The first legislator I ever met with was a United States Congressman. We had expected him to be friendly to our cause, but the meeting was not going well. He seemed to be impatient with my teammate's attempts to remind him of their previous connections through a mutual friend. He had questions about our seemingly innocuous bill--questions we had not anticipated and could not answer. He was offended that we were not aware of his previous efforts on the same issue. And, if I remember correctly, the bill was not even up for a vote at that time, so he couldn't vote for it as we asked.
And then I handed him a stack of postcards signed by members of our advocacy group-- 50 or 60 sort of virtual attendees of our meeting. Surely that sheer volume of interest would convince him to support our bill when it did come to the floor! But as we prepared to leave, he said something that made my heart sink:
"I look forward to reading these."
Why was that the most ominous sentence of the whole meeting? Because I knew, and he was about to find out, that every single one of those postcards was identical except for the name and address on one side. There was nothing to read-- just the prefabricated message of a group that had, in the process of trying to make it easy for us, actually made our task almost impossible.
Stephanie Vance bills herself as the Advocacy Guru. Her central message is that elected officials run on constituent service. They want to know what we want from them! And I myself have seen that persistent, personal, relevant communication, with clear "asks" and consistent follow-up, can change the direction of individual legislators and create unstoppable momentum on whole issues. But that first postcard campaign and in-district meeting certainly had none of those components. We were asking the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong thing in the wrong way!
The first step is to make sure we are reaching out to the right branch and level of government at the right time. Do we want a local ordinance, a state law, a Federal law, a favorable judicial ruling, a zoning variance, a veto from the Governor or President, or what? Once we've determined that we are contacting the right person, we still should pay attention to the strategic moments in a piece of legislation. It's not very helpful to contact our lawmakers asking them to vote for a bill that hasn't been introduced yet, or asking the President to veto a bill that hasn't even passed.
Then we must know what we want. The Bible tells us that "we have not because we ask not," and indeed, if we just contact our legislators with a message for or against an issue without a specific action point, we can hardly blame them for doing nothing. After all, nothing was what we asked for!
According to Vance, effective lobbying is NOT, surprisingly, driven by facts and logic. Legislators get inundated with facts every day, and, as we have all been learning on social media during this nightmare election of 2016, facts can be arranged and edited to tell any story. Anecdotal evidence has to frame --or maybe even replace-- whatever facts or statistics we want to present. If this makes our legislators sound like shallow thinkers, consider that many studies show this is actually how all humans are wired to think. So, contrary to what so many "Action Alerts" have led us to believe, our best bet is not to inundate our lawmakers with facts and figures about why they should vote our way, but to tell a story about how we constituents have been personally affected. And if we can connect our stories to our lawmakers' stories, so much the better.
Icing that cake would require us to actually know something about our lawmakers, though. Even when they belong to the opposing party, they are, after all, human beings. They probably have families. They may have pets. They may have professional backgrounds in a field that pertains to our concerns. They are originally from some specific part of the state. They come to this party with areas of interest and expertise, and if we understand what those are, we can better help them understand our interests!
More shocking still, Congressional staffers are also actual human beings and not androids! Time and again Vance encourages us not to underestimate the value and power of a legislator's staff. They are accessible, they certainly have their employer's ear, and they may even be members of our own community. Many constituents tend to treat them like obstacles to the ultimate goal, but if the goal is to win the legislator's vote, they might actually be the most effective path to success.
We should also do these poor public servants the courtesy of knowing where they stand on our issue; after all, if the legislator wrote the bill, he doesn't really need five paragraphs encouraging him to vote for it. If the President has already vowed to veto the bill if it passes, our message should reflect that! In the age of search engines, there's really no reason not to have this information.
The most challenging part of the book for me was the discussion of follow-up. As a Shy Person, I am the opposite of a marketer. Just to ask strangers for something is painful; to actually follow up and see if they did it is almost unthinkable. Yet, like the children we told to clean their rooms, legislators juggling many priorities probably won't do what we expect but only what we inspect. So if I am going to drop off a handful of postcards --each one containing a different, personal, relevant message, of course-- I should put a note in my calendar to follow up with a quick phone call in a month or so.
The purpose of the legislative branch, as Vance points out, is actually not to just churn out legislation. It's not like a fudge factory! It is called a deliberative body for a reason-- its purpose is to "deliberate," that is, discuss and weigh the pros and cons of various courses of action. For that reason, the "gridlock" we all like to complain about is not a bug, it's a feature.
Oh, and that Federal bill we were advocating for? It never did pass, but with the help of some of the strategies outlined above, including a lot of high-quality letter campaigns, we have passed numerous bills at the state level that have been equally effective at addressing our concerns. Smart, persistent, patient lobbying can move the ship of state in the direction we desire.
PS Just ran into this series of interviews with staffers that really proves the points above!
