K Street Cafe

K Street Café’s Colin Delany today used the enormous surge in communications to Congress related to the bailout bill as an opportunity to provide readers with a wonderful summary of best practices for organizations who are running advocacy campaigns.

I agree with almost everything Colin advises: advocacy campaigns should not rely on form email communications. Instead they should use a variety of tactics, they should encourage citizens to write in their voice, and they should use creativity to help reinforce their message.

But the events of the last two weeks have reinforced a few additional key best practices to run a successful advocacy campaign.

Let’s use the excellent research by the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) that Colin refers to in his post as a starting point. (My firm Adfero Group was a sponsor of the 2008 CMF’s Communicating With Congress project, and Kathy Goldschmidt of CMF is a contributor on K Street Café.)

This now-famous chart by CMF details the “influence” of ten different kinds of communications to Congress. A visit to a Member’s congressional office by a constituent is most influential (99% of staff say that it is very influential or somewhat influential). A letter to a Member’s office by a constituent in his or her own voice is a little less influential (96%). Form communications are less influential. Of the ten types of communications detailed in the report, the least effective is a form email (63%.)

OK. Let’s tie this research together with what we have learned from the surge in grassroots activity related to the bailout bill and make some observations:

1. Many misinterpret this chart to mean that organizations should avoid sending email to Capitol Hill altogether and instead focus solely on more influential tactics.

2. I would make the case that if 63% of Congressional staff say that form email communications are influential, then form email communications are in fact influential.

3. What the chart does not take into account is volume. Would ten email form letters be more influential then one in-person visit by a constituent? Probably not. Would ten handwritten letters from constituents have more influence than one in-person visit? Debatable. But probably not, I would guess. However,

4. If I were running an advocacy campaign to defeat the bailout bill and I could choose between a coordinated effort to set up in-person meetings between Members and their constituents and a massive surge of inbound email that cripples the IT infrastructure of the House of Representatives, I would most certainly choose the latter.

5. The reason that the House surprisingly voted against the bailout bill earlier this week was the sheer volume of communication from constituents.

6. The best advocacy campaigns have a healthy mix of both quality and quantity. In the end, professionals who are running advocacy efforts to impact Congress should mix high-touch in-person visits and personalized letters with a large volume of constituents contacting their elected representatives – even if that means making it easier for citizens to communicate by letting them submit a form email.