In our October Newsletter we announced some exiting news, our partnership with Constituent Voice! Constituent Voice’s mission is to provide technology solutions to empower your organization to enact change. They make it easy for your organization’s members to hear your message, while spreading your word to their lawmakers, and beyond. They help with this through two different products they offer: AdvocacyDay and AdvocacyNow.
Constituent Voice has many different partners to help their organization be the best tool possible for advocacy including: National Write Your Congressman, a well-respected legislative research firm with almost sixty years of proven experience in providing small business owners with a voice on Capitol Hill; Advocacy Associates, who provides guidance and leadership in directing organizations toward influencing Congress through grassroots efforts; and KnowWho, who provides political contact information with directory and data solutions for “Who’s Who?” on Capitol Hill. (BillTrack50 also partners with KnowWho; we’ve found their data to be the most accurate, timely, and complete we can find.)
AdvocacyDay for Organizing your “Day on the Hill”
AdvocacyDay is a one-stop shop for everything you’ll need to organize an advocacy day on Capitol Hill or in your state capitol. This quick and easy to use smartphone app helps get information to your advocates both before and during your event, as helping with post-event analysis. AdvocacyDay allows you to easily communicate to your advocates where to go, when to be there, who to talk to, and what to say, all in one place! It will automatically notify your advocates when there’s a change and their meeting dashboard will reflect the new information within minutes.
Importantly, the app also encourages your participants to take notes and fill out a survey which will let you know how your message is being received. The surveys are automatically tallied, so when the event is over, you can quickly see which legislators are receptive to your cause. If some participants don’t have a smartphone, don’t worry. Their platform makes it easy to print their schedule or save it as a PDF file to send as an email. You can print a single schedule or print them all to have on hand.
Here is a video showing more about AdvocacyDay:
AdvocacyNow
AdvocacyNow is a great tool for grassroots advocacy management. You can customize your issues in the administration tool by selecting bills, votes, and news that are relevant to your causes. Then it is simple to send a call for action and create talking points for your advocates to use with their representatives. AdvocacyNow manages message delivery, empowering your advocates to send your message directly to their legislators anywhere, anytime! You can even allow your advocates to share your causes on Twitter and Facebook, bringing even more exposure and action to your issues.
Finally, if your advocates need coaching, AdvocacyNow can help with that too. Stephanie Vance, a 20-year DC veteran and sought after advocacy trainer, is available to help train your advocates to move from “being heard” to “being agreed with” on your policy issues. Vance shares the “Three A’s of Effective Advocacy” and “10 Things Not to Do and the One Thing that ALWAYS Works,” as well as how to build long term relationships with legislators.
If AdvocacyDay or AdvocacyNow sounds like something your organization would be interested in taking a look at reach out to them directly or contact us and we’ll help get you set up.