In the past, when I would get home from the annual PAC Conference or Innovate to Motivate, I would go through a series of withdrawal emotions – first, exhaustion.
Sessions all day and “networking” all night, I always needed to catch up on sleep. Once I was back at work, I would feel overwhelmed. There on my desk would be the large binder with notes, session information, legal questions and contacts I didn’t want to forget. Anxiety would set in, then reality – I had a job to do and I needed to catch up on emails, so I would push that large pile over to the corner until I had time.
We never have time. Our jobs, especially in light of the last year, have increasingly become more hectic and multidimensional. After almost 10 years of attending the winter conferences, I have some advice to pass along that I was given while I was managing the U.S. Chamber’s PAC.
Make the effort to stay in touch with new contacts. Even something as simple as friending new contacts on Facebook helps. You never know if you will need something, or more importantly, can help someone else. Or who will become your friends outside of the industry. In 2002, I was six months on the job, just out of college and arrived to my first conference early. I had lunch with Sheree Anne Kelly with the Public Affairs Council to learn more about the conference. Eight years later, I am still grateful for that lunch and the natural friendship that followed. PS. Congrats to SA for her recent promotion!!
Read your notes again. This may seem weird but I would take the notes from sessions and open up a document and type. What this did was allow me to see what I thought was important to remember and to look at that piece of information, after the conference, to see if it really was still relevant to what my PAC could do and what it was already doing. There are so many great ideas but you can’t incorporate them all. Take the top few and think about how to make them work for your PAC.
Audit. There are more audits than just financial. Have an outsider look at what you do – communicating with PAC members, how you raise money, which events work, who you write checks to and the effect it has for your organization. I would ask someone from the outside to look in – either a recent contact or, if you really want to jumpstart your PACs potential, an organization with experience, such as Aristotle. Our PAC staff has actively managed some of the most successful PACs in the country and the knowledge pooled together has had amazing results for our clients.
Lastly, I still have my notes from the last nine years of conferences and all the binders and session handouts that seemed relevant to my career. Yes, I’m a proud nerd. My last suggestion is to keep what matters and what you can see yourself using over the years. Although I was sad to miss my first conference season in my career, I am thoroughly enjoying my newest challenge, motherhood. And I can’t wait to bring the little man along next year to meet all of the amazing friends I have made over the years.
Maintaining a website can be a little overwhelming, if you have never done something like this before. However, with a little help and a few tricks of the trade, it can be quite simple and not as time-consuming as you might imagine.
We will be covering different topics and tips each month that will help you with your Web management. The first item on the agenda is images.
As a rule of thumb, JPG files are best for photographs or art with gradient tints. GIF images work best for line art, text rendered as an image and art with flat color.
Images should be saved to the exact size you want them to be viewed on the Web. Do not resize images using size attributes (height and width) in your HTML code. Taking a large image and having it display at a smaller size not only slows down loading times but may also distort the image.
Final Web images should be saved as the same size (72 pixels per inch resolution).
It is a good idea to add an ALT tag to each image, because most search engines index these tags.
Image Example:<img src=”/images/imagefile.gif” alt=”Picture Description (for tag)” width=”100″ height=”200″ /></li>
TIP:
You shouldn’t change the size of your image using the size attributes, but you should specify the actual size attributes of each image. The page is layed out to its final structure before all the images are loaded, so without size attributes, text and other pictures can get bounced around as room is made for each image that is still loading.
One of the blogs that I follow — TechPresident – recently posted an interesting piece on the use of positive reinforcement in the grassroots campaign to include a public option in the health care bill.
The blog sums up the situation on the Hill far more eloquently than I can, so I’ll let you read what they say about what’s going on with the campaign’s strategy. But the article brought several questions to my mind that many of our clients deal with on a regular basis – how effective are thank-you-letter campaigns at garnering goodwill on the Hill, and are they a good use of our grassroots organization’s time? With limited time and resources, is it worthwhile to engage advocates in a thank-you-letter campaign? Or is it better to wait until action is needed to positively influence legislation in order to prevent going to the well too many times?
I tend to think that you can’t say thank you enough – both with your advocate base and with your legislative targets. We’ve had many clients who have increased response rates among their advocate bases simply by implementing a consistent and meaningful recognition program.
Experience also has shown our team that keeping constituents engaged on issues, even when there isn’t a pressing issue going on, is important to the long-term health of grassroots programs.
I’m interested in hearing about other experiences from the field. Have any of you experienced an enhanced relationship with a legislator because of a concerted effort to use the carrot instead of the stick? It certainly appears to be getting some traction with the public option effort, although whether it’s enough to get the bill passed remains to be seen.
We all know that the best way to keep traffic coming back to a website is to kee the content fresh and interesting. But the challenge is, how to do that with limited time and resources?
One of our favorite ways to accomplish this goal is by incorporating widgets into our clients’ website content. There are a ton of politically minded widgets available, and many of them don’t cost anything.
A few examples:
WidgetBox has a free app that will let you create your own widget from any blog, RSS feed, flickr account, and a host of other sources. I created one for our blog (posted below).
OpenCongress has a Bill Tracker widget that will post the most recent status of any bill in Congress.
Need some additional ideas about how to keep your web content fresh? Give us a call!
While grassroots was certainly the name of the game at last week’s Public Affairs Council Conference in Orlando, a Saturday morning session focused on a different perspective – grasstops! Your organization’s grasstops advocates are those who have personal relationships with key decision-makers or elected officials. Leveraging these relationships can mean the difference between success and failure in your advocacy efforts!
Ilona Piaskowy from the Association of Public Television Stations and Robert Sommer from Rock Entertainment Management presented great strategies and best practices for identifying, engaging, and utilizing your grasstops advocates.
1. Maintain regular communication: Ilona discussed the monthly conference calls she has with her grasstops advocates, and the importance of follow-up if you think a member’s interest is waning.
2. Planning and strategy: Robert reminded the audience that grasstops advocates are usually very busy people, so it’s best to be strategic with your requests and not overwhelm them. Think about what each advocates is best suited for, and what tasks they are most likely to follow though on.
3. Preparation and training: Both presenters discussed the importance of properly training and preparing your grasstops advocates so they feel comfortable talking to legislators and elected officials about your goal.
This was a very interesting session, because both Ilona and Robert provided case studies on cultivating grasstops at their respective organizations. It was a great way to wrap up the conference!
While the Snowpocalypse/Snomageddon/Bizzard of ‘10 might have slowed DC down, it didn’t stop us – especially here at Aristotle. We have support teams on both coasts ready to help 24/7 (San Diego and DC), so anytime you need us we’re here … even when our DC headquarters is buried under 3+ feet of snow.
So give us a call anytime if you have questions, concerns, or suggestions – and if you’re looking to escape the east coast weather for awhile , San Diego’s a good bet:
Aristotle is very pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Aristotle Excellence Award, recognizing singular achievement in political campaigns around the world. Held in conjunction with Politics Magazine, the awards attracted a wide array of worthy nominees this year. We’re confident that our 2010 winners can be counted among the very best in our business.
Carlos Fara, Argentina/Bolivia Carmen Fernandez, Venezuela Ajmal Ghani, US/Afghanistan Steven Joyce, New Zealand Mixo Kochakidze, Georgia Necati Ozkan, Turkey Sami Panah, Afghanistan Kostas Sazmatzoglou, Greece Klaus Schuler, Germany Mauricio de Vengochea, US
Congratulations to the winners and many thanks to everyone who submitted a nomination.
For more about the Aristotle Excellence Awards, visit: www.aristotle.com/excellence
January 20-23, 2010
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando®
5601 Universal Blvd
Orlando, Florida 3281
We’re just a week away from the P.A.C. Grassroots Conference. We had a great time in St. Petersburg last year and know that this year’s conference will be just as successful.
We wanted to drop you a line and let you know that we’ll be back as a sponsor and would love to meet you at the conference – Aristotle’s Grassroots team will be available at our booth in the Resource Marketplace on January 21st. This year we’ve unveiled our Grassroots “Cash for Clunkers” program and we’ll be giving away an iPod Shuffle – stop by to hear about the program and register to win.
If you’d like to set up a time to get together during the conference or if you have any other questions don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@aristotle.com.
As someone who regularly advises PAC and grassroots managers on their websites, I found the National Journal’s recent survey of House and Senate Committee websites fascinating.
We often talk about how Congress is, for practical purposes, made up of 541 small businesses with their own processes and cultures. Nothing proves that point better than comparing the highest scoring site – House Education and Labor to the lowest scoring site – Senate Armed Services Committee. A pretty striking contrast.
Where do you think your PAC or grassroots website falls on the spectrum?
On Friday, Women in Government Relations (WGR) held a conference on PACs, Politics and Grassroots, here in Washington, DC. The all-day event helped attendees not only learn about best practices from leaders in the profession, but also gave everyone a great opportunity to network and meet other WGR members.
The day began with a captivating presentation by Dr. Heather Boushey, Senior Economist with the Center for American Progress. Dr. Boushey’s presentation focused on her recent research for a project with California First Lady Maria Shriver. The project, titled “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything”, explores the current role of working women, and how the increase in women in the workplace has affected the economy and family life. Based on the questions and comments from the audience, it was clear that the essential questions in The Shriver Report resonated with many women at the conference. Click here to learn more about this report.
The morning and afternoon breakout sessions focused on a wide array of issues facing the PAC/grassroots profession. Topics ranged from ethics in grassroots to PAC fundraising to implementing a social media plan. The PAC fundraising session (moderated by Aristotle Senior VP Jeff Ashe) was especially interesting because attendees had the opportunity to ask the speakers detailed questions about best practices for PAC fundraising in a challenging economy. You could definitely tell this topic was popular – the session room was completely packed, with people standing in the doorways! But it was worth it; attendees came away from the session with innovative new ideas to take back to their PACs.
Many thanks to the WGR volunteers and staff for putting on such a great event!
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One of the blogs that I follow — 
