It is time to rethink advocacy.

This week, I had the pleasure of presenting Engage’s case for “rethinking advocacy” in Tallahassee.  I used the following video to kick off my presentation:

If you have not had the above conversation before, color me shocked.  Unfortunately, many of us are all too familiar with the above conversation.  Advocacy organizations feel the urgent pinch of potentially devastating legislation, and have no way to mobilize their supporters.  And the quick fix advocacy “solutions” simply don’t do the job.

Earlier this year, the Congressional Management Foundation published a study that included the below graph showing that only 1% of congressional staffers believe that form e-mail messages have a lot of positive influence on the decisions of Members of Congress.  This is painfully low given the amount of mass form e-mail that is sent by advocacy organizations every day.

Many advocacy groups are at a place where they recognize that advocacy is broken and they are willing to rethink advocacy altogether if the right solution comes along.  We believe that we have begun to build one of the solutions to online advocacy in our product, Multiply.  As Patrick Ruffini blogged about a few weeks ago, one of the most critical problems that Multiply solves is keeping all advocacy data in one place.  The way most advocacy groups store data today makes it very difficult to know who exactly their most active and engaged supporters are.  Sure you can track donor data, social media data, email data and so on, but it is all disconnected.  There is no way of bringing all of that action under a single dashboard — until now.

Data management is just one of the big problems of advocacy that we believe Multiply is solving.  Others include providing advocacy organizations with a powerful calling module to clog up legislators’ phone lines and the ability for organizations to empower their supporters to spread news and messaging via social media, where, as CMF points out, legislators and their staffs are spending more and more time.

Rethinking advocacy is a daunting task and we do not have all of the answers.  We want to hear from you and your organization about how you are rethinking advocacy and how we might be able to help provide solutions to the problems you are facing.  Feel free to leave your comments on rethinking advocacy below or shoot me an e-mail to start a conversation on how specifically your advocacy organization can rethink advocacy.