If you spend much time in any state capitol in the U.S., you will encounter the springtime ritual of nonprofit organizations (and for-profits, too–you can tell the difference by the type of lunch they provide!) bringing their constituents to their state capital for an annual Lobby Day. I have organized 7 of these myself and helped to plan and coordinate another ~10, and I have participated as a speaker or advocate in at least 15 more. I have seen amazingly successful Lobby Days, where participants have meaningful encounters with elected officials, connect with others similarly committed to their issues, and leave excited to take on more advocacy work. And I have seen lackluster Lobby Days, where participants catch only glimpses of elected officials, sit numbly and listen to uninspired speakers, and wander around the capitol waiting for their boxed lunch to be delivered so that they can go home. And I know that you want to have the former, not the latter, describe your Lobby Day, right?
Which leads, then, to the inevitable bulleted list of lessons I’ve learned over the years of bringing non-lobbyists to state capitols to lobby effectively. Done right, this one day can yield significant returns for a nonprofit’s advocacy campaign, and I hope that these thoughts might help you in preparing your own day.
Plan your Lobby Day with an eye towards the legislative calendar. You want to be early enough in the session that your issues are still in play, and so that you can make an impact on the process, and yet not so early that you haven’t had time to lay a foundation for the day–setting up visits, preparing timely bill summaries and talking points, and planning logistics (only some of which can be done in advance of the start of the legislative session). In a state where the session runs January-sometime in late spring/early summer (like Kansas and Missouri), mid-February is kind of ideal, although I have had successful Lobby Days as late as mid-March. You may also want to have an idea of when other nonprofit organizations, particularly whose agendas might overlap yours, are planning Lobby Days, so that you can maximize your impact throughout the session. We twice chose to do our Lobby Day during spring break because we were working on student issues and wanted to have a large youth presence.
That leads to the next point, you need to have a lot of the groundwork done before your group ever hits the floor of the capitol building. Visits need to be set up with at least some members of the legislature (once you have confirmed that you will have constituents from a certain district participating, you don’t necessarily need all of the names–you can schedule a meeting with the legislator for ‘her constituents who will be in the capitol with XYZ organization that day.’ If they aren’t constituents, you’ll be relying on the strength of your relationship with the legislators and/or relationships that individuals have with them, so you’ll potentially need to be more specific about who’s involved.) Some agencies like to have participants schedule these visits themselves, I guess to have the experience, but I am more concerned with making sure that they happen, which is where the real empowerment can occur, so I like to set them up myself. You also need to alert the media and deal with logistics (parking, meal arrangements, etc..). We always found it necessary to fundraise in order to pay for school buses to take people from Kansas City to Topeka, and we also provided small stipends to people in targeted areas of the state (where we wanted to persuade legislators) so that they could also travel to the capital.
Materials: you’ll need press packets, packets of information for elected officials that each delegation will leave with their members, and packets for the participants themselves (talking points, information about the capitol, lobbying tips). Make sure that these are kept separate, with different colors of paper, or something–they are for very different audiences. You should also print off photographs of each legislator with whom a group is supposed to meet; they should be able to recognize him/her not only in the meeting but also if the meeting is cancelled and they have to track him/her down outside the chambers or in the hallway.
If at all possible, you should form teams or ‘delegations’ for the legislative visits; I like groups of ~3-4 for these conversations, with 1 or 2 people being either those who have a connection to the legislator (like a constituent or someone with a relationship) or those with experience lobbying (or, ideally, both), and the other ~1-2 people being those who are pretty new to lobbying. Your goals here are to get every single person an experience sitting down and talking with an elected official and also to make those visits as impactful as possible, and I’ve found that this arrangement satisfies both, while also achieving a valuable third goal of developing new leadership and equipping people to play more active roles in the future.
Plan an agenda that energizes your participants, provides them with some of the context that they need to be effective in their lobbying, allows them to meet each other, and yet devotes the majority of the day to actual contact with legislative targets. This can’t be overemphasized; it just isn’t a Lobby Day if people are just coming to hear speakers and then eating lunch and maybe running into a senator in the restroom but not knowing for sure and, in any event, not saying anything. Usually we had some sort of march and rally first thing in the morning; everyone knew we were there by about 10am. Then we had legislative visits until lunch (paying attention to the House and Senate agendas and committee schedules); some people left at lunch, if their visits were done, while others stayed after lunch to meet with more legislators.
Participants’ packets should include feedback sheets where they provide information about each legislative contact (scheduled visits plus any chance encounters), the views expressed by the elected official, any follow-up needed, and a process evaluation of the visit, including feedback on fellow group members. Since I always had a master list of who was meeting with whom and when, I could follow up to make sure that I received these forms from at least all of the established visits. This is essential if the core lobbyists/advocates are to ‘close the loop’ by answering questions and taking advantage of legislative interest. Have someone stationed somewhere in the capitol building to receive these and also to answer questions and provide directions all day, and also check for them again at lunch and before closing the day’s events.
If you have organized an agency Lobby Day, what lessons do you want to share? What worked and what didn’t? What was your greatest success? What would you do differently? What help do you need as you consider bringing people to Topeka or Jefferson City (or insert your state capital) next year?
Materials:
Bilingual flyer for Bistate Lobby Day, January 2007
Advertisement
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
