Watch Episode 1 of Fix My Advocacy Campaign

Got advocacy problems? We can help.

Are you asking yourself:

• Am I chasing the right goal?
• Am I using my list to its full potential?
• Are my ads, my landing page, or my targeting what’s hurting conversions?
• Am I re-engaging advocates, or losing them after they take one action?
• Could I share results with my board right now – without panicking?

Fix My Advocacy Campaign is a series where advocacy experts dissect campaigns and figure out what went wrong. Watch the first episode to see exactly where campaigns break – and what you can do right now to fix them.

Here to Help

We fix this stuff for a living. Let’s talk.

Transcript:

Em: So, picture it. It’s launch day. You have done months of prep. The channels are picked. Your audiences are mapped. You’re ready to go. You hit the switch on your advocacy campaign and… nothing. Few clicks, no actions. What happened? Welcome to Fix My Advocacy Campaign.

Each episode, we bring in an advocacy expert to dissect campaigns and figure out what went wrong to help keep yours on track. Today we’re here with Speak4 CEO Joe Mansour.

Joe: Happy to be here.

Em: Joe, to start things off, why are we here?

Joe: What we wanted to do with this episode and this program was help people who are currently running advocacy programs. If you’re running an advocacy campaign, there are a lot of common challenges that we see working across hundreds of different organizations. And we thought, how can we help you, the practitioner, better run a campaign and solve some of those common problems that we see a lot and maybe we can help with.

Em: I know you mentioned practitioners. Who is this for?

Joe: This is for people who are setting up campaigns, running campaigns, getting approval on projects, in the thick of it. If you have no idea the first thing about advocacy, this is not for you. We have some 101 materials on the Speak4 site that you can check out. But this is for doers, users, practitioners. That’s who we’re trying to talk to here.

Em: When you’re helping organizations, practitioners, and companies build these advocacy campaigns, what are you looking for? Where do we start?

Joe: Well, the framework that I’m going to talk about today, the way we simplify how to think about an advocacy program, is five steps. Five fingers, I can count to five, right? A lot of this might be, I don’t know, maybe not conventional wisdom, but something folks are aware of. But hopefully this framework, this rubric, is a useful tool for helping to think through how to structure, optimize, and fix an advocacy or activism program.

So the five steps are: plan, recruit, activate, nurture, and then optimize.

We’ll break it down, but plan is thinking about what do I need to do, how is it going to run, what are my goals, what is my metric of success, time frame, etc. It’s very fundamental, but a lot of folks mess it up and make assumptions that lead you down bad paths. So really drilling in and making sure you have a good plan, and you understand some of those core assumptions that then focus the rest of it.

Recruit: how are you going to get folks? Ads, QR codes, house file activation.

How are you going to get folks to take action? Activate is the heart of it. This is where a tool like Speak4 comes in: getting folks to sign up and take that action. It often happens on a landing page or a Facebook ad, etc. So the activate piece is where the rubber meets the road.

Then nurture, which is that re-engagement, that ongoing relationship building. It’s the “okay, they’ve done an initial action, now what?” This is often an area that separates the basic programs from the advanced programs. The basic programs stop at that initial action. They’re just like, “Okay, I’m done.” The more sophisticated programs, which we’re going to talk about here and I’d always recommend folks consider, have that follow-on process.

And then fifth, optimize. You could call it iterate, you could call it learn, but we’ll call it optimize. That’s the “okay, I’m looking at my data, I’m looking at what worked, I’m iterating through this, I’m tracking the reporting, and I’m improving my program over time.” Going back to the beginning, resetting, and getting better as I go.

Em: I feel like the best way to dive into some of these case files that we’re going to present is through the lens of this advocacy funnel that you’ve just outlined for us. Shall we get into the first case file?

Joe: Let’s do it.

Case File 1: Setting a Corporate Campaign Up for Success

Em: Okay. So, first up, we have an issue that we have seen more than once from our friends in the corporate advocacy space. This case file reads: “Our company needs positive action on a bill currently sitting in the US Senate. We want favorable perceptions on the issue in the Beltway, so we’re building support in key states. There’s a lot riding on this issue for my business. How do I set my campaign up for success?”

Joe: So, we’re in the planning stage here, right? What do we have to do to be successful and impactful? There are the five basic questions from journalism. They’re not the same, but they’re useful for this: who, what, when, where, why.

You can take that and apply it to planning, thinking through the questions you’d want to ask as you’re trying to figure this out. Who are we targeting? What’s our budget and our message? When are we running? What are our flight dates? What are the key dates that we need to engage around? Is there a committee vote? Is there a hearing? When is this on the floor? Again, we don’t want to take that timing for granted. Where: what are our geographic targets? Are we targeting the majority members of the committee of jurisdiction? Are we targeting everyone?

And then this is last in the list, but I think it’s really first in our order of precedence: why. What’s our goal? The question I always like to ask folks when they come in is, “What does success look like? I come back to you in a month or two and we’ve won. You’re very happy. What did that look like?” What is the result you’re taking to your leadership where they’re like, “Yeah, this was a worthwhile program”? It sounds basic, but you have to articulate it and you have to understand it. So I think that’s really important.

The other question that I always like to ask, and I think it’s very important, is: what assets do we have? What do we have sitting around?

One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride. Classic. There’s a great line toward the end, after they visit Miracle Max and Westley is back from the dead. They’re on the castle wall, about to storm the castle, and they’re listing off the terrible plan, and he says, “If only we had a wheelbarrow.” And it’s like, “Oh, we do have a wheelbarrow.” And he’s like, “Why didn’t you list that among our assets in the first place?”

So often I get into these programs and people are telling me, “Okay, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that,” and then, “Oh, well, we do have a 100,000-person house file that we could use.” And it’s like, why didn’t you list that among our assets in the first place? Let’s figure out what we’ve got so we can use it. Go ahead. [laughter]

Em: Well, quick question about this. What would you say are typical wheelbarrows that get left off the list that you’d love to know about in order to diagnose some of these issues ahead of time?

Joe: Well, the house file. Do you have an existing supporter base that you can mobilize?

Em: Yeah.

Joe: Do you have stakeholders, members if you’re a trade association, who are really fired up? Do you have stories, testimonials that you can leverage? Do you have a way to get your messaging in front of folks? Maybe it’s a newsletter. Maybe you’ve got a trade publication that gets sent out. Is there an event, a conference where you can show up and canvass for stories or signups with an iPad?

Em: Yeah.

Joe: Assets where you have an opportunity to get in front of folks who are likely to take action are a no-brainer.

Another common one I see all the time: you get into a program and folks are like, “Oh, well, thanks for this great landing page, but the branding’s off. You should use this logo.” And it’s like, why didn’t we establish that on the front end? Or, “We can’t use that messaging, it’s out of date, we’ve got to use this messaging.” Part of that is just the team asking the right questions. The more information you can gather upfront, typically the better the planning. Getting your wheelbarrows in line, whatever the metaphor is.

Em: The wheelbarrow.

Joe: The wheelbarrow is a good metaphor for it, because sometimes we’ll say, “Just back up the wheelbarrow, dump all your information, and let us sort it out.” So it kind of works.

Case File 2: Making a Small Budget Count

Em: Love it. I love it. So, with our wheelbarrow in order on the planning stage, let us truck forward to our next case file. Joe, I know that you’ve seen a few of these at Speak4. This next case file focuses on a coalition looking to make the most of a small budget.

Joe: Mhm.

Em: So they say: “We have an advocate base that is fired up about our issue and a short timeline to make an impact.” Classic coalition problems. “How do we make what we have count?”

Joe: I worked for a very scrappy nonprofit earlier in my career, and I learned more working there than I did in a lot of other places that had bigger funding and budgets. So I think just because you have a low budget doesn’t mean you can’t make an impact. But it does force you to be more creative, more innovative. The analogy I would use when I was working at this nonprofit years ago is that you had to be like MacGyver. What could you do with duct tape and a paperclip?

Em: Yes.

Joe: You could do a lot. You’ve got to have the paperclip, you’ve got to have the duct tape.

Em: We’re very into hardware metaphors in this episode.

Joe: Very into the shed here. But you’ve got to have that. To go back to the planning thing, the assets matter tremendously here, because you’re not going to have a huge budget for a paid program, if any. So you’ve got to rely on the resources you do have. Do you have a house file? Do you have events? Do you have really fired-up activists that you can arm with an email that says “share this with your friends” or “post this to social media”? You’ve got to really look at your assets and leverage them.

The biggest thing I would also say is: can you have a really aggressive and compelling message that’ll cut through and get attention? Because if it’s milquetoast, if it’s vanilla, it’s not going to stand out, particularly if you don’t have the resources to drive it. So, a really good message. And then an urgent issue.

Em: Yeah.

Joe: Leverage that. Leverage the urgency to move it forward. Say, “We need you to take action now. The vote’s in 24 hours. Your voice matters.”

This is something we see when we look at the data on how to incite action from activists. A lot of times we’ll do a countdown clock or a timer or a count-up bar. These are gamification widgets that you can use with Speak4. You can say, “Okay, we need 50 more advocates to take action to hit our goal.” What we find is when the countdown is too large, like “they need 100 signers,” it doesn’t increase action. When it’s seven or six, that’s when it works.

When people feel like their voice doesn’t matter, like “oh, you need 100 folks, what’s my one action going to matter,” that’s a little deflating. But when it’s, “Hey, we just need five people and that’ll make a difference,” that motivates. So: a great message, urgency, and why it matters for that one person. You can make a difference.

Em: Yeah. We’re touching on something that I think we might talk about a little more, but it might be worth mentioning now. It sounds like this coalition has a smaller advocate base that is very passionate. When you don’t necessarily have the numbers, are there ways to still be efficient and effective with your advocacy?

Joe: I think it’s really important to encourage repeat or recurring activism. Not just, “Hey, send this letter, and see you later,” but, “Hey, send this letter now. Send a follow-up one.” You could turn on something like Send Plus, where you can send a second message automatically. Follow up with higher-value actions, whether it’s recording a video testimonial or making a phone call, so that you get the most action you can out of your smaller advocate base.

We’re going to repeat this a lot, I think, but don’t be one and done. An action flow, that series of actions, is going to give you significantly better results than a one-off, fire-and-forget approach.

Em: Yep. Capitalizing on the excitement of the advocates and the strength of your message.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Case File 3: Nobody Is Taking Action

Em: All right. How are you feeling? You ready for another one?

Joe: Hit me.

Em: All right. This next issue is one many of us have but are too afraid to admit. This person says: “Hi, my nonprofit recently launched a grassroots campaign on a state-level policy. We thought we had the messaging right. No one is taking action. What’s wrong?” Oops.

Joe: Oops. So I feel like you’ve got to put on your plumber’s gear and diagnose where the problem is. Where’s the leaky pipe? Oftentimes when I see this, folks roll in and make some assumptions: “Well, clearly it’s this.” And it’s like, you don’t know that. You’ve got to look at the data and ask, where in my activism or advocacy program is the issue? Is it with the ads? Is it with the landing page? Is it with the email send? You can look at the data, diagnose it, and break it down. And when you find out where the problem is, then you can iterate: “Okay, what do I need to do? How do I fix this?”

To break that down a little more, let’s assume they’re running ads for this. If you’re looking at your ad campaign, you’d ask: am I getting a lot of impressions on my ads but no clicks? If I’m not getting any clicks, that says it’s an ad problem, not a landing page problem.

Am I getting a lot of clicks and signups on the page, but no letters? This is something we see a lot: you’re actually getting no matches. If you’re targeting a state house, candidate, or campaign, oftentimes the ad platforms target by zip code or larger geographies, and they’re targeting a geographic area that’s too tight. You need better targeting data. You need a tool like the district matching Speak4 offers, to get the zip codes most likely to match a given congressional district. Thanks to the wonders of gerrymandering, you have legislative districts that cut through zip codes, and one zip code may be in multiple districts. If you just rely on zip code targeting, you’re going to get bad targeting. It’s not going to be efficient.

So, could it be an ad problem? Okay, maybe we say no, it’s not an ad problem. I’m getting clicks, they’re correctly targeted, but no one’s converting on the landing page. Why are we not getting any conversions? Then you can start to break it down from there. What are the likely causes?

I will say this based on looking at a lot of landing pages: a starting point is almost always that there’s too much copy on the page.

Em: But they said they got the messaging right.

Joe: Well, what is it? Like Mark Twain, though maybe this is misattributed to him, said: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long letter.” People confuse length with clarity, and oftentimes being clear means writing less. This is particularly true with these activism pages that, more often than not, are going to be viewed on a mobile phone. Less is more. Cut, cut, cut.

Too much copy, or a bad call to action. It’s not personalized. It’s not urgent. It doesn’t tell you why you should care. The thing I always hate is when they put the bill number in the heading. The bill number should be in the letter to the lawmaker.

Em: Got it.

Joe: But it should almost never, in my opinion, be the headline on the landing page.

Em: Like, why?

Joe: Because no one knows what the bill number is. No one cares.

Em: No one cares. Personal to the advocate.

Joe: Yeah. Why this issue matters.

Bad visuals. My pet peeve is pictures of a capitol building. It’s kind of meaningless. What does that have to do with this issue? I get it, we’re doing some sort of legislative action, here’s the capitol dome, insert state capitol. I just hate it.

Lack of gamification, those urgency countdown clocks. That’s a simple thing. Lack of urgency.

The other one: test your page. Maybe it’s a bug. Maybe there’s something wrong with the targeting. Always QA your pages to make sure everything’s working as intended.

Always start by putting on the plumber’s gear, going through your funnel, and diagnosing where the leak is before you dive in and start prescribing fixes.

Case File 4: We Won. Now What?

Em: Love it. On to the next: agencies. As if we would forget you. This one’s for you. This agency says, “We won a policy fight for one of our clients.”

Joe: Mhm.

Em: “Now we have a list of advocates and no plan for what to do next. Help.” Can you help this agency out, Joe?

Joe: Well, you won. Congrats. [laughter] I always like to joke that that’s a high-class problem, right? You have high-class problems and low-class problems. High-class problems are the problems of success, champagne problems. You won. Yay.

Em: Better than the alternative.

Joe: Yeah. But I think this particularly gets into the “we achieved this, now what? So what?” This is where having that ongoing re-engagement, that nurture program, really comes into play.

Maybe that initial program was sending a bunch of emails into lawmaker offices. This could be an opportunity to add higher-quality asks into your advocacy. Maybe you’re going to collect video testimonials from your supporters and bank a bunch of stories, whether you turn them into ads, post them to social media, or send them to lawmakers. Maybe you’re going to start recruiting individualized testimonials or messages from folks, using AI smoothing to collect and organize them. Maybe you’re going to start doing some surveys to learn a little more about your advocates.

You have that initial success. How do you keep it going, build your support, and keep the supporter base you already engaged warm and active for the inevitable next fight? Because if you don’t, and you neglect it, they’re going to lose interest. That list is going to stagnate, and it’s effectively going to be useless.

Em: Have you seen that in other campaigns?

Joe: Stagnating advocacy lists, yes. And it’s a waste of energy and resources, because a lot of money and time is spent cultivating a supporter base. If you stop communicating with them, it’s going to go stale quickly, over a couple of months. Then, if there’s a fight again, you’re going to have to spend even more money to recruit new folks or reactivate them.

Em: This reminds me of something I’ve heard you say before, which is urgency versus importance. Just because you have won the urgent ask doesn’t undermine the importance of turning that one-time push into a grassroots community that can be there for the next urgent push.

Joe: Yeah. When you recruit an advocate base, an army, a movement, whatever you want to call it… I don’t know, maybe this is the wrong analogy, but it’s like eating. It’s not really healthy to gorge yourself all at once and then not eat for months at a time.

Em: Yeah.

Joe: Not how we’re supposed to do it. It’s probably far healthier to have a more sustainable diet over the long term, and that might be one way of thinking about it as well. A more sustainable approach is going to be healthier for your program and your wallet, I would say.

Case File 5: Presenting to the Board

Em: Eat well, agencies.

All right, we’ve come to our last case file, but certainly not least. We’re hitting on something we can all relate to: justifying our existence. [laughter]

So, our friend says: “I have to present our advocacy work at our association’s upcoming board meeting. Help me.” How would you help this person, Joe?

Joe: Well, it’s always fun to have to go before the board or your client and justify your existence. I often find that folks don’t celebrate their wins enough. Sometimes I’m looking at presentations, or people are talking about what they’re going to present, and they’re only focused on stuff that’s happening in the future. And it’s like, hey, you had a tremendous win. Maybe it was three months ago or six months ago, but why don’t you talk about your wins? Talk about the successes.

At the end of the day, with these advocacy programs, more often than not you’re trying to shape policy in some way.

Em: Yeah.

Joe: So step one is: were you successful in that? If you were, you should talk about that first. That just happened because of the program you are running, so don’t neglect it. Sometimes we get a little myopic: “Oh, well, that was in the past, that was last quarter.” No, no, no. It’s still relevant. Let’s bring it forward.

I also really like the quantity and quality framing of how you report success on an advocacy program. Quantity is metrics. Of course people want metrics, and you typically have them with an advocacy program. How many folks have you recruited? How many letters have you sent? How many videos have you collected? What’s your cost per advocate? Those are great. You should put them in, but you shouldn’t end there.

Then you want the quality: personal stories and anecdotes. Here are three videos we collected of real advocates talking about why this matters. Here are written testimonials from folks. And then, what about anecdotes from the legislative or regulatory staff, or whoever you’re targeting with these campaigns, about how this has impacted them?

I worked on a larger healthcare-related initiative where we got tremendous anecdotes. We did a fly-in in conjunction with our advocacy push, and we had recorded video testimonials that we then used in video ads. One of the advocates who was in a video ad was at the fly-in, going around to congressional offices, and staff were like, “I recognize you, I’ve seen you on TV, you’re great.” And then, on the same project, they met with regulatory staffers at an agency who said, “We’re getting all your messages, and we have to read every single one of them.” I think that anecdote is really important to share.

Em: Not just the advocate saying that they’re engaged, but the folks you’re trying to reach and persuade sharing their experience. Hopefully positive.

Joe: Yeah, with your program. Pulling that through and sharing it. So lead with your wins. Celebrate your wins, right? What do you say? Celebrate yourself.

Em: Yes.

Joe: Celebrate your wins, have the data, but then also share the stories.

Em: What a wonderful note to end this episode on. Celebrating your wins, and what a win this was. Thank you for joining me, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for doing this.

Em: This is the first video of what we hope will be an ongoing series. If you recognized your own campaign in one of these problems, or if you have a problem you’d like solved, visit speak4.co/fix and we’ll be happy to help you out. Till next time.

Joe: Thank you.