Several years ago our Innovate to Motivate conference hosted then Gallup Managing Partner Ron Balmer to talk about Gallup’s research on customer engagement and how it applies to grassroots organizations. It was one of our most highly rated workstorms. Gallup has been at the forefront of engagement research; they define it as the degree to which people will work for or against your organization or brand. I think most of us would agree that definition of stakeholder engagement is worth pursuing. They have published recent research which reinforces Ron’s prescient admonitions.
Engagement matters because the world is driven to distraction. With engagement, your stakeholders give you the benefit of the doubt when you screw up. They also have your brand as a part of their own identity. They can’t imagine a world without your organization or cause, and criticizing your organization means criticizing themselves.
Gallup conducted research with over 17,000 social media users to determine how people interact with social media and its effectiveness as a marketing tool. Gallup doesn’t conduct shoddy research, so I think it’s worth our time to see if there are applications for those of us in the grassroots persuasion business. After all, we are marketers of ideas and action. (more…)
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Come hear Adfero Group’s own Sue Zoldak and Purple Forge’s John Craig discuss how organizations are using Mobile apps to organize, mobilize and engage their target audiences in grassroots advocacy, lobbying and campaigning.
Are you currently using Mobile to reach your organization’s assets? Find out more and sign up here.
Date: Thursday, November 10, 2011, 6:00 p.m.
Location:
Adfero Group
1666 K Street NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C.
Schedule:
6:00 – 6:30 Meet & Greet
6:30 – 6:40 Introductions
6:45 – 7:30 Sue Zoldak (Adfero Group) & John Craig (Purple Forge)
7:30 – 8:00 Q&A
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The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the latest high-profile example of how underdogs don’t use their positions as effectively as they could.
I give the protesters credit for getting off their computers and on the streets. Research we conducted with hundreds of grassroots professionals found that getting their volunteers into the trenches was their No. 1 challenge.
I also give them points for understanding that being the underdog can be an advantage in the business and political arenas, especially during an economic decline. That’s what my research found. I interviewed more than 1,000 grassroots advocates and the senators, members of Congress, state legislators and business leaders whose minds they changed for my new book, The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful…and Live to Tell About It. Based on those interviews and survey responses, we have uncovered the seven key extreme influence tactics required to persuade those up the food chain. Upward influence matters because it’s about the results, not just noise.
We usually support the underdog, but my research found that not all underdogs are created equal. If you want the advantage of the underdog mantle, you can’t have a huge amount of resources, so the protestors made a mistake when they allowed the members of more than three dozen unions to march with them. Successful underdogs have few resources and don’t squander their resources. Few in America view unions as resource-starved underdogs, so the sympathy factor is negated. (more…)
Posted by: Guest Contributor
By Brett Weisel, Advocacy Manager at Feeding America
Last week I attended the Public Affairs Council’s National Grassroots Conference. It was once again a fantastic conference—high energy, educational, well attended, etc. However, as I chatted with my fellow grassroots professionals throughout the week, I couldn’t help but think how lucky I am to work at Feeding America. Being from a nonprofit, I have the luxury of having a good deal of freedom and flexibility in how I communicate with my key audiences—both to our online advocates and our network of more than 200 food banks.
I say that because I was surprised to hear about the level of restrictions that are placed on many grassroots professionals regarding how and when they can communicate with their members or employees, what they can say (for instance—making sure the language is vetted by their legal department), and institutional barriers that prevent them from truly growing their grassroots. At the conference, we learned from the Congressional Management Foundation that grassroots does matter and Members of Congress do listen to their constituents, making effective grassroots mobilization vital to any cause. While I understand why many companies place institutional restrictions on these types of communications, it seems to me that placing limitations on how, when, and which audiences we can engage to mobilize support prevents us from doing our job effectively. From my perspective, pointing out that I can’t do my job effectively is a pretty good argument to try to break down those restrictions and release the shackles.
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Cross-posted from The Partnership for a More Perfect Union Communicating with Congress blog
Today, CMF and the Partnership released a new survey of congressional staff which reveals that they believe constituents have far more influence on undecided lawmakers than lobbyists. If you listen to the media, the pundits, or the general public, however, you might think lobbyists are at the top of the heap. But our research shows this is not the case.
When asked about various groups and strategies that might influence their Member of Congress, 46% of congressional staff surveyed said that “in-person constituent visits” would have “a lot” of influence, compared to 8% which said the same of a “lobbyist visit.”
In spite of the fact that many citizens feel like they have lost their place at the table, Congress really is trying to listen to the views of constituents.
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Grassroots advocacy in the first quarter of 2011 – a new year and a new Congress – presents some challenges, but even more opportunities for your organization and its members.
Let’s acknowledge that, in the first three months, it will be a bit difficult to deliver your messages to Congress. What do you do when some offices haven’t been filled yet (some Senate offices won’t be filled until March) and many House offices aren’t yet fully staffed?
That said, the first quarter also brings tremendous opportunities to educate and engage members of Congress, particularly the freshman class, early on.
As Brad Fitch rightly noted in his post, New House Calendar Benefits Grassroots Advocates, the 2011 House calendar currently has 13 District Work periods – more than double from 2010. This means your organization and members have more opportunities to engage with your member of Congress at home, and your member of Congress has more face time with constituents from the district. This is a win-win situation.
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Cross-posted on the Partnership for a More Perfect Union
The newly released House calendar for the 112th Congress presents a fascinating opportunity for grassroots advocates seeking to build relationships and influence legislators. The calendar makes good on part of a promise the House Republicans made when they took office that they would operate differently than Democrats, and even previous Republican leaders.
The schedule is mostly a two-weeks-on and one-week-off schedule. It includes five days of voting when legislators are in Washington, no votes after 7 pm, and consistent end times on Fridays. Whether incoming Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor can pull it off is still a question. (The Senate tried a similar calendar during the 104th Congress and punted it after 10 months.) But, for sake of sane scheduling, increased efficiency, and hot meals at 7:30 pm for Members and staff, let’s assume they can. What does this mean for those seeking to influence legislators?
First, legislators will likely schedule more town hall meetings. The 2010 House calendar had 5 District Work periods – the 2011 calendar has 13. This means Members of Congress have more certainty and time to schedule town hall meetings in the district. It also means they’ll likely schedule more events as well – visits to businesses, schools, and groups. Great photo op’s, but also great face time with constituents.
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On January 25th-28th, the Public Affairs Council will be sponsoring its 34th annual National Grassroots Conference. The three-day conference offers opportunities to learn about the latest in grassroots tactics and to network with other advocacy professionals.
As a repeat attendee, I can vouch for the conference’s reputation as a great source of innovative ideas and a fantastic mid-winter getaway. (Did I mention this year’s location is the Casa Marina Resort in Key West, Florida?)
Also new this year: my colleague and fellow K Street Café contributor Brad Fitch of the Congressional Management Foundation will be delivering the opening address at the conference’s first general session.
Brad will share CMF’s newest data on which modern advocacy strategies have the most impact on Capitol Hill. Brad will also talk about how social media is shaping constituent communications with Congress.
I will be there covering Brad’s speech and other events throughout the conference for K Street Café’s readers.
If you are attending the conference and would like to contribute to K Street Café’s coverage of the event, please let us know.
First published on Partnership for a More Perfect Union.
You know something has had an impact on you when you’re still thinking about it weeks after the fact. And what happened recently on YouTube got me thinking.
Members of Congress and their staffs have gotten used to a world where a constituent writes a postal letter or e-mail or calls the office and the office responds in written form to the citizen’s concerns. One of the challenges that social media creates for congressional offices is that they can no longer just wait for constituent communication to come to them. They now need to monitor external sources to capture it all.
As Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers said in our “Inside the Hill” web series, “the world has changed.”
What punctuated this for me was the flurry of activity around a Senate vote regarding the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Regardless of what side of this sensitive social issue you come down on, something happened that should be instructive to Members of Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens alike.
The Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) is an organization dedicated to ending DADT. They recently enlisted Lady Gaga, of…well…Lady Gaga fame, to create and post a YouTube video asking her considerable fan base to call their Senators to request an end to the ban on openly gay service members. This video is interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that, when she calls her Senators live in the video, she never actually gets through to either one because the volume of calls to the Senate’s phone system resulted in a busy signal from one and an at-capacity mailbox from the other. What happens next is even more interesting.
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Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy
The tea party movement, and the social media activism horse it rode in on, are both facing skepticism from influential thinkers including Malcolm Gladwell.
To Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers,” online advocacy and cause-related actions in social media are moot compared to activism that propelled social upheavals like the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Social media evangelists, he wrote in this week’s The New Yorker, “seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”
As Gladwell dismissed “the outsized enthusiasm for social media” in his essay, another leading thinker ripped into one of today’s most-hyped social media activism stories – that of the tea party movement’s vaunted follower counts.
Micah Sifry, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and a proponent of digital and social technologies in politics, challenged recent reports claiming Republicans are trouncing Democrats when it comes to their social media followings. Sifry argued in a recent post on PDF’s TechPresident site, “while I don’t doubt that there is more enthusiasm on the right side of the aisle about the coming November election, I don’t think the online metrics are really so lopsided.”
To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.
