Category Archives: Tips and How-Tos

Why Advocates Make the Best Fundraisers

Posted on March 31, 2011 by | Leave a comment

One of those books that I’ve had on my nightstand for months (thank goodness for really long checkouts from the university library) is Fundraising for Social Change.

Once I finally opened it up, I found not only some still-relevant and very applicable (although my edition is somewhat outdated, technology-wise) fundraising strategies, especially for grassroots social change organizations, but also even more parallels between advocacy and fundraising than I had contemplated before. This has me thinking about how fundraisers are advocates for their causes, and how advocates should spend more time asking for money, and I want to hear from those who are fundraisers and those who are advocates (and those who consider themselves both!) about your reactions to these areas of overlap. In the weeks to come, I’ll sprinkle in some posts with some specific ideas about how some of the strategies suggested in Fundraising for Social Change might be applied in an advocacy context, but, here, I’m more interested in the big picture, a sort of “Venn Diagram” of how the worlds of asking for money and asking for policy change collide.

  • Organizations that ask most frequently get the best response: This is true in fundraising, and explains part of why people give so many of their charitable dollars to religious institutions, and it’s true for advocates, too. I’ve won at least one legislative battle, in particular, because I refused to go away, and I’ve garnered more than a couple of votes by having the audacity to just ask.
  • You need strategies to acquire, retain, and upgrade: We can’t use the same messages to bring in new people, keep those we have, and move people from peripheral to central involvement, and that’s true for fundraising and for the realms of organizing and advocacy. We lose people when it’s obvious we’re not exactly talking to them, and we can miss out on valuable opportunities to help people take the next step, too.
  • Nonprofit Boards matter…a lot: I’ve never seen a successful advocacy program, over the long term, in an organization without a supportive Board of Directors, and without the active participation of those core community leaders, fundraising efforts stagnate, too.
  • Emphasize your passion, but don’t forget to close the deal: I’ve debriefed with advocates often, only to find that they can’t tell me whether they have the support of the person they just lobbied. They didn’t directly ask. We get the most sympathetic attention when we stress our connection to the cause and the reasons it matters, but we have to stop talking at least long enough to listen to the other’s response.
  • Don’t apologize: I never felt bad about asking an elected official to do something morally correct but politically unpopular. I was giving them the valuable chance to do the right thing. Asking for money is the same way. People give because they want to invest in a collective response to a social problem, which is why people decide to support certain courses of policy action, too. They’re grateful for those opportunities, and we provide a valuable public service by providing them.
  • There’s no substitute for preparation: Fundraising for Social Change emphasizes the importance of understanding your donors, and your prospects, and of entering the conversation with the data and the practice you need to succeed. Obviously, that’s true in many life and professional endeavors, but especially in advocacy, where (as in fundraising) you may only have 5 minutes or so to make your case. You need to maximize every moment.

    I don’t love asking people for money. Just as I don’t naturally love confrontations with elected officials or media representatives, or policy debates with my neighbors. But I know that I can do it, and I have, and I will, because I know that winning advocacy campaigns requires money, and that money which is raised from our constituency is money that is more secure and more empowering than that which is begged from distant benefactors. I see raising the money to fund social change as an extension of my belief in it, and so it must be part of the equation.

    And you, advocates, can fundraise too.

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    Crowdsourcing: your new anti-burnout strategy?

    Posted on March 3, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    I don’t deny that there are strains of this all throughout American culture, but social workers and nonprofit folks seem particularly susceptible: the one-up battle of “who is the busiest?”!

    I see it in organizations where people are afraid or embarrassed to leave at 5PM, because they incur the wrath or disdain of their coworkers who take late hours like a badge of honor.

    I see it in my students, who before their careers have even started, are convinced that they are busier than anyone can possibly understand.

    I see it in social work colleagues, who inevitably answer even “how are you?” with something along the lines of “crazy busy, of course!”

    And, of course, I see it in myself, when I complain to my husband about how I’ll be up until midnight again tonight and I can tell he has to bite his tongue not to ask, “um, why?”

    And, so, it was this malady that was on my mind when I read the part in The Networked Nonprofit (thanks, too, for putting it in italics so we overly-busy could notice!): You have too much to do because you do too much.

    I know what you’re thinking: but I HAVE to do all of this.

    But, really, even if it does, indeed, have to get done (and, probably, that’s a question for another day’s post, related to information overload and mission-centered management), do YOU have to be the one to do it?

    And, I think, given my infatuation with crowdsourcing, that the answer is most likely “no”.

    I’m not just talking about getting volunteers to do some of your behind-the-scenes work, although I think that’s worth thinking about (yes, I know that it takes longer initially, but you’re bringing people more fully into your organization and building their capacity to take on work in the future, rather than just spending your weekends folding newsletters).

    I mean crowdsourcing the “real” work, the stuff that right now you can’t imagine anyone but you doing. As in, really tapping into the power of your leaders and your networks so that you really, really don’t do as much anymore.

    I would love to hear from people who have tried turning to their crowds to lighten their own loads (or from those who have found paths to organizational simplicity and work management that weed out the nonessential tasks, too, as I think about how I want to approach that topic). What have you tried? What might you consider? What barriers can you anticipate from your boss(es) as you shift your work? What advantages can you imagine, in terms of your leadership development, as a bonus to the workload reduction? And what factors, other than sheer amount of work, contribute to your burnout, that might be more implacable?

    Obviously, every too-busy social worker will have to decide what makes sense in her/his own context, but here are some ideas that I’ve tried, albeit without thinking of them as “crowdsourcing”. I’ve tried to estimate the number of hours of work saved per tactic, too!

  • Report preparation/editing: I don’t mean just proofreading here, although I almost always do that with a crowd, too. When I wrote El Centro’s big research analysis of our surveys into the lives of Latino immigrants, I would often convene a group of immigrants, service providers, and community leaders, prior to report preparation, to share some of the raw findings and get their take on what was most important, what warranted further study, and how to explain seemingly perplexing results. Hours saved: ~10/year
  • Identifying representatives for coalition meetings: People like to be asked to represent your organization/cause at important meetings and, if you explain how the transfer of power and the preparation of the individual is working, your partners can be comfortable with it, too. Hours saved: At least 10/month
  • Constituent “maintenance”: To keep your network engaged, you need to communicate with them often. But it doesn’t have to be you. In today’s digital age, this might mean finding folks who can take on blogging or Twitter updates, but I used extensive phone trees to activate participants for events, keep people informed about legislative updates, and “listen” to rumors and concerns in the community. Hours saved: More than 40/month

    These are all things that I could have done, in fact, used to do, but things that I recognized I didn’t need to do anymore. They are things that others could, in fact, do just as well, leaving me to do, well, other things that others could have done, too, if only I’d figured out a better way to crowdsource those, too!

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    With you, not “of” you: Free agents and your nonprofit

    Posted on February 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    While we may not often refer to them this way, most of us who have worked in community organizing have had encounters with the people that The Networked Nonprofit refers to as “free agents”. They’re the folks out talking about your work, lifting up your causes, and even bringing in dollars, just because they have a passion for what you do.

    The authors of The Networked Nonprofit make a convincing case that new social media tools make it easier for free agents to operate (they have access to more information about nonprofits and their work, and they have improved ways to communicate and share that information with an ever-wider set of potential converts, through expanding social networks), and also provide traditional nonprofits and the folks who staff them with new ways to find, reach out to, and even “organize” free agents, too.

    Kanter and Fine understand how to approach free agents, without scaring them off, but social workers, administrators, and even community organizers used to working within set structures, and with established roles of engagement, are often less comfortable with the ambiguous and fluid ways in which free agents can add value to our work (starting with, of course, the fact that they’re seldom preoccupied with adding value to our work, but rather passionate about an issue that happens to overlap with our efforts).

    If you’re asking yourself why you can’t get people to “take more initiative”, or if you yourself feel stunted by the confines of organizing committees or certain protocols, thinking about free agents and how you might pull them into your orbit, without expecting to put them under your wing, may open up new, untapped fonts of energy and, in the process, help you rethink how you approach the “agency” of each and every individual alongside whom you labor for social change.

    I’ve done some additional reading and talking and contemplating about these ideas, and here are my takes on the list of dos and don’ts, so to speak, from the book (pp. 19-21). I want to hear from free agents hard at work on causes of all kinds: how do you find organizations worthy of your efforts, and do you attempt to reach out or coordinate your work in any way? If so, what kinds of responses have you found? And, organizers, how does viewing your leaders through a lens of “free agency” change how you approach your leadership development? What have you found that works, and doesn’t, in collaborating with these independent operators?

  • Get to know free agents: in many ways, this comes back to the whole question of listening; if we’re only putting our advocacy message out, without listening to what others are saying in the same issue space, we’ll never find people who could be potent allies. Going beyond the online world, though, we need to look for free agents in our physical organizing, too–the person who has shown up at your last three protests without saying much (because, also, it could be someone doing opposition research, so we need to get to know him/her!), the volunteer who’s faithful behind the scenes, the soccer league coach who has access to thousands (from my own work–he turned into a turnout machine!). If we’re so focused on what we’re producing, or on who didn’t come to an event, we’ll miss those who are obviously motivated by some internal fire to contribute (relates to “Don’t ignore the newcomer”, another piece of advice from the authors.)
  • Break out of silos: Again, this has offline applications as well; we need to do our listening, and our outreach, not just among the usual allies, but in unlikely places, too. I made a point of skimming the letters to the editor in a very conservative religious publication in Kansas, to have a sense of how issues of immigration were resonating in this particular faith circle. That’s how I found an evangelical pastor fervently committed to justice for immigrants, who, while he never became a core part of our organizing work (and never developed really strong relationships with the other, mostly Catholic, mostly liberal clergy), delivered the votes of several conservative members of the legislature, out of his own (supported and shaped by our work) advocacy.
  • Give free agents a place to learn about issues and sort out their feelings about them: We too often expect advocates to arrive “converted” and ready to recite our talking points, instead of remembering that people feel most strongly those values and positions to which they come on their own terms. We need public events on our issues that are really for the public, and blogs and discussion boards where people can ask questions and forge their own beliefs, even when that makes us uncomfortable, or even when they don’t “come around” as quickly as we’d like.
  • Keep the welcome sign lit and Let them go: These related mantras remind us that free agents really are free, and must be, to come and go as their passions wax and wane, and as life intervenes. But, really, this is how we should regard all of our leaders; if people are only engaged out of some sense of obligation to us, not a commitment to community or cause, it’s hollow leadership at best. We need to structure organizations, and campaigns, so that there are roles that people can play in various capacities, and not take it personally when others have different parameters for their involvement.
  • Don’t be afraid to follow: I like this final piece of wisdom the very best. Unfortunately, I’ve seen more than a few organizers feel really threatened by the outstanding leaders in their midst, and, when good ideas get ignored because they came from outside instead of in, or when leadership gets squashed because other leaders are intimidated, it’s our causes and the people most affected by them who lose the most. We’ve all got too much to do, right? So why, again, are we worried about being the ones to direct every action or develop every strategy?

    Finding free agents, and working with them, even if they won’t work for us, should, after all, make us all more…free.

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    Putting advocacy in your strategic plan

    Posted on February 21, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    This is not a “how-to” post on strategic planning.

    There are certainly other resources, and others far more expert than I, to address the theory and practice of quality strategic planning (you know, the kind that is actually strategic and is actually planning).

    But I’ve been working with a couple of nonprofit organizations (on advocacy, research, and capacity-building) that have just completed or are undergoing strategic planning processes, and that has me thinking about two kinds of intersections between advocacy and strategic planning: first, using your advocacy skills to influence your organization’s direction and, second, incorporating specific advocacy objectives and activities into the strategic plan, to increase their acceptance within the organization’s resource distribution and power hierarchies.

    Before we get to that, though, it’s worth saying that I agree with the authors of The Networked Nonprofit that “strategic planning” as we understand it today–a discrete, time and resource-intensive, relatively insular process–will soon be a relic of the past, at least for the most nimble and responsive organizations.

    In its place will be real-time, continuous, transparent, collaborative listening and analysis and thinking about current opportunities, future possibilities, and how to best position the organization within them. Such a process, integrated seamlessly into how the organization talks with staff, donors, constituents, and community leaders about their work, their environment, and where they’re headed, would guide not only big decisions like staffing and program development but also the daily ones, related to message development, event planning, and fundraising appeals.

    And it wouldn’t require three-day-long retreats.

    Or those colored dots.

    But, today, as you work to steer your organization towards a simplified and opened up planning ‘orientation’, how can you use your advocacy skills to shape agency decisions, while also positioning the organization to value advocacy as you know it should?

    Some tips here, from my own participation in five separate strategic planning processes, as a consultant, Board member, and staff member.

  • Approach the strategic planning process as an advocacy target. Do research the way you would for any campaign–who will be the key decision makers, what are the entry points to the process, where are there relationships that you can leverage to influence the outcome? This isn’t, of course, about trying to strongarm anyone, or “rigging” the process, but about preparing to approach the process with an eye towards your preferred outcomes, applying your skills of education, persuasion, and storytelling, just as you would in another change context.
  • Use your crowd. Someday, hopefully, nonprofit organizations’ strategic plans will be truly transparent, so that constituents and volunteers and the general public have an opportunity to participate and an additional tool for accountability. Until that day, think about how you can use those who are invested in your work to contribute to the analysis and brainstorming that are essential to any good strategic plan, and also about how sharing some of the results of the plan can help you in your efforts to increase organizational follow-through (because more eyes will be watching).
  • Be prepared with arguments about how advocacy can advance the other strategic goals of organizational leaders. This requires, of course, having some sense of what those goals are likely to be, and then being able to talk about advocacy in a way that will resonate with those other agendas. Maybe your leadership wants to enhance the organization’s profile? Reduce staff burnout and turnover? Build relationships with influential supporters and potential donors? You can make a strong case for how advocacy complements all of those goals.
  • Get advocacy included in the strategic plan, in some form. Maybe, at this point, your leadership is only willing to consider an ad hoc Board committee to explore a public policy agenda, or cosponsoring a learning conference with other agencies in your field, or allowing staff to use some of their professional development time for policy-related content. It’s a start. Once your strategic plan outlines advocacy as a legitimate component of your organization’s work, you’ve begun to shift the thinking about who you are and what you do, and that’s often the biggest hurdle to overcome in engaging more actively in social change.

    Obviously, I want to hear from practitioners involved in strategic planning today. What has worked, for you, in terms of advocacy conversations within this process? What advice do you have? Have you attempted to use your advocacy skills on your own organizational targets? What have been the results? And, what are your thoughts on the future of this “future-planning” exercise?

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    Crowdsourcing your Board?

    Posted on February 16, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    What if you didn't need a chair to have a 'seat at the table'?

    While I wrote about some reflections on The Networked Nonprofit in December, it has taken me quite awhile longer to think through Chapter 11: Governing through Networks, where the authors make some recommendations about how integrating social media thinking, not just the tools, can improve the performance of Boards of Directors and, in the process, revitalize nonprofit organizations in some critical ways.

    I’m not a governance expert, although I’ve certainly had a lot of experience with nonprofit Boards, as an employee, consultant, volunteer, and Board member. I’ve seen a few really effective Boards create powerhouse organizations that excel at achieving their mission, and many more lackluster Boards that fail to do much except eat the free lunch they’re given every month.

    It’s the latter kind of Board that Kanter and Fine argue social media principles, such as transparency and equality and collaboration, can help to avoid. Importantly, this doesn’t mean just friending your current Board members on Facebook, but, instead, an emphasis on how to truly transform governance to make it more congruent with today’s social media climate of openness and fluidity.

    This means, of course, that we stop looking only to the ‘usual suspects’ for potential Board members, and that we think, instead, about how members of our crowd can participate in shaping our organization’s future.

    And I believe that this orientation to Board recruitment, development, and process could, in turn, create new kinds of nonprofit organizations that would, among other things, be more open to risk-taking and stand-making, which the nonprofit sector desperately needs.

    The book is worth reading for Chapter 11 alone, really, especially if your current Board is anything less than spectacular. Here are a few of the authors’ key suggestions about how to begin to open up a Board within the social media space, with my commentary about the implications for creating advocacy-friendly nonprofits, too.

    I want to hear from Board members, employees, volunteers, and students within nonprofit organizations. How does your Board currently operate, and what might applying some of these principles mean? What are your Board’s guiding imperatives today, and how might those change under a social media perspective? How would you crowdsource governance at your organization, if you could?

  • Include your Board members in a public social network: While it’s not the end of the process, making sure that your Board members play an active role in your organization’s online presence can help to communicate your mission and objectives (and, for example, policy priorities) while also providing a vehicle for others to weigh in.
  • Create an open invitation to Board meetings: It always baffles and alarms me when students say that they’re not invited to even participate in their own agency’s meetings. What’s the big secret? I can’t help but hope that organizations would take stronger stances on advocacy issues, in particular, if they had to do so with clients and the public listening.
  • Post draft agendas online: Your crowd, including donors, volunteers, and clients, will be much more engaged in conversations about how you can enhance your work if they see a meaningful mechanism through which their participation will matter. Allowing the public to comment on Board agendas won’t generate a groundswell of retweets, certainly, but those who do care will know that you do, too.
  • Make sharing the default: Instead of expending energy trying to keep things private, Boards should be oriented towards opening up real conversations with their stakeholders, not in controlled bursts but as part of a larger dialogue about the change they want to be in the world. This may mean, as the authors suggest, meeting outside of the Board room (like your state capitol, during the session!), or including online participatory tools in your strategic planning process, or having ad-hoc or standing committees that include not just Board members but also interested members of the public, or inviting leaders and clients to interface with your Board, or asking for Board nominations through social media channels, or…all of the above.

    Aren’t the functions of a real nonprofit Board–setting the course, monitoring the progress, providing the tools–too important to be left to just the Board?

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    In search of the tipping point: Lobbying Lessons

    Posted on January 25, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    Finding a way to make it stick

    One of the first messages that social work activists learn, upon entering the lobbying arena, is that, unfortunately, the quality of our messages is not that directly related to whether people will remember them.

    Yes, it’s true.

    We can have terrific facts.

    We can have beautiful visual aids.

    We can even have heart-wrenching stories.

    And, still, sometimes, the targets of our advocacy efforts won’t remember what we said.

    Legislative sessions are starting up all around the country. Congress is heading back to work. And, so, as we prepare for the real work of building power, nurturing relationships with decisionmakers, researching issues, and constructing solid policy proposals, I have advice that seems rather trivial:

    Make your message sticky.

    I’m sure it’s a testimony to how frequently my brain turns to nonprofit advocacy, that I can find lessons for that work even in a business book. But, you knew that already.

    In The Tipping Point, there were dozens of examples of the importance of ‘stickiness’–the need to figure out two key things:

    1. The one piece of information that you want to “stick” with people
    and
    2. A trick, of sorts, to make it stick

    The latter, while seemingly more challenging, is actually the easier part. Think of every jingle you remember, every random fact that sticks in your brain, everything you may have learned in a freshman introduction to marketing class you took for general education requirements in college.

    Use juxtaposition–people remember things that are surprising.

    Use imagery–people remember pictures better than words.

    Use linguistic techniques like alliteration–people remember things that they can’t get out of their heads.

    The harder part, for most of us, is the former.

    There’s just so much we want to say, and so much we want people to learn, about these issues about which we already know so very much. We think that we have an obligation, a duty, to communicate everything.

    We use smaller and smaller margins to try to fit in everything we think people should know.

    But we know that doesn’t work. We know that we, ourselves, tend to only be able to remember a few things at a time, and we know that we tune out, are even put off by, those who try to cram in more.

    And we can’t afford to have our messages discarded like that.

    So, this legislative session, we’re going to make our messages stick.

    And we’re going to change conversations, shift thinking, and…we’re going to win.

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    My worst policy presentations

    Posted on November 17, 2010 by | 2 Comments

    Okay, so this should really be filed under “how not to”.

    In class this week, we’re tackling the challenge of effectively communicating our fantastic policy ideas to elected officials, potential coalition allies, opinion leaders, agency bureaucrats.

    To a large extent, it’s easy to overstate the importance of the policy presentation, as a finite act. Really, influencing how people think and talk about a particular social problem is an organizing challenge; people are much more likely to change their approach to a given issue based on their relationships with others than even the most cogent presentation of facts. So, I guess, that’s kind of lesson #1–what you do in all of the time outside of the presentation is way more important than what you do with that time. For many of the people to whom you are to present, who you are and who you know are still much more persuasive than what you say.

    But, still, I’ve certainly seen minds changed based on legislative testimony or even a really compelling written presentation of facts, and it’s also certainly true that there is a lot of ambivalence among the general public and even our more targeted audiences about the issues with which we grapple as a society, and you have an opportunity with every policy presentation to elevate your perspective and move someone off the fence and firmly into your camp.

    But, since my students and I will spend time this week looking at examples of policy presentations and talking about what makes different types succeed, and since there is so much anxiety about any kind of policy presentation that involves ‘oral arguments’ (why is it that putting our writing forward isn’t as scary? In some ways, I think it should be more so, because it’s there, staring at us, in near-perpetuity!), I have dedicated this particular post to:

    My Five Biggest, Most Disastrous, Missed Opportunity, Worst-All-Time Policy Presentations

    I’ve tried to pull out some lessons from each of these debacles, and it is my hope that readers will not only gain some insights from my failures but also be emboldened and encouraged to hear about the spectacular ways in which I have, well, flamed out. AND, I’d especially love it (and be very grateful!) if anyone would be willing to share a lesson learned from a presentation gone bad of their own, too. It’s all for my students’ learning, here, people!

    Here they are, yes, in reverse order of awfulness. I’ve saved the best/worst for last:

    5. Stunted Expectations
    One of my biggest failures may have looked like a success. I gave a public presentation in Garden City, Kansas on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. My presentation was well-attended and well-received, and almost everyone there signed the postcards to Congress calling for progressive immigration legislation. So, what was the problem? Well, several, actually. Most significantly, I totally failed to tailor the presentation to the audience; I had been on a circuit around the state for a week, giving essentially the same speech, and so I failed to account for Garden City’s unique history and political tradition regarding immigrant inclusion. I should have asked much more–organize events in the city, do delegations to their elected officials, perhaps become part of the New Sanctuary Movement. It was also a perfect (missed) opportunity to try out some of my harsher critiques of the status quo; instead, what was nearly revolutionary in some communities sounded tepid in Garden City.
    My diagnosis? Laziness, timidity, and forgotten context watered down my message for this audience and, as a result, I missed the chance to turn supporters into activists, passive believers into active campaigners, and the committed into a powerful leadership. We can’t be guilty of expecting too little from those to whom we present.

    4. The Wrong Messenger
    This failure felt wrong from the moment I agreed to do it, and it just kept feeling wrong. I was invited by a high school in Topeka to talk to a large group of immigrant students about higher educational opportunities, Kansas’ new instate tuition law, and leadership/advocacy. And I totally should have said, “no.” See, this is exactly the kind of thing that the immigrant young people who led the effort to pass the instate tuition law should have done themselves; who better to inspire other high school students than high school students? And, yet, maybe because it was during the school day, or maybe because I knew I’d already be in Topeka, or maybe because, after so many days of talking to hostile audiences, it sounded kind of fun to go to be thanked for the work…I said, “yes.”
    And, it was okay; I mean, they were awesome students and excited about the new law, and they had some great ideas for how to advance organizing in their own community. But all of that just reinforced to me how it could have been wonderful, and, instead, wasn’t, because I took the easy way out and put my own considerations ahead of the cause’s. Would it have been more work to manage the logistics of getting permission for one of the student leaders to miss school and blah, blah, blah? Sure. But it would have lived my values of empowerment, and helping people speak for themselves. And it would have worked a lot better, too.

    3. Round Peg/Square Hole
    I’m including this one to demonstrate that I have even spectacularly failed in policy presentation in multiple languages and in more than one country! I had been asked to be on a panel at the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras conference. I was to speak for 20 minutes about the prospects for immigration reform and workers’ rights in the United States, in Spanish, with simultaneous translation into English. I prepared my remarks, but, when the day of the panel arrived, the organizers told me that I’d actually only have 10 minutes, because the conference was running late. And that’s where the problems started. To try to fit in everything, I raced through, barely noticing the reaction of the translators in the back of the room. Soon, one actually left the booth, waving her arms frantically over her head. I was speaking so quickly that they couldn’t keep up; some of the attendees had absolutely no idea what I was saying, and I was probably losing many of the others with my rapid pace.
    And, while I admit that I still speak quickly, far too quickly at times, this experience (and its humiliation) stayed with me; when presenting, especially orally, we have to know exactly what the parameters are, and never assume that we’re above the rules. The most profound of our remarks won’t have any impact if people aren’t around anymore to hear them, or if they’re said unintelligibly, or if the dominant message is that we’re inconsiderately disregarding the needs of those around us. And pay attention to body language and feedback cues from your audience. Nodding heads are good. People flagging you down is usually a very, very bad sign.

    2. Totally Blindsided
    So I actually did quite well on this one. My testimony fit exactly within the time limit and covered all of the key points, and I had great delivery, and…it really didn’t matter at all. Because I forgot that, sometimes, it’s what everyone else says that counts a lot more. This was a hearing on our bill that would restore undocumented immigrants’ access to driver’s licenses, a right that was stripped in 2000, nearly restored in 2001, and then definitively halted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, out of national security concerns. I thought that I had done everything right for this hearing, in January 2004. Our bill had cleared the House the year before and was now in the Senate. The Judiciary Committee Chairman supported it, as did several of the members, with whom I had already spoken. I had lined up a strong list of supporters: faith groups, law enforcement officers, two eloquent immigrant leaders, an insurance agent…it looked very solid. It snowed more than 6 inches the night before, but we still had about 1000 people in Topeka to show their support. As proponents, our testimony went well. And, then.
    Things first went bad when the final person to speak as a proponent was the one person on our side with whom I hadn’t spoken in advance. His argument still rings in my ears: part of it was, verbatim, that “Hispanics are having more babies than white people so, watch out, we’re going to take over.” Um, can you say “opposite of what we wanted to say?” Lesson that, sometimes, even your ‘friends’ can hurt you, if you haven’t done the work in advance. But, still, if it had just been that, we probably could have rebounded.
    There was just one opposing testimony. From a father…whose son was killed in the Twin Towers. Now, I’m sorry for his loss. Obviously. As was everyone else in the room, which went silent when he began to speak. But I so wish I knew then what I found out about 5 minutes after leaving the hearing, which is that he was actually a representative of a group affiliated with the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform. We had, in fact, already done a lot of work discrediting FAIR within the Kansas Legislature, but I was totally unprepared for this conferee, and, so, even later, my efforts to clarify and explain to our media contacts and friendly legislators were the classic “too little, too late.” Even the Chair whispered to me on the way out the door, “I don’t think we can save this.”
    We have to acknowledge that we don’t set the agenda and often can’t control the conversation. That means that any successful policy presentation must include intelligence-gathering on those who oppose our understanding of the social problem and our strategy to solve it. Our message should not simply react to this opposition, but it must account for it, diffuse it, and effectively counter it. Otherwise, you’ll be like me, listening in shock as everything I said was completely wiped from the minds of my audience, and even my friends shook their heads in disbelief.

    1. You Can’t Convince Everyone, and Sometimes You Shouldn’t Try
    So I promised a real nightmare for this last one. One year, I agreed to do a call-in show on a conservative talk radio program about immigrants’ rights. It was on a Saturday morning–my birthday!–at 8AM. So that sets the stage. Now, I’d done my research, and I knew that this host and his listeners were quite hostile to my position, but I had a lot of faith in my persuasive abilities, or something. Anyway, I dutifully called in.
    I was, of course, defeated from the beginning; the host was deliberately rude to me, refused to let me finish a sentence, distorted the few words I managed to get in, and, then, after about 15 minutes, directed his listeners to “call in and tell me if this is the stupidest person we’ve ever had on this radio show or not.” Seriously.
    Either my Protestant guilt or sheer shock kept me on the phone, long past when I should have just hung up. The only redeeming moment was when one woman called in to say, “no, I think there was someone stupider on once,” but then the host talked her into conceding that I was, in fact, “actually way stupider than that guy.”
    Easy lesson from this one, of course: there are many people who may be receptive to at least parts of our messages of social justice, especially when we couch them in the language of shared values and common aspirations. And we shouldn’t shy away from controversy or be afraid to debate.
    BUT.
    We should also not allow ourselves to be exploited by those who have no interest in truth or dialogue, especially when we’ll be so baited that we may, actually, do something that could turn off potential allies. Or, when there are much better things we could be doing with our time: organizing our “choirs”, so that they’ll actually “sing”; honing our messages; researching our policy alternatives; reaching out to those undecided middles; or, even, celebrating our birthdays.

    Your turn–please share lessons learned from your own policy presentations gone bad. Really. It will make me feel better.

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    Yes, you can influence redistricting!

    Posted on October 26, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    Every 10 years, our country conducts a decennial census, which brings us new insights into our population, allocates critical resources, and, of course

    sparks nasty redistricting fights in most of the state legislatures in the country.

    Just in time for the 2011 legislative cycle, The Alliance for Justice has released some new guides that reassure nonprofit organizations, including public charities and private foundations, that, yes, we can get involved in the redistricting fight, while legally protecting our nonprofit status. It’s critically important, especially given data that 70% of registered voters have no opinion about redistricting, and experience across the country that shows very little citizen engagement in the process.

    This is critical, both because redistricting is so important to the exercise of democracy in our country, and because it’s often an incredibly divisive fight, the kind that nonprofit organizations usually want to avoid.

    The Alliance for Justice can’t give you the political and moral courage to enter this fray, but they can reassure you that you can, indeed, do so, and give you the guidance you need to avoid running afoul of the Internal Revenue Service when you do.

    You should check out the guides, but here are a few quick points to get you started (and to run past your Board Chair as you make the case for including redistricting on your list of policy priorities for the coming year!):

  • In states where redistricting is governed by the legislature (like in Kansas), efforts to influence it often count as a lobbying activity (and, therefore, should be tracked as an expense).
  • In states where redistricting happens outside of the legislative arena (like Missouri), this activity should not count as lobbying.
    *Question for the AFJ folks, though, that I haven’t been able to figure out yet: if a legislator sits on the redistricting panel (because some states include them) but is acting in his/her capacity on the panel, not as a legislator, then is it lobbying? I think not, but some clarity there would be good.

  • Any activity that educates policymakers about the issues at hand without specifically advocating a piece of legislation is not, similarly to other advocacy, counted as lobbying. In the area of redistricting, this opens up a lot of opportunities to discuss how redistricting impacts certain populations, issues that will be at stake, and civil rights implications.
  • Because redistricting ultimately influences political elections, it’s especially important that nonprofit organizations articulate (and actually hold!) nonpartisan rationales for why particular redistricting plans are preferable to others. In other words, opposing a particular plan because it unfairly disenfranchises voters of color is okay (as a lobbying activity), but opposing it because it would make it harder to elect Democrats (or Republicans) is not.

    Many states don’t get their full redistricting processes underway until summer 2011 (in Kansas, it’s after the 2011 session recesses in May), so you still have time to get your coalitions and plans in place. We want fair districts and equitable electoral opportunities in 2012 and beyond.

    It won’t be an easy struggle, but, with AFJ’s guidance, it’s one we know we can take on. And we can prevent this:

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    Translating what we know into what they’ll trust

    Posted on October 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    photo credit, victius, via Flickr, Plinth Telephone System

    So this week I’ve been thinking a lot about social workers, and our particular skills, and how those can come into play in the advocacy that we know our clients deserve and our world desperately needs. I’ve argued that we know enough, already, to make a significant contribution.

    I believe that. I’ve seen both effects at work, and I know that they make social workers a force with which to be reckoned, when we turn ourselves loose on the injustices that plague our communities.

    And yet.

    I also know, and have seen, how social workers can be so frustrated in policy, when they feel that their clients’ voices are not heard, that their practice wisdom is ignored, and that they are marginalized in the policy process.

    I’ve heard on more than one occasion from social workers who lament, when policymakers are talking deficit reduction and cost containment and we’re talking kids having a chance to succeed and focus on families, that it’s as though we’re speaking a different language.

    And, so, when I was reading in Blink about how “our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way” (p. 52), when the reality is that sometimes we can’t articulate that very well, or at least not to the satisfaction of those who are hostile to or at least suspicious of our profession and our orientation to begin with, which is state of the relationship between social workers and some policymakers today, it kind of struck me:

    we ARE.

    Speaking different languages, that is.

    And the consequences can be grave, because they (policymakers) need to hear what we (social workers and those with whom we work) have to say.

    So, then, it strikes me that one of our core challenges, in thinking about social workers and advocacy, is how to share what we know in ways that will be viewed as legitimate and, ultimately, gain credence in the battle over how to define social problems and how to frame how we solve them.

    This means learning how to give effective testimony, so that we fit the form enough for our substance to shine. It means weaving compelling stories into our policy arguments, and knowing how to reinforce those stories with the kinds of evidence (including, yes, statistics!) that people are more familiar with (all the while introducing the personal case as another type of valuable information). It means understanding what policymakers mean when they talk about deficits and bending the cost curve, not so that we acquiesce to their priorities, but so that we can integrate some of their language into our own rationales for change.

    And it means, of course, building the kinds of relationships to power that will, eventually, mean that we can influence the language of policy deliberation, and, in the meantime, that people will care enough about what we’re saying to ask for an interpreter.

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    Leading your horses to water: Making social media easy for your activists

    Posted on September 21, 2010 by | 2 Comments

    Like so many things, it’s easy for social change activists to get really excited about social media and its capacity to bring people together around the causes we hold so dear, forgetting in the meantime that these new tools aren’t necessarily intuitive for all of those we’re trying to engage and, more importantly, that empowering people to use them successfully can be another opportunity to build capacity and strengthen our relationship with our constituents.

    That’s why I love what the Environmental Defense Action Fund has done with their Twitter Guide to the climate change bill.

    There is a lot that they’re doing so well with their web-based advocacy–great (as in horrifying and spell-binding) videos of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf, up-to-date blog posts, podcasts and other informative tools, and a good social media presence–but this Twitter guide is especially impressive because it manages to walk people through how to engage on this legislative issue on Twitter, without seeming condescending or too ‘tech-y’.

    And, while a guide like this can become outdated very quickly (as legislation changes and the Twitter discussion stream shifts), it provides an excellent model for organizations seeking to influence the online conversations their supporters have about their issues.

    Some of the essential elements:

  • Guide to the most common hashtags used by supporters and oppponents of the legislation (helps advocates organize their tweets, builds momentum around the topic, and facilitates monitoring)
  • Twitter-ready talking points (key messages, already formulated in short phrases suitable for tweeting)
  • Integration with Twitter (they include a link right next to each point that allows supporters to immediately tweet a given message–this serves two purposes: getting the message out quickly AND giving people a chance to practice interfacing with Twitter, if they’re new to that)
  • Beginner-friendly language that assumes neither that users have to be Twitter experts to get started nor that all of your followers are necessarily “Twitter fluent” (you could pick this up with only a very basic idea of what Twitter is and still get started–you really need to know more about how messaging and policy debate works, which is what you want to emphasize anyway; Twitter is just the medium)

    Does anyone have other examples of nonprofit advocacy groups producing tools like this to help advocates navigate the social media landscape? I’m especially interested in those that are campaign-specific and “battle-ready”, so to speak, so not the more involved guides that provide background information on the applications but rather quick, easy-to-use tools that can be immediately implemented in a campaign. Are you creating anything like this for your work, or might you?

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