearly two-thirds said they believe government’s role in their industry will increase in the next three to five years.

If you want to see evidence of what happens when corporate employees approach global public affairs the wrong way, just read the headlines. In India, the giant conglomerate Tata Group may be implicated in a high-profile scandal, reports The Financial Times. Parliamentary panels are probing allegations that the company’s business executives practiced graft and other misconduct when dealing with government officials. In China last year, four executives from Rio Tinto, an Australian mining company, were sentenced to prison for bribery and stealing commercial secrets.CNN called this incident “a wake-up call for foreign firms in China.”

Could more training have helped these companies do the right thing? I would hope so. When you consider the cost of a negative public policy outcome, a missed opportunity to open a new market, and – most of all – the damage caused by a major ethics scandal, it’s short-sighted not to equip executives with the information they need to be effective.

The risks are simply too great to fly blind.

One year ago today the Congressional Management Foundation launched its new venture, the Partnership for a More Perfect Union. For those of you that have been following the Partnership, you know that this represents a broadening of CMF’s core mission, which has always been to support the Member, committee, and leadership offices of the U.S. Congress. Now, through the Partnership, CMF is seeking to improve the communication, understanding, and relationship between Members of Congress and the citizens they represent.

Here’s a little bit about what we’ve been up to in the last year:

• On April 21, 2010, CMF launched the Partnership for a More Perfect Union with the help of our Founding Partners: Fleishman-Hillard, AT&T, Convio, and the Hansan Family Foundation.
• CMF and the Partnership released the results of the 111th Congress Gold Mouse Project that seeks to improve the quality of congressional websites to meet constituents’ needs and expectations. We reviewed all 620 Member, committee, and leadership office websites of the House and Senate, presenting the best 135 websites in Congress with the coveted Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze Mouse awards.
• On January 26, 2011, we released the report, Communicating with Congress: Perceptions of Citizen Advocacy on Capitol Hill, the results of a survey of 260 congressional staff on both sides of the Hill and aisle about how they perceive and manage constituent “mail.” That same day, CMF’s President and CEO, Brad Fitch, delivered the key note address on the key findings from the report at the Public Affairs Council’s National Grassroots Conference in Key West, Florida.
• To date, we have provided webinar training for 192 grassroots advocacy practitioners through our Partnership with groups such as the National Conference on Citizenship, Women in Government Relations, and Independent Sector, and delivered speeches to groups including the American Optometric Association, Convio’s 2010 Summit, the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the American League of Lobbyists, Society for Human Resource Management, National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, and the American Traffic Safety Services Association.
• Earlier this year we launched the Partnership’s free bi-weekly email newsletter that not only captures our work, but provides subscribers with a summary of what is happening in the worlds of Congress, advocacy, citizen engagement, technology, and the social web.
• We also provide those organizations and individuals that join the Partnership with extra content, such as unpublished data, that they can repurpose for their efforts to educate their advocates and members.
• As of today, 18 organizations have joined the Partnership and we are grateful to them for their support, involvement, and belief in our mission: American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, American Network of Community Options and Resources, American Optometric Association, ASAE, Bayer Corporation, Clovis Point Solutions, Express Scripts, Independent Sector, National Conference on Citizenship, National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, National Write Your Congressman, Public Affairs Council, American Dental Association, American Society of Civil Engineers, American Traffic Safety Services Association, Open Forum Foundation, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, and our first of hopefully many Citizen–Advocate Partners, Beverly E. Bell.

Finally, one year out we continue to be grateful to our friends and partners at Fleishman-Hillard for having the foresight and determination to help us in this important endeavor. They are not only a Founding Partner, but they also helped us develop the Partnership brand, create the Partnership’s website and the “Inside the Hill” video series, and continue to provide valuable guidance to us on a regular basis. We are probably most grateful that they were the first Partner to fully understand and get behind our vision to enrich the relationship between citizens and Members of Congress and we are thankful for their continuing support.

Happy 1st anniversary, Partnership! Again, thank you to all of the individuals and organizations that have helped us become one year closer to perfecting our union!

Key contact programs are vital in today’s advocacy environment.  Having a large grassroots army that can mobilize on a range of issues is necessary, but not sufficient.  Organizations also need to be able to call on a committed group of activists who are willing to go above and beyond.

Unlike a traditional grassroots campaign, a key contact program focuses on a narrower subset of individuals.  Specifically, a “key contact” is someone who either (1) has an established relationship with an elected official; (2) has a comfort level with engaging in intense advocacy activities, such as making phone calls or doing in-person visits; or (3) has built up political capital through involvement in groups like the PTA.  One useful approach to building a key contact program around these types of individuals is the RAP Index.

Earlier this year, the Congressional Management Foundation released “Perceptions of Citizen Advocacy on Capitol Hill,” compiling the results of a survey of more than 250 congressional staff about constituent communications.  (Disclaimer: My firm, Adfero Group, is a co-sponsor of the report.)

One figure in the CMF’s report shows how Congressional staffers rated the influence of various advocacy tactics.  At the top of the list were “in person visits from constituents,” which 46% of respondents rated as having “a lot of positive influence,” and 51% rated as having “some influence.”   In contrast, only 1% of respondents rated “form email messages” as having “a lot of positive influence,” with 50% responding that form emails have “some influence.”

Although high-volume efforts like form email campaigns play a role in effective advocacy strategies, these statistics show that making an impact on Capitol Hill largely depends on high-touch advocacy tactics.  A Member’s one-on-one time with the well-educated and well-connected advocate is crucial to advancing an organization’s message.

If your organization is looking to develop a key contact program, here are some steps to follow:

1) Begin building in advance. An effective key contact program takes time to create.  It is not something you can develop overnight when your organization is facing an unexpected crisis.  If you expect a tough legislative fight in the future, start thinking about a key contact program now.

2) Focus on geography. You may not need a key contact program that spans all 50 states.  Outline your legislative goals for the next several years and figure out what states and districts are most important for those goals.  Concentrate your key contact program in these areas.

3) Analyze your current assets. Far too many organizations try to jumpstart a key contact program by starting from scratch instead of looking back to see who has taken action in the past.  Start with your existing assets and build from there.

4) Survey your entire membership. You should consider everyone, regardless of whether or not they have taken action in the past.  You never know who is going to turn out to be a great advocate.  A member may not be interested in politics, but her son could play on a soccer team with a Senator’s son.  When you survey your membership, your goal should be to figure out who has the key relationships, what those relationships are, and how strong they are.  You may find your best advocates from the most unlikely of sources.

5) Continually educate and inform your key contacts. The biggest mistake organizations make is to build a key contact list and then neglect it for three, six, or even twelve months when there is no pressing legislative goal.  You should provide your key contacts with special insider information on a regular basis to keep them engaged.

6) Reward and recognize. Your organization should brainstorm creative ways to reward and recognize your best advocates.   For example, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (an Adfero client) recently launched its “Advocacy Network,” which allows advocates to log into a Web site to report each action they take, place themselves on the ASA Advocacy Map, and earn points toward the ranking of “superactivist.”  The ASA’s efforts to reward its advocates have dramatically increased participation within its network.  Your efforts to recognize top activists will pay off.

7) Continually recruit and refine your efforts. Don’t neglect newcomers to the game.  You should regularly adjust your key contact program to be sure it is working effectively.

E-mails to congressional representatives are the common currency of online advocacy campaigns, but a new study shows all advocacy e-mails are not created alike. In a report published earlier this month, the Congressional Management Foundation aimed to determine how much influence e-mail, social media channels, and traditional media channels have on U.S. House Members and Senators.

The CMF survey of more than 250 congressional staffers showed that e-mails with individualized messages are far better received than form e-mails, which are often automated through advocacy campaign websites. Nineteen percent of respondents said e-mails including more personalized messages had “a lot of positive influence” on office holders who had yet to firmly decide on an issue, and 69 percent said they had some influence.

“What matters most is the content, not the vehicle,” suggested the “Communicating with Congress” report, which showed that postal mail featuring personalized messages is seen as almost equally influential to personalized e-mails. Twenty percent said they had “a lot of positive influence” and 70 percent said they had some.

Form e-mails, on the other hand, were seen as having “a lot of positive influence” by just 1 percent of participants and “some influence” by 50 percent. Social media site comments were also attributed less value. Just 1 percent said social site comments had “a lot of positive influence,” and 41 percent said they had “some influence.”

To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.