As advocacy professionals, we live in the post-pandemic world of limited resources like time and money. More than ever, our members need to be making quality contacts with elected officials at city hall, state capitols, and Capitol Hill.

The need to increase capacity with limited resources means integrating and consolidating how we run local, state, and federal advocacy programs. I like to call this integrated advocacy.

So what does integrated advocacy mean? In short, it’s removing the old barriers of “local issues” just requiring a local association response or a federal action alert not being coordinated with local or state staff.

Integrated Advocacy Starts at the Local and State Levels

In 2019, the National Conference of State Legislatures issued a report showing the importance of building relationships early with elected officials. The report noted that between 2005 and 2019, about half of Congressmembers had served in state legislatures.

With Congressional careers starting at the local level, identifying advocates from your association should start there as well. State and local elected officials tend to have fewer staffers, meaning more opportunities for direct communication, influence, and impact. It is easier for your members to stand out as subject matter experts, build trust, and become partners in public policy. This helps your advocates, and by de facto your mission and legislative priorities, develop a relationship over time as an elected official’s career grows. As a result, advocates are likely to have more access in those early years and contribute to local campaigns where the dollars are appreciated.

Even if your organization does not have a strong local or state structure, creating a survey asking your members about relationships can help.

As those relationships grow, so should the number of quality contacts at the state and federal advocacy levels. Tracking these relationships is essential to building advocacy champions who will go above and beyond the action alerts or bulk communications.

Integrated Advocacy Means Better Data Collection

Quality contacts must be tracked and data integrated. Most databases can cross-reference your members based on your local, state, and federal officials. This provides valuable information that can simultaneously track your active members with key elected officials at all levels.

Also, record the homegrown relationships members have. For example, an association member coached the child of an elected official, an elected official lives in the neighborhood of an association member, or a member is part of the same PTA as the official. Keeping track of this information might seem daunting, but not if there is an integrated approach.

Integrating the data on relationships and contacts requires what I like to call a “relationship audit.” A relationship audit involves local, state, and federal staff communicating at least twice a year to cross-reference the most active members on local, state, and federal issues your organization is covering. In short, integrating your data makes rapid response a powerful advocacy tool.

Even if your organization does not have a strong local or state structure, creating a survey asking your members about relationships can help. Take advantage of any large gatherings your organization has—like annual meetings, a Hill day, or state legislative days—to ask relationship questions.

Training Our Members Matters More than Ever

Finally, integrated advocacy means integrating your training for your most active members. How much training are we dedicating to preparing our advocates to be engaged long term at all three levels of advocacy?

Imagine the power of your staff at all three levels of advocacy coordinating member training programs. Training advocates jointly creates a sense of understanding of how local, state, and federal advocacy works.

We must all eliminate any turf wars where local, state, and federal advocacy staff do not work together. There is no such thing as “my advocate.” Joint training is a great way to reinforce a unity mentality.

Post-Pandemic Advocacy and Online Training

You might be thinking that coordinating your training would take time, money, and increase burdens on staff. Two years ago, I would have agreed. However, the past year of navigating the pandemic revealed the power of online platforms.

Regardless of the platform used, more members can participate and more staff can connect without the cost of hotels, meeting rooms, travel, and so forth. By training, I do not just mean the basics of how to conduct a visit to an elected official’s office. Integrated advocacy is about the member’s need for professional development, such as learning how to do storytelling, winning and influencing, or running for political office.

These are trainings that can complement your members’ professional goals and give them the skills they need to communicate better while keeping them engaged in advocacy at all levels.

The reality of more elected officials originating locally and moving up nationally, the strain on financial and staff resources coming out of the pandemic, and the need for advocates with quality relationships at all levels means rethinking advocacy. Our goal should be to inspire more communication between staff, share and develop good data collection for constant study and analysis, and build a training curriculum that uses the most powerful resource we have: our members.