Roots of Success, Spring 2006

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Reproduction or redistribution without permission is strictly prohibited.

Which influence strategies move undecided legislators? Read about Amy's newest Fortune "Power 25" research findings		The Showalter Innovation Award Winners

Insights from Innovate to Motivate 2006
Insights from Innovate to Motivate 2006	Amy Showalter Grassroots and PAC Productivity Expert	Rants and Raves

Using Persuasion Tactics that Change Legislators' Minds

The Influence Tactics of Fortune’s “Power 25”

The Congressional Management Foundation’s Kathy Goldschmidt called the research results “fascinating and useful.”

It is our interest in excellent government relations programs and “best in class” organizations that inspired our second research project with Fortune magazine’s “Power 25.” The first project focused on how they recruit, retain, and motivate their most productive grassroots advocates.

Our new research seeks to answer a second vital question: “What influence tactics predict success when attempting to gain legislative support”? We believe the answers are vital, because there are competing mythologies about what works in the legislative influence arena.

For example, when a group wins a high-profile campaign, the campaign is usually dissected for strategies and tactics, disregarding the influence context or the influence target that helped those tactics succeed.

We were also intrigued that workshop audience members (government relations staff and their grassroots and PAC volunteers) routinely asked questions to find out the “most influential way to communicate with legislators,” as if the communication method was the main predictor of influence success. This focus on downstream, rather than upstream issues concerned us, because the actual communication is only one part of the influence equation. There is an over emphasis on communicating at the expense of influencing legislators. Communicating and influencing are two different objectives.

Third, we saw a challenge with the focus on the tools, rather than an integrated-influence approach. We believed that this over-reliance on the tools denigrates the value of the government-relations function. This research is our effort to help government relations professionals better understand the complexity and need for their strategic counsel to their board members, employees, and senior organization leaders.

In fact, we tend to attribute success to one thing, when in fact it is many things working in concert. There simply is no “easy button” to push.

We asked the organization representatives how they influenced undecided legislators, since that is where true influence skills become apparent.

The #1 factor that determines whether a legislator will favorably consider your position

Based on the findings, we have created a comprehensive checklist of the tactics you can immediately implement to experience more influence success.

“To have real data to back up and debunk common lobbying techniques is fascinating and invaluable. We can stop wasting our time on what doesn’t work.”--Cassi Baker, Vice President, State Government Affairs -- Cardinal Health

Because we wanted to look at the practices of “best in class” organizations, we interviewed the groups on Fortune’s Power 25. Since there were a few groups who chose not to participate in the project, to supplement our dataset, we included three groups not on the Fortune “Power 25” but who were nevertheless involved who were involved in high profile grassroots campaigns.

We asked participants to cite two undecided legislators who were the targets of a particular grassroots influence campaign. We asked that one of the legislators be an example of a successful influence attempt, and the other one be an example of an unsuccessful attempt.

The methodology of including various levels of success is important. If only successful campaigns were examined, trivial correlations would appear to be important. For example, it might be found that the wearing of clothes was highly correlated with every campaign success. By including a range of influence successes and failures, analyses allow us to spot those factors that truly impact influence success.

We conducted half of the interviews by phone, and half in person. We asked the participants to account for over 40 conditions which may predict an outcome relative to each influence campaign attempt. The inclusion of a broad range of variables from many sources makes this research different from more commonly encountered case histories that look at a particular group winning a particular campaign, and then hypothesizing what might have caused the win. The range of variables across many campaigns allow us to isolate the conditions under which certain techniques become more successful.

The analysis consisted of locating significant correlations and performing a multiple regression analysis to locate variables that most strongly predict campaign success.

“This provides a more scientific approach that helps our strategic planning. It allows us to better understand our weaknesses and improve our opportunities for influence success.” -- Jim McCabe, Government Relations Manager - Allstate Insurance

The results and Amy’s tactics for implementing the findings were unveiled at our Innovate to Motivate conference.

Contact us at 513.762.7668/amy@showaltergroup.com if you are interested in having Kelton or Amy present the findings to your organization.

As those of you who attend Innovate to Motivate to know, Peter, Tony, and I are passionate about tapping the wisdom and knowledge of our conference attendees. To that end, our workstorms produce lots of lively discussion, including the sharing of our challenges and solutions. I always have many “learning moments” during I2M, and this year was no different.

“Our company controller is my best friend. When I ask for a budget increase, I make it clear that the annualized cost to the company of having to live with onerous legislation, or having to continue to fight against new proposals will cost the company much more on an annual basis than my budget request.”

“It’s our job to manage the expectations of our PAC members and grassroots advocates. It’s our responsibility to make sure they understand what works and what doesn’t when influencing legislators.”

“There is a cost to acquire grassroots volunteers. Generally, the less you spend, the lower quality advocate you acquire. If you get low quality advocates, provide activities for them that moves them from a “5” to a “10.”

“When I look at recognizing our employees for their participation in our grassroots program, I think the biggest challenge I have to answer is: “How does participating in a grassroots program help an employee do his or her job? What professional benefits does it provide?” If I can show that it is helping them do a better job and helping them with career advancement, I believe that is a great recognition tactic.”

“You can’t use the excuse that “my grassroots lobbying infraction was so small, we didn’t think anyone would notice” as a reason to be unaware of a state’s specific laws on grassroots lobbying.” That small infraction is big when it hits the media.”

“Instead of using your web site as a big filing cabinet, think of using your videos, commercials, position papers, etc., in specific ways to push people to your site.”

We are pleased to announce the winners of The Showalter Group's 2005 Innovation Award Winners!

We honor innovations in the PAC, grassroots, and technology fields. The awards are determined by a committee of government relations professionals.

Jessica Erickson, Fannie Mae
Meaghan Killion, International Dairy Foods Association
Colleen Rocha Levine, National Lumber and Building Materials Dealers
Louis Vega, The Dow Chemical Company
Laura Vogel, National Association of REALTORS

Grassroots: Southwest Airlines, nominated by e-advocates, Set Love Free campaign. Program administrator: Susan Goodman

Grassroots Runner Up: Westfield Insurance Company Legislative Lightning program. Program manager: Sally Estvanic

PAC: Fannie Mae PAC Message Testing Program manager: Jessica Erickson

Technology: Grassroots Enterprise, "John Edwards Pod Cast" Program manager: Mike Panetta

This high tech and high touch approach to running an issue campaign is innovative because of its use of both traditional political campaign tactics and technology to inspire and influence. Their goal was to connect on three levels with their target audience—at the issue, idea, and value levels. They announced their position on the issue while also providing numerous attention-getting promotional spin-offs on 60’s motifs. Secondly, this message worked for them on an idea level where they could connect with people who share their ideology on government interference in the marketplace. Thirdly, they connect with their stakeholders on a values level. Their customers want affordable air travel and they value convenience and treasure their pocketbooks.

This campaign will likely change the way political involvement professionals plan and develop their initiatives in the future. It demonstrated the positive effect of pairing online high tech involvement and recruitment techniques with high touch offline traditional campaign tactics. By understanding the powerful synergy of these two distinct approaches, future issues campaigns will be much more interesting and will provide opportunities for a variety of activist expressions of support. If becoming involved in issues important to the company is suddenly fun, made relevant, and there are multiple options on how to be involved (parades, rallies, letters to the editor, letters to Congress, gate decorating contests, etc), then suddenly politics and political involvement will be more appealing and thus participation will increase. As a result, we can all hope for a better-educated workforce when it comes to public policy matters that affect where a corporation does work, where its employees live, and the communities where they raise their families.

Because insurance is a highly regulated industry, they felt there was a gap in keeping their decision makers informed about legislative issues. They formed a cross-department committee to present legislative information in a fun and informative way that would let those with an interest get more in-depth information as needed. This allowed them to involve all areas without any individual department having ownership of this program by having a different department sponsor and provide the speaker each month. It gives short eight-minute snapshots of the most important issues they face while keeping their company on message. They linked the program to an intranet tool that serves as a central clearing house for hand-outs or additional information from the programs. It gives their employees a place to go when they need detailed information on a particular current topic. Since their speakers vary based on who has the expertise on that area this also educated their employees as to who the company go-to person or expert is in a given area.

This is a unique way to package and market information. The exclusive brand, innovative program format and catchy slogan invite broad participation. The real innovation is that they have employees from all over the company who own this program. Not only are folks more likely to support their peers who may be speaking on a topic, it gives them ownership and provides a valuable career development opportunity by allowing subject matter experts a public speaking opportunity in front of their executives. This program also promotes company awareness of the importance and impact of legislative issues. It is the participation and the diversity of the group that provide its strength. It is like hiring a whole team of government relations staff! The program helps leverage limited resources through employee participation!

This organization got back to basics and listened to their members! Using the talent within, they created an internal PAC communications team. This helped focus their communications on their affordable housing mission and provided the appropriate incentives for PAC participation. In the process, they dropped a quarterly newsletter (that no one was reading) and started producing a brief bi-monthly PAC update that focused on giving information and details about the PAC, rather than fluff. The feedback received has been extremely positive.

They hope that people will look at their own PAC communications, re-evaluate their effectiveness and re-focus their messaging by concentrating on their specific audience. Utilize the talent within your organization to get the right message out! Don’t rely on cookie-cutter messaging that you receive from a consultant or learn from other PAC professionals; tailor the message for your audience.

The podcast was historic, as was the level of success and buzz engendered by it. In the course of just 4 days, traffic to Senator Edwards’ site rose by nearly 10,000%. In fact, the two-week period surrounding this podcast was the single highest traffic period experienced by the Edwards site (OneAmericaCommittee.com) in the entire time since the election. But perhaps most important of all – the perception of Senator Edwards changed dramatically among the key “digerati” class – the bloggers. During the 2004 campaign, the Edwards campaign had been viewed as one of the least tech savvy. With the launch of the podcast, this perception did a 180-degree shift, and tech became one of his biggest assets.

Rather than spending a lot of time and effort trying to get a 15-second sound byte in the mass media, organizations will be able to actually produce their own media, and go into much greater detail about the issues that concern their stakeholders or the general public without worrying about squeezing in today’s “talking points”. Candidates will now be able to speak not just in sound bites – but in sound mega-bites. Podcasting works. The written word is wonderful, but it’s hard to top the emotional impact of the spoken word.

Some of you may be familiar with my “The Hits Just Keep on Coming” column, where I write about the best and worst of what I’m hearing in the GR field. The column has been now re-named “Rants and Raves” and will be a succinct list of what is worth raving about, and what deserves a rant (or two).

I received a phone call from a major non-profit to thank me for my donation. The volunteer not only thanked me, she told me specifically what my money allowed them to do – how many children would be served, what the children would do with my money, etc.

Bravo to them for helping me see what my contribution does. The personal phone call makes me even more motivated to help. And, it was totally unexpected. There was no guarantee of “a phone call for $$$”

Reality Check: When is the last time we personally thanked our contributors and advocates?

Hearing people say that “I can’t learn PAC fundraising/grassroots/lobbying/etc. from an association (or from a corporation if you are an association professional).” My friends, influence is influence regardless of the setting. The audience is the same – human beings. Your corporate employees have the same psychology that association members do.

Reality Check: Do you tune out when someone dissimilar to you is presenting information? Remember Walter Lippman’s admonition: “When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks.”

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