Debunking Advocacy Myths

This week Shayna was in beautiful San Francisco to present at the annual National Council for Community and Education Partnerships (NCCEP) conference on more effective advocacy.

Shayna’s slides are posted here. She debunked five myths about advocacy, so this week’s Three Things include two bonus bits of wisdom:

Advocacy myth #1: DC professionals are most persuasive.

Organizations without a culture or history of advocacy often labor under the misconception that the only way to influence the Hill is to be in the smoky backrooms wheeling and dealing. There’s a pervasive myth that sending in an army of lobbyists is the most persuasive way to move a persuadable legislator.

Data from the Congressional Management Foundation aligns with every other study of what moves legislators on the Hill: lobbyist contacts are less persuasive than every form of quality constituent contact. Good lobbyists are valuable sources of information to staffers on the Hill. The best ones are issue experts that staff can trust to provide facts, resources, and context. However, lobbyists aren’t generally understood to represent constituents – they represent interests. Even if you’ve got a lobbyist on the Hill working for you, backing up that investment with high quality constituent contacts can make a big difference..

Advocacy myth #2: Constituent contacts don’t matter.

Again, to the data: senior staff on the Hill reported the top six most persuasive types of contacts are quality constituent contact – DC or in-district office visits, personal letters or emails, questions and comments at telephone town halls and in-district town halls, phone calls.

“Quality” is an important modifier. Constituent contacts in the form of “clicktivism” – online petitions, form emails, form letters, etc. – rank on the bottom of the persuasiveness scale. Invest in delivering high quality contacts from constituents to decision-makers to make an impact on your issue.

Advocacy myth #3: Online contacts matter most.

Over the last several years, many organizations have shifted their organizing investments to building capacity to deliver online contacts. Email campaigns encouraging activists to “click here to sign the petition!” are far more commonplace today than any in-person, high-touch organizing or online strategies to achieve the same high quality results. An oft-heard refrain relates to this modern era and the ubiquity – and assumed effectiveness – of online-only advocacy.

The data confirms that this is a myth. Mass-produced online advocacy action are at the bottom of the persuasiveness scale. You don’t need an elaborate technological solution to build an effective advocacy program – you need a strategy and the capacity to deliver high quality constituent contacts, online and offline.

As an aside, this dangerous myth has pervaded voters’ perceptions about how they make a difference, too. See our reporting on this disconnect here: http://englin.net/greatdisconnect/

Advocacy myth #4: Quantity is more important than quality.

A thousand e-petition signatures is a less effective advocacy action than a hundred contacts consisting of a combination of Hill and in-district office visits, personalized emails or letters (not just modified form letters – but actual individual, personal missives), constituent questions at recess town halls, and other high quality contacts.

The volume of mass-produced contacts to the Hill (and a few bad actors in the space) has had an unfortunate effect: Congressional staffers aren’t convinced those form emails come from real people, expressing their real preferences. Quoting the Congressional Management Foundation:

Congressional staff often seriously doubt that identical form communications are actually sent by constituents. Instead, the prevalent belief expressed in our surveys, interviews and focus groups is that grassroots organizations are creating these communications from membership lists, rather than through direct constituent action. When asked whether they thought identical form communications were generated “without the knowledge or consent” of a constituent, 49% agreed or strongly agreed and an additional 25% responded “neither agree nor disagree,” suggesting that they have some doubts.

Advocacy myth #5: Our statistics tell our story.

Progressive organizations making a difference in the world tend to lead with our numbers: how many people served or saved, how many hours, dollars, etc., and we tend to train our activists to deliver our statistics. We’re laboring under the myth that our statistics tell our most effective story.

Data and numbers matter. But activists would do better to put those numbers into the context of their own personal story and their own reasons for supporting or opposing the policy they’re advocating for or against. We wrote a bit about this a few weeks ago, too: http://englin.net/numbers-dont-move-people