Advocacy Today Demands Bringing Your “A” Game
- Breaking legislation that’s not in your strategic plan
- Multi-channel outreach through emails, twitter, facebook, phone and more
- Activity at the federal, state AND local levels
That means you need to launch campaigns to fight legislation or regulations, and then rally supporters and stakeholders to take action with informed messaging and issue alerts.
Your communications with advocates have to be clear and effective, and they need to give them the opportunity to take action for you with ease. (See the formula for writing a killer call to action!)
Then their emails, tweets, and posts to lawmakers at the federal, state and local level, and to the agencies, must bypass gatekeepers, spam filters, and busy schedules, to get read and acknowledged by the right people.
Internally, you want a dashboard view, technology that tracks click rates, opens, and allows you to segment lists, among multiple other actions in the advocacy workflow, and lets you run reports on progress and performance.
A good professional advocacy engagement solution gives you all this and more. It helps your organization educate and activate stakeholders, target efforts, and work more productively with greater results, at every stage, from a single system.
Can I Roll My Own Solution?
Good luck with that.
Top Benefits of a Professional Advocacy Platform
A top-tier platform will get your critical emails whitelisted and delivered. That’s the difference between your important messages getting through and generating action, or withering away unread in a junk folder.
2. Predictable Pricing and Scalability
A value-priced advocacy solution will encourage success, and not nickel-and-dime you as you grow.
3. Intelligence That Goes Beyond “Civics 101”
Top-tier advocacy solutions are an authority on the inner workings of federal, state and local government and have walked in your shoes. They know that a bill’s name and number are only the beginning of the story.
4. Simple, Easy Engagement Actions for Your Supporters
Professional advocacy solutions make it dead simple for your supporters to call, write or tweet their lawmakers, or sign a petition or leave a comment on regulations.gov.
5. Seamless Integration With Your AMS and CMS
A great professional online advocacy solution plays well with other systems and empowers you to easily embed calls to action and content onto existing websites and social media platforms. In addition, it seamlessly synchronizes data with your Association Management Software and Content Management System.
6. You’ll Be More Efficient
Free up hours previously lost to time sucks, such as re-entering data from your email application into your AMS and scraping the web for lawmaker emails and Twitter handles. Features like seamless system integration and auto-populated contact fields let you spend that time instead on more value-added activities, like meeting with lawmakers face to face, crafting brilliant emails, and hosting events.
7. You’ll Respond More Effectively
The key to effective advocacy campaigns is your ability to respond quickly and comprehensively to legislative events. A good all-in-one solution allows you to operate in multiple channels — website, email, Twitter, Facebook — from one platform in one concerted push that keeps your members engaged. You’ll also create public buzz that justifies your existence to your internal stakeholders.
8. You’ll Expand Your Reach
Grow your base by making your site a hub of activity. A good advocacy solution gives you the tools to attract new supporters at all levels — for example, by providing calls to action that can target local, state and federal officials — and then the mechanism to capture those supporters’ contact information. Grow by converting new contacts into loyal advocates.
Stakeholders Will Know You Are Serious
A professional advocacy tool with a dedicated microsite action center and timely actionable alerts tells staff, supporters and key influencers that you mean business.
A great professional advocacy solution will empower you to:
- Educate stakeholders, perform advocate outreach, manage your campaigns, gather insightful membership data, and generate powerful reports.
- Seamlessly embed functionality where you need it (including on your Facebook page) or create a totally new microsite with its built-in CMS.
- Be design-responsive for various devices. Everyone lives on their phones these days and your advocates expect to be able to take action on theirs.
And it will empower your advocates to:
- Comment on a regulation straight from your advocacy action hub website.
- Write a letter to federal, state and local officials and find those officials for them in double quick time with a zip code matching feature.
- Provide a phone number for their officials and allow you to provide them handy talking points. Sign a petition that helps you capture emails and build your membership list. Tweet their elected officials straight from your website. Share their story around the legislation or regulation your fighting.
- Register to vote in their district right from your website.
Is It Time to Go Pro?
- The current system is straining to handle growing campaign volume or complexity.
- You can’t mobilize your grassroots by performing certain functions, like segmented outreach or tweets directly from your website.
- You’re tired of managing multiple accounts and applications, hopping between browser windows and having critical advocate or lawmaker information fall through the cracks.
- Something big is happening in your organization — geographic expansion, hot legislation or regulations, a shift in your mission or the legislative landscape — and you want to seize this opportunity to take your advocacy efforts to the next level.
Conclusion: Make an Assessment
About CQ Roll Call Engage
Find out more at http://cqrollcall.com/engage.
