Category Archives: PAC Persuasion
The Top 9 Things Your PAC Prospects Don’t Want to Hear
Based on my experience in delivering actual PAC fundraising appeals, as well as interviewing corporate employees and association members, here is my list of the top 9 most uninfluential and uninspiring ways to make your PAC pitch. These apply to oral, written, and web content communications.
Keep it nearby when you are preparing your remarks for your next PAC membership drive, because you can, safely and without the supervision of a trained professional, try these techniques on your own.
1. “You need to give to the PAC because campaigns are expensive.”
In years of conducting PAC questionnaires and interviews, I honestly have never heard a PAC prospect mention this as a motivation to contribute. Yet, it’s as popular as ever among political involvement…
Grassroots and PAC Influence Lessons Learned in 2010
What did you learn in 2010? Watch the video below for insights Amy gained in the last year!
Common Obstacles to Trust and How to Overcome Them: Part Three
We’re going to explore more common obstacles to trust and how to overcome them.
Negative communication
If we are truly grassroots professionals, we should embrace bottom up communication. Many times our messages only ask members to do something for us, or tell them what they should not be doing, saying, thinking, and so forth. It is important to be a carrier of good news. It affects how we are seen in the organization and how much time our advocates will give us in the future.
People attribute negative personal characteristics to those who bring us bad news, regardless of whether they were involved in creating that bad news. We generally don’t trust those we don’t like.
What is your positive-to-negative communication ratio? Ask your…
Common Obstacles to Trust and How to Overcome Them: Part Two
We’re going to explore more common obstacles to trust and how to overcome them.
Direction changes
The insidious impact of direction changes is why it is so important to foster a grassroots and PAC community within an organization. Campaigns definitely have their purpose, but they can reduce motivation in the long term unless community is created from them.
Our advocates will tolerate change, but not ambiguity. I’m thrilled to hear about organizations that are revitalizing their grassroots and PAC communities. However, the fact that they have to “revitalize” means that the original effort stalled. This impacts our ability to motivate our team for future battles.
How do your advocates and PAC leaders know that this “revitalization” isn’t just another two-year attempt (or more commonly,…
Why have a PAC?
This is why…
Innovate to Motivate faculty member Brett Kappel weighs in on new research from Vanderbilt University:
The research finds that corporations gain clear financial benefits when individual employees make political donations.
What they describe in a new research paper is strong evidence that individuals who make political donations – whether at the behest of companies or not – directly benefit businesses in their communities.
“The reason we looked at individual contributions is because it accounts for about two-thirds of all the money given directly to politicians,” said Ovtchinnikov, noting that only about 10 percent of firms are actively involved in campaign finance. “Individuals are the big players in this game.”
The 2010 U.S. congressional elections saw an unprecedented boom in campaign…