Three Advocacy “Shoulds”

Early this week, Jake Brewer published a piece titled, “The Tragedy of Advocacy,” laying bare the disconnect between online advocacy and policy change.

Jake’s isn’t the first and won’t be the last (we hope) entreaty to advocacy professionals to get better at linking what we ask of our advocates to real political power (we’ve even posted one of our own similar entreaties – here and here), but Jake’s version is thorough, actionable, and handily, consists of three main points. So, it’s perfect for this week’s Three Things! (We’re pretty sure he didn’t do that on purpose).

Our contribution to the conversation Jake invigorated with his article: three “shoulds” from Shayna to make advocacy better. We’d love to know what you think.

1) Advocacy should be more closely connected to the way policy is made.

Quoting Jake:

I personally have asked thousands upon thousands of people to write Congress in demanding things like a “clean energy future.” There’s definitely something to be said about symbolic efforts that gain media attention and that ultimately lead to getting a bill dropped in Congress, but, honestly, bills almost never actually get dropped for that reason. The two things any of Member of Congress can do are co-sponsor an existing bill or vote yes or no on it. Broad-based citizen advocacy should ask for one of those things.

Jake is right – public demands for vague principles have exactly zero chance of moving policy through a legislative process.

If passing or killing or changing legislation is your goal (in Congress, your state legislature, or your City Council), then focus your advocacy asks on the *specific* things you want legislators to do, and limit those asks to the legislators positioned to take action. Pelting all 435 Congresspeople with a specific legislative ask is merely drowning out signal with noise if only 60 members on a committee of jurisdiction can do anything about it.

2) We should be honest about the value of e-advocacy.

Jake lays out a compelling case for the uselessness of sending mass emails or faxes to Congress, noting that the systems for delivering the messages are deeply flawed and that Congressional staff are so inundated with those emails and faxes that they’re essentially just so much spam: never really read, never really processed, and certainly never seriously considered. Jake lays down a challenge that I’ll second:

Find a petition that is supposed to deliver your message to your representative. Sign it, and wait a day or two; give the petition time to make its way through the system. Then call your representative’s office and ask if they got it. Ask them to do a search of the emails they’ve received or check their faxes. Ask if they’ve recorded your input on the bill you commented on.

I’d add to that challenge: ask if the Member has shifted his position or taken action on the bill.

If your target is other than Congress the signal-to-noise ratio is still pretty good, so e-advocacy of the most ubiquitous “send an email to your legislator” sort can still be an effective way of delivering constituent sentiment. (David, our resident sitting state legislator, concurs.)

And/but, even down-ticket, a call, visit, written letter, letter-to-the-editor, question at a candidate forum, and other more personal and direct interactions with legislators and their staff are far more likely to move the needle. We should undertake redirection of advocacy resources and thinking toward old-fashioned “meatspace” approaches to balance out the e-advocacy approaches that get so much attention of late.

3) We should stop conflating list size with advocacy or movement building (funders, I’m lookin’ at you).

I think most people involved in advocacy are rolling their eyes at my first two “shoulds,” because we all already know that targeting is important and the value of e-advocacy is limited. The reason those factors are ignored is that resources flow in droves to “movement building” or “capacity building” which are all too often measured as list size.

The rationale isn’t ridiculous on its face: big list size means that if even a small percentage of people on the list do more than just clicktivism, we’ll have better numbers for the real stuff. And, since we never know where we’ll need to focus next, building lists in specific Congressional districts is risky, so we’ll look to national list building instead.

However, while the rationale isn’t ridiculous the practice is. To paraphrase many a strategic thinker: what gets measured gets done. So, since what gets measured is list size, what gets built are big lists by any means necessary. So, while no one would set out to create a list of congressional advocates built almost entirely of people on either coast (the make-up of far too many national progressive organizations’ lists) if their goal is moving legislation through Congress, that’s exactly what gets created because those are the lists that are easiest to build biggest and most quickly.

Similarly, no one would send a message to people in all 50 states encouraging them to lobby their Congresspeople on, say, funding for mental health services, if the bill is stuck in a subcommittee of the Senate HELP committee that consists of Senators from a dozen states. But that’s exactly what happens, because advocacy lists are built to be big first and targeted second.

Moreover, as a field we’ve been conditioned to use those asks as the first screen for the more meaningful advocacy activities: if someone clicks on a link to send a message to their Congressperson and takes the time to personalize that message, maybe she’ll also be willing to make a phone call? Again, it’s not ridiculous on it’s face, but this approach comes at the cost of rallying our troops to meaningless actions and worsening the signal-to-noise ratio for the people we need to hear us.

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