Examples of Effective Lobbying Strategies

Examples of Effective Lobbying All Organizations Can Use

There are a few lobbying strategies that can prove to be effective for all organizations, whether you’re a corporation, trade association, or nonprofit. These strategies include tracking social media dialogue, building a policy reputation calendar, and using your advocacy data to enhance your lobbying strategy.

Use Social Media Dialogue to Identify Legislative Champions

Tracking legislator social media dialogue allows you to identify potential advocacy or media partners who work on the same issues as your organization. Identify the top 10 most vocal legislators that post about your issues on social media and use this list to schedule meetings with those officials.

In addition to volume, look at the accounts those legislators are tagging in their posts on your issue. These organizations could be potential strategic partners for your organization.

Build a Policy Reputation Calendar to Boost Messaging Impact

A policy reputation calendar helps you send proactive communications by planning out an entire year (typically by month) of topics that highlight your organization’s work.

Combining different engagement techniques and the right message aligned with a themed calendar can have a powerful impact on your relationships on Capitol Hill and how people understand your issues.

Use Advocacy Data to Enhance Your Lobbying Strategy

By tracking key metrics for your grassroots advocacy and lobbying efforts side-by-side, you boost your lobbying strategy to ensure top issues get the most attention on both sides of the public affairs equation.

To do this, have your lobbying team track their activity to better measure the issues they are most active on. This tracking can include emails, events, phone calls, casual conversations, or organized meetings for each issue. Then, track your grassroots campaigns and actions on that issue. If your priorities are aligned, then the issues that your lobbyists are most active on should match ones that you are driving the most grassroots actions to.

With an outcome-focused approach, your grassroots and lobbying teams are working towards the same overarching objective and can share data and information to achieve that common goal.

More> Grassroots Advocacy Definition

Corporate Lobbying Examples

Successful corporate lobbying can be achieved by adding a few techniques to your strategy. Corporate lobbying strategies should include engaging communities where your business operates, incorporating site visits, tracking and logging interactions, and tracking dialogue to turn insights into actions.

Support Communities in Need to Build Local Official Relationships: DoorDash

When every state and county was implementing various restrictions related to COVID-19, DoorDash supported the communities they operated in by offering their platform for use in aid distribution. This allowed DoorDash to build relationships with elected officials that they potentially lacked before through proactive outreach and social media monitoring.

By utilizing partnerships in a moment of crisis, your team will have stronger relationships with those officials moving forward.

Incorporate Site Visits to Maximize Impact: Walmart

Walmart shows members of Congress their business impact within their districts. While planning site visits for districts where Walmart has something unique, such as a dairy plant, it also provides an opportunity for the member of the Walmart team to bring up policy preferences outside of the member’s office.

After visiting a site, it is easier for elected officials to see why your team advocates for the policies that it does, rather than just listening to a member of the public affairs team across a table on Capitol Hill.

Site visits are significant as they provide a much more in-depth understanding of your policy positions.

Track and Log Interactions to Inform Future Engagement Strategies: Uber

Uber uses a database of legislators and staffers to track the conversations happening with each legislative office, thus building stakeholder relationships. When a team member meets with an office, they log what was discussed. This way, if a different team member is hoping to also engage that office, they can use past interactions to inform their future engagement strategy. The benefits of logging interactions are twofold – you better track if there was proper follow-up and you can also evaluate whether it is appropriate to go back in again, or if you’ve overstayed your welcome.

Turn Insights into Action with Dialogue Tracking: Jackpocket

As a startup in the lottery industry, Jackpocket’s one person government affairs team can’t risk missing a relevant mention of the lottery on any bill, press release, or social media post, so they use legislative tracking software to follow all of these things in one centralized place.

Adding a legislative tracking system can act as an added team member for small or one-person teams. Instead of worrying about finding new legislation as it is introduced, you can focus on making an impact on those policies.

More> How Jackpocket Uses Legislation Tracking

Non-Profit Lobbying Examples

Non-profit lobbying can be successful if you integrate strategies directed toward nonprofit organizations. These focused strategies can include centralizing all legislative information in a unified system, building a legislative stakeholder database, and using a system to collaborate on tracking bills.

Centralize All Information for Proactive Legislation Advocacy: Sierra Club

The Sierra Club uses a shared legislative tracking system that their lobbyists throughout all 50 states access and update. This centralized system better allows for identifying legislation to act on, follow social media dialogue related to relevant legislation, and share legislative scorecards with their members and partners. A shared tracking system is especially useful for larger organizations with chapters in multiple states.

A shared legislative tracking system also serves as an early warning system allowing you to stay on top of the issues and see results in legislation. Based on this system, you can create talking points, share resources about issues in a particular state, and distinguish which messengers are most helpful.

Build a Legislative Stakeholder Database to Track the Public Service Pipeline: YMCA

The YMCA created a stakeholder database for alumni network building at the state level and added program alumni who not only work for elected officials but are elected officials themselves. A legislative database helps you identify key legislators who have connections to your organization or its mission by searching across members’ biographies before they took office. This helps your advocacy team build further relationships with elected officials and their staffers by finding who has personal connections.

Use a Tracking System for Collaboration to Expand Reach: Alzheimer’s Association

With lobbyists spread out across all 50 states, the Alzheimer’s Association uses a shared legislative tracking system to keep the team on the same page.

Each team member can tag bills that are introduced in their state legislature by issue area and level of importance, and the national team in DC can create a 50-state strategy based on the information gathered on the ground. This makes it faster and easier to track legislation across all state legislatures without bills or important dialogue slipping through the cracks.

More> Alzheimer’s Legislative Advocacy Program

Trade Association Lobbying Examples

Optimize your trade association lobbying by adding these techniques to your strategy: mobilizing members to share stories, diversifying engagement efforts with events, tracking dialogue to identify champions, and utilizing grasstops ambassador relationships to connect with legislators.

Mobilize Members to Share Their Stories and Bolster Lobbying Efforts: AHLA

To bolster their government affairs strategy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, AHLA mobilized their members to share their stories with elected officials on how their lives had been affected by the pandemic. With thirty thousand people writing over 100,000 letters, AHLA’S government affairs teams went into meetings knowing legislators had already heard the message from constituent hoteliers – making the lobbyists’ job much easier.

With legislators already receiving your member’s stories, your lobbyists can jump straight into policy debates. By integrating your lobbying and advocacy efforts, members can make direct asks of their representatives to take action and prompt them to take a meeting with your lobbying team.

More> AHLA Grassroots Stories

Diversify Engagement Efforts With Events: Consumer Technology Association

Engaging with elected officials is a significant part of CTA’s work, from regular events at the CTA Innovation House on Capitol Hill to the annual CES show in Las Vegas—the largest trade show in the country.

If your team regularly attends events in addition to meetings and site visits with legislators and staff, it can be challenging to keep track of who on your team has met with which legislative offices. Have team members log notes from each event or meeting so the whole team is kept in the loop with where each relationship stands.

Track Dialogue to Identify Champions: Destinations International

Destinations International tracks social media to identify which elected officials are mentioning the organization or the issues it cares about.

Through tracking, you can evaluate every local official’s engagement with your issues and encourage members to post positively about their industry on social media. You can also use social media tracking to identify your champions that tweet positively about your organization or issues. Share these social media examples as a model for all members to emulate in their own social media posts, using your membership base to make a wider digital impact on elected officials.

More> How Destinations International Uses Integrated Public Affairs Software

Utilize Grasstops Ambassador Relationships to Connect with Legislators: Land Trust Alliance

For legislators, the most impactful meetings are the ones that include constituents. With a successful grasstops Ambassador Program, organizations like the Land Trust Alliance can make sure to consistently engage legislators with their own constituents while discussing federal policy priorities.

Have your grasstops ambassadors log interactions from their conversations with legislators to collect insights from their meetings. Sometimes legislators are more candid with constituents than they may be with lobbyists, so this is a great way to capture intel from the conversations your advocates are having with legislators.

More> How Land Trust Alliance Organizes Their Legislative Advocacy Program

Lobbying with Quorum

Use Quorum’s Government Relations Strategic Plan Template to start building a successful lobbying strategy. With the template, you can stay organized and create a plan that works for you. Once you’ve made your government relations strategic plan, implement it with Quorum.