A New AI Tool Targets the Least-Loved Task in Public Affairs: the Weekly Client Report

Artificial intelligence tools have been taking over workflows for years, but until now there’s been a dearth of products designed specifically to address one of the biggest time sucks in public affairs: client report generation. As retainers have grown to cover more ground, staffers are having to stuff more data and analysis into weekly client reports.

CiviClick, which offers an industry-leading, AI-powered grassroots advocacy and public affairs platform, has unveiled a solution its calling Digital Advocacy Deputy, or D.A.D for short. The tool’s flagship offering is the highly customizable written report with “impactful visuals.” 

CiviClick CEO Chazz Clevinger explains how D.A.D. can help firms leverage efficiency and reduce staffer burnout while ensuring their reports retain main character energy for their clients.

C&E: Who is this tool for?

Clevinger: Earlier in my career, I worked at a mid-sized public affairs firm where I experienced the headaches of weekly client reports. Sometimes templates don’t cut it — especially when projects vary. Add in clients with high demands and this can lead to hours of work across teams: writing, designing custom graphics, pulling metrics, and dumping it into a design or data visualization tool before sending it out to the client.

We pictured this tool helping mid-level or junior-level associates at small-to-mid-sized public affairs firms. Those associates are usually the ones putting together these reports in collaboration with a graphic designer who will take all the written copy and create nice piecharts, graphs and visuals and then get it out the door to the client. Most firms have templates that they use, so it’s not like they’re starting from scratch. The challenge, though, is if the associate uses the wrong template or forgets to edit the name of one association versus another because they’re in a rush — or maybe the template is outdated — it won’t provide what the modern executive team in a corporation needs to get from their public affairs firm. 

C&E: From your experience, what do you see lacking in some of the reports firms provide?

Clevinger: It’s really about matching the report to the current public affairs workflow. Most firms are getting paid for their work on retainer, and that typically includes a broad range of activities from generating op-eds and earned media to digital advocacy and driving grassroots engagement. In some cases, they’re overseeing a budget that includes far more than their own retainer. That budget can include hiring companies like CiviClick or some other vendor to serve as the technology foundation for the campaign, as well as hiring a texting tool or hiring a data vendor like i360. On top of that, then they’re determining where to put the ad spend. It’s a lot of time and effort and energy to put all of this into a weekly report to give to clients.

C&E: What makes D.A.D’s reports different?

Clevinger: Most platforms can give you raw numbers: The number of targets, who those targets were, the contact information of the advocates, et cetera. But what we wanted to do was create something far more robust — partner-level quality. Our reports deliver a narrative around the campaign based on analyzing past voting history and taking a look at each individual target or individual lawmaker that the campaign is attempting to influence. Essentially, our analysis includes actionable recommendations beyond just the raw metrics themselves, because that’s ultimately what a company or an association is going to be looking for from their public affairs firm.

C&E: There are some concerns around the material that AI generates, what would you say to a client who’s hesitant to use D.A.D?

Clevinger: Now, we don’t expect our clients to just take that report and send it immediately to the client. What we provide is a format, whether that’s a PowerPoint, or a Word doc, which they can provide their own edits to. We’re very aware that regardless of how far AI comes — and it’s come a long way — there’s still always going to be a trust variable. But we can be very tight, very controlled with the type of content that we produce. And we can make it available so that 85 percent of the work is done already.

C&E: What’s the 15 percent left to do?

Clevinger: That’s someone at the firm reviewing that report, scanning it, making sure that things are accurate, and then maybe adding some of their own narrative or removing some of the narrative that D.A.D produced. This tool is a productivity enhancer — something to basically take a frustrating several hours of a junior- or mid-level associate’s existence and complete it in a matter of seconds.

C&E: Is there a risk that D.A.D will create similar reports for different clients because of its training?

Clevinger: No. The only model that D.A.D will be trained against is someone’s own account. If a client signs up for an account, and uses it for two years, then D.A.D is only going to be trained on the activities and the actions of that client’s campaigns. It wasn’t built to be static, but it’s not going to be trained against all of the other clients we have. D.A.D trains only on that individual client so it’s going to get very good in understanding you and the campaigns that you run for your firm or for your association.

C&E: Do you envision this tool replacing other AI platform subscriptions a firm or an association may have?

Clevinger: We aren’t recommending clients stop using Anthropic or Gemini or ChatGPT or any of these tools. These are obviously all extremely helpful and very good. But they’re not tailored to the needs of public affairs professionals so often the quality of prompts that you have to enter in order for something like Claude or ChatGPT to create the end product for you can be fairly significant. In my own work, I recently ended up spending like five hours working with Claude on all the iterations and all the prompts to create a proposal for a very large trade group. The bottom line: mass market, general use AI tools can still be a time suck if you’re asking it to do complex tasks. D.A.D creates efficiency for practitioners in our space and that’s why the investment is worth it.

C&E: How was D.A.D trained before it was released?

Clevinger: We provided it with templates that were designed by our professional graphic designers. And so that’s another area where oftentimes AI is still missing the ball: high quality graphics. A lot of times the graphics are okay, but they’re immediately recognizable as AI-generated graphics. Those are a few of the things that put us in somewhat of a unique category.

C&E: CiviClick is an agency-first company, tell us how your clients could potentially white label this tool? 

Clevinger: Many of the agencies that work with us, the end client doesn’t even know that CiviClick is involved because we’ll strip our branding from the widgets. If clients want to have no association with CiviClick to protect the client that they’re working with, that’s something we fully understand. We want our partner agencies to be comfortable working with us as opposed to some of our competitors who have a less agency-friendly model.

C&E: How do you see the public affairs industry changing in the coming years and how will D.A.D meet those changing needs?

Clevinger: There are probably going to be some very big firms in the future because even some smaller regional firms we’ve worked with have doubled or tripled in size in recent years. But larger firms are always going to be able to throw bodies at work. We help smaller-to-midsized firms be more impactful — and more competitive. They’ll want to take advantage of all D.A.D’s benefits in terms of generating quick custom reports, and that added efficiency helps them flex their staff onto additional projects without burning them out. 

C&E: Burnout is a major problem in the public affairs industry, was that a motivating factor behind developing this tool? 

Clevinger: It unquestionably was a motivating factor. Some firms do a better job of preventing burnout. But there are certain firms where their culture is: sleep when you’re dead. You have to grind it out all day, everyday. As a result there’s a lot of turnover at those firms. CiviClick’s whole slate of tools are designed to help reduce that grind for public affairs professionals. We help them focus on perfecting the product rather than on building it.

C&E: Do you think tools like D.A.D are going to result in job losses in the industry? 

Clevinger: That’s likely going to happen regardless of whether or not someone uses D.A.D. But I understand the fear that these tools are going to take over their jobs and the fear that using them will result in loss of skill. But the truth is that jobs aren’t threatened by AI tools themselves. People’s jobs are threatened by other people using AI so it’s better to be an adopter than not.