Guest post by Elizabeth Snyder, director of advocacy & public policy at the American Fraternal Alliance

My advocacy website vendor is awesome – which doesn’t matter as much when the Fraternal Alliance isn’t running an advocacy campaign and pushing members to use web forms, talking points, etc. Keeping advocates engaged and motivated to build relationships with elected officials is a constant challenge, especially at a small staff association where time and resources are limited. I went in to this session wanting some cheap and easy ways to engage association members and left with some concrete examples of how to integrate social media into my advocacy strategy.

Here’s a breakdown of what the three panelists discussed:

Brad Fitch, Congressional Management Foundation
Brad’s statistics about how Congressional staff use Facebook and other forms of social media were surprising. Sixty four percent of Congressional staff said Facebook is important or very important; and trumped form emails. Staffers put Facebook posts out there and use constituent responses as an informal public opinion poll – as few as 10-20 Facebook comments can get a staffer’s attention. Brad also reviewed using YouTube as a way to get volunteers to tell their story and let staffers know that your organization is doing something worthwhile.  

Ben Rattray, Change.org
Ben challenged the audience to break national campaigns down to the local level. His focus on building small, local victories, and working up to national engagement is something that is so easy to lose sight of – especially when you’re in the middle of the campaign. Conversely, Ben offered some great examples of how social justice groups have used technology to creatively influence corporate leaders on a national level. Google Adwords and cookies can be your friends if you have the right expertise. If you reach key audiences early in the game your campaign can be won without maximum engagement, saving time and money.     

Ben stated that strategy is your killer app and made a compelling case for organizations who want to take advocacy a step further than the traditional form emails and phone campaigns. 

Shana Glickfield, Beekeeper Group
Shana’s focused on the difficulty in keeping people engaged in an attention deficit economy. With so many people using phone apps and the internet to connect you have to meet people where they are in terms of technology. If your advocates aren’t tech savvy use texting. If they live on Facebook find them. If they ditch computers for mobile web consider a mobile web site. No matter what you do use storytelling techniques to keep people engaged and always keep the content fresh so visitors have a different experience every time they visit your site. For online communities, focus on quality, not quantity. Shana made a great case for effective storytelling no matter the medium used to communicate the message.