What Issue Campaigners Should Be Doing Between Now And January

Advocates face a dilemma in the closing stages of the midterm: engage in the final weeks with a sour electorate on the receiving end of record ad spending, wait until the lame duck session where gumball rally-style legislating could see any combination of pending bills passed, or watch how the rest of the year plays out while readying for the new crop of incoming lawmakers in January. 

The best approach, says Speak4’s Joe Mansour, is all of the above.

“It’s better to start now. Get the tech in place, run a GOTV program and start banking advocates bases in your target areas,” says Mansour, an award-winning advocacy tech founder whose company Speak4 has been recognized for having one of the best platforms in the business at the CampaignTech Awards. “It’s a bit like the old adage: If you’re 5 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.”

In an interview with C&E, Mansour explains what else advocates should be doing now to elevate their issues and prepare for when lawmakers come back off the campaign trail. 

C&E: In this environment, is there a risk of advocates waiting for the perfect time to start communicating on their issues?

Mansour: I would pull a line from General Patton and say: A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. So start now by getting the tech in place, running a GOTV program in a supportive lawmaker’s district, start banking advocates bases in your target areas, have a plan to protect your flank during the lame duck and then prepare for what’s going happen in January. If you’re waiting until January to get your program together, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. You’re going to have to spend more money, and risk losing.

C&E: What if practitioners hear push back about the ways things have always been done in the past?

Mansour: I find that it’s really hard for folks to argue against a pilot program. Because to argue against a pilot program is to argue against innovation and creativity. And even if you are against all of those steps I mentioned, you don’t want to be perceived as being against innovation.  There’s nothing like a risk-free pilot, short-term.

C&E: Do you typically work directly with groups and PACs or with consultants? 

Mansour:  At Speak4, we offer a digital advocacy software-as-a-service solution. And one of the largest verticals are our agency partners that are using the platform on behalf of their clients. 

C&E: What’s your advice to those agency partners on how to retain and grow clients beyond the political cycle?

Mansour: The most effective programs are year-round. Let’s say you’re working with a group or a corporation, there are spikes in activity, whether it’s an election cycle and you’re doing a get-out-the-vote push, or there’s a big bill and you need to ramp up messages to lawmakers. But then what do you do throughout the rest of that period to maintain your advocate base?

A service like Speak4 makes that easier to do. We can collect video testimonials so that our clients have a bank of authentic supporters in the different states and districts that they can leverage. We offer petitions and surveys to gather more information on supporters. And can automate sharing information on an issue as it moves through the legislative process to a list of supporters. One of the No. 1 rules of advocacy is that if you don’t communicate with your list of supporters, they go dark and they atrophy.

C&E: What’s working for clients right now and how would you transition a program in January? 

Mansour:  Right now, it’s all about GOTV. We have tools that let folks look up their polling place, or register to vote or look up who their elected officials are before they go vote. That’s sort of like blocking and tackling. Collecting and distributing video testimonials is another tool we offer. It’s really effective and can be part of a campaign’s program now during the remainder of the cycle. You can collect a series of them and turn them into a 30-second ad or just share them directly on social channels or a website. It really meets the moment of a desire for authentic, personal kind of content in the age of AI. 

After the election, if you’ve built up a list of advocates or supporters in that district or that state, have them meet with the lawmaker or their staff and brief them on your issues. You could also say, ‘Hey, we have 1,000 supporters in your district. Do you want to get on a webinar with them and talk to them about what you’re going to be doing on our issue?’ The start of a session is a great time to build that relationship before their views on certain issues may be fully settled.

C&E: What can advocates do to support candidates and grow relationships between now and November? 

Mansour: I think the first is if you’ve identified the district as an area where your issue is going to be important, you should start list building and recruiting supporters in that geography, district, or state who you can later mobilize. And whether it’s sort of an initial sending letters, or if it’s just like, ‘hey, sign a petition’ or ‘hey, take a survey,’ and then move them through the sort of funnel of advocacy. Later you can ask, ‘can you write a custom story? Can you share a video testimonial? Can you do higher-value asks? Can you attend an event, a town hall meeting or a tele-town hall?’

As Election Day gets closer, add a GOTV piece to it: confirm your voter registration, make a plan, go vote, etc. Post-election, it might be a good time to start doing communication into lawmaker offices. When a member is newly elected, that’s a tremendous time to meet with them or their staff. 

C&E: What if your issue isn’t set to come up either in a lame duck session or at the start of the new Congress or legislative session? 

Mansour: We have a tool for message scheduling, where folks will bank messages and hold them and then they can deliver them later. There are different techniques that you can leverage to think about the timing and the cadence. 

C&E: There’s a debate in the advocacy software space over modular services versus all-in-one — what’s your philosophy on advocacy software?

Mansour: It really depends. If someone’s like, ‘here are the five tools I have to have and I need all of them and I want them all under one thing,’ then yeah, go do an all-in-one. It makes a lot of sense. What I often find though is there are one, maybe two tools that they actually need — and there’s a lot of other stuff that they then pay for that they never use. 

Or more importantly, they sacrifice what they really need for what they don’t. What does that mean? It means that I have a bunch of requirements so I buy an all-in-one tool that I don’t really use. And when I do use some of the other tools, the tech doesn’t work. And then I can’t get anyone to help. 

Our focus is being modular, which gives our clients more control and more flexibility. We offer really good integrations that pull the data between these different platforms, and then a really robust support team of real people based in the United States who are going to answer your questions via email or Zoom and help you move quickly. That’s our philosophy. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Speak4, reach out here.