Article
How to Create an Effective Grassroots Advocacy Campaign
Today, the world of grassroots advocacy is much larger and far noisier than ever before. Grassroots campaigning is no longer dominated by nonprofit organizations; now large enterprises are going beyond conventional lobbying and public affairs tactics and direct relationships with legislators and starting to leverage grassroots advocacy strategies to achieve their legislative priorities.
But the strategies and tactics behind grassroots advocacy efforts are also changing. While traditional tactics such as door-to-door canvassing, direct mail, and phone campaigns are still essential, new digital organizing methods are continually evolving. For instance, the rise of social media has opened up boundless opportunities to raise awareness on public policy issues, drive advocate engagement, and inform public opinion.
But with all of the competition and commotion in the market, successful grassroots advocacy for corporate public affairs today requires a digital strategy that cuts through the noise to deliver a powerful message that inspires action.
Why grassroots lobbying is an important public affairs strategy
Grassroots advocacy is the process of building and organizing public support to achieve policy goals. Instead of relying on lobbyists to meet directly with members of Congress, a grassroots campaign spurs constituents into action by asking supporters and volunteers to contact their elected officials and putting pressure on them to enact change.
There are three primary benefits to grassroots advocacy:
- Strength in numbers. Individual lobbyists don’t hold the same power over members of Congress as a large group of their own constituents.
- Person-to-person. Lawmakers are often swayed by personal anecdotes, stories, or evidence presented by individual advocates.
- Securing voters. Most of the time, advocates are also registered voters, meaning their opinions can hold a lot of sway with their elected officials.
What makes a successful advocacy campaign?
While government affairs professionals and lobbyists still play a valuable role in developing direct government relations, a public affairs campaign is incomplete without an effective grassroots strategy. And the success of any modern advocacy campaign depends on one major factor: data.
The key to building an impactful grassroots strategy that shapes public policy outcomes is ensuring you have a way to effectively monitor and evaluate your advocacy campaign by tracking and analyzing as many advocate data points as possible. Collecting this breadth of data allows organizations to create precise, targeted campaigns that put the right message in front of the right audience at the perfect time.
By generating performance insights, checking progress toward goals, and gaining visibility into campaign efficacy, you can make more informed decisions about how to improve efforts to mobilize a grassroots movement to your cause – and report on this critical information to donors, stakeholders, and advocates.
4 strategies for grassroots advocacy campaign success
Advocacy success looks different for every project and organization, whether it’s tied to expanding or engaging your supporters, or achieving business objectives through changes to laws or regulations. So, how do companies organize effective campaigns that influence policy? It all starts with planning.
Advocacy planning sets the stage for your campaign’s success by outlining your strategy and the milestones to hit along the way. It also lays the foundation for how you will monitor and evaluate grassroots work, from data collection to policy impact assessment. With these frameworks in place, you can make strategic adjustments that optimize the outcomes of your advocacy effort and ultimately enact policy changes.
No matter the metrics you’re tracking, these four steps will help guide you through the process of measuring the success of your initiatives.
1. Set project objectives
The first step to measuring advocacy success is to outline project objectives. For instance, your overarching goal might be to mobilize voters to get a new bill signed into law. However, this target doesn’t provide you with measurable milestones. To evaluate progress throughout the campaign, it’s best to break down larger advocacy goals into smaller objectives. These might include reaching a predetermined number of new supporters or mobilizing a segment of advocates to contact their local lawmakers.
2. Define how you’ll measure success
With your objectives in place, the next step is to select key performance metrics that will enable you to monitor and measure campaign success. Collect data from across disparate sources to provide a deep understanding of your constituents. This includes real-time metrics such as how your advocates are engaging, what channels they’re using, and demographic information that tells a story about each constituent.
Many customer relationship management (CRM) tools offer advanced data management capabilities to help drive effective advocate engagement. Depending on the digital platforms you choose to reach your target audience, tools such as Mailchimp, Eventbrite, Facebook lead ads, WordPress, and Hustle can help you seamlessly collect and analyze reach and performance data for each channel.
Keep in mind that developing systems and processes around advocacy monitoring and evaluation is uniquely challenging, as strategies must be dynamic to adapt to fast-paced, unpredictable political forces. Goals and milestones often shift to account for changing circumstances and new political opportunities. Campaigns can last for years, and the policy goals may change. As a result, advocacy initiatives might end before legislative outcomes are even realized.
3. Monitor progress metrics
Once your campaign is in motion, it’s time to start monitoring the data and measuring progress toward your advocacy goals. It’s important to track all relevant activity, such as page views, sign-ups, new advocates added, and total lawmaker contacts. Measuring and evaluating this granular progress allows you to adjust and optimize your advocacy strategy along the way.
Outside of maximizing influence and advocacy outcomes, this visibility will also enable you to generate credible reports that demonstrate tangible campaign impacts to relevant parties. By monitoring and assessing digital media activities, constituent data, and policy influence, you can provide your stakeholders and supporters with comprehensive visibility into campaign performance.
4. Assess and report outcomes
The final step in measuring advocacy success is to assess the impacts and outcomes of your campaign – and share your results with stakeholders.
In the early stages, evaluation might focus on periodic benchmarks to learn who engages with your movement and to understand the kinds of content that mobilizes your target audience. After campaign completion, you can assess any policy outcomes to determine whether you achieved your goals and, if not, to identify areas for future improvement.
Whether your movement mobilized new supporters to contact their elected officials or simply gained new advocates, reporting on campaign success metrics is critical to prove progress and value to stakeholders at every step. Even if your efforts struggled to engage constituents, you can identify areas for improvement and walk stakeholders through actionable next steps in your report.
Move your campaign forward with Bloomberg Government
Modern grassroots advocacy campaigns for corporate public affairs require a digital strategy. Campaign strategists need an effective way to collect constituent data, measure digital media efficacy, and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. Watch our on-demand webinar How Lobbying Firms Are Changing Their Structures and Advocacy Strategies to learn more about how the lobbying business is changing, both in terms of how firms are structured and how their focus is expanding beyond the typical Washington issues and ways of conducting advocacy.
Evaluating policy influence can be difficult and takes time – and without the right tools, public affairs professionals can find themselves without a clear way to demonstrate the impact of their lobbying and public affairs activities and initiatives. Monitoring and evaluating advocacy efforts doesn’t need to be a burden. Bloomberg Government has a comprehensive set of tools for grassroots organizers to make the most of their campaigns, including cross-industry news coverage and analysis, legislative tracking, and detailed congressional directories. Request a demo to see it for yourself.