“We have five pillars to our advocacy, that we encourage our network of food banks to participate in,” she says. “These metrics include contacts with lawmakers; coalition's built or coalition interactions; actions with grassroots; actions with grasstops; and media. Off of those five pillars, all food banks take a mandatory survey once a year to report all of the work that they're doing. Through that survey, they show us how many times they're interacting or doing each of the types of advocacy. All of that is then tabulated together and then each food bank gets a score between 0.0 and 3.0, and we use that to see how proficient and how much advocacy they're doing so we can target where training needs to take place.”
The tools you use will determine what type of data you can collect and how easily. FiscalNote’s advocacy solutions offer a complete approach to grassroots and grasstops advocacy that includes media advertising directly to Congressional stakeholders, stakeholder mapping in FiscalNote, and the largest, most revered grassroots advocacy platform, VoterVoice.
“VoterVoice and FiscalNote have been a tremendous help because it's so much easier to be able to track those numbers that we're looking for,” says Patton. “If you have the money to invest in one of these platforms, you absolutely should. It makes it a lot easier than trying to manually keep up.”
Choose Regular Intervals for Measuring Results
“I suggest determining your top five evaluation factors and measure them as frequently as possible to best determine causation — what worked, what didn’t, and what made the change!” says Katelyn Moga Gesing, senior manager of national advocacy at Nurse-Family Partnership
Measuring the progress of your advocacy campaigns as you go allows you to optimize and make adjustments to optimize and improve your results. If you see a particular subject line or call to action is doing well, how can you do more of that? Evaluating during the campaign instead of waiting until the end allows you to better focus your efforts on the strategies that will yield the best outcomes.
Additionally, most advocacy professionals are expected to report on their efforts regularly. For Patton, for example, it’s every two weeks during internal policy calls, monthly to NDSS’ president, and quarterly to their board of directors. For Moga Gesing, it’s weekly for internal staff and quarterly for the board of directors. So, keeping up with your advocacy metrics is vital to meet the expected cadence of reporting — the tools you use can make the difference between this being a painstaking process or smooth sailing.
“[FiscalNote] helps us identify key issue movements across a region, proactively address them as an organization, and document our efforts. I can easily and quickly get a 30,000-foot look at what’s going on and pull reports to send to our CEO and senior management team," says Justin Wiley, vice president of government relations for the International Code Council (ICC), which uses FiscalNote to stay on top of the 1,500 issues per year they track.
Make it Fun — A Little Competition can go a Long Way
If you have a team of advocacy experts or manage different chapters with their own advocacy teams, reporting can sometimes feel like herding cats. To get people motivated to engage in timely reporting and keep track of their efforts in real-time, friendly competition can sometimes help.
Nguyen gets the 200+ food banks in their networks to keep track of their advocacy metrics and report with a “hall of fame” designation for having done so many advocacy actions.
“They have to submit all of the meetings that they're doing, and all of the interactions that they've had on the different pillars, and then they send that to us,” she says. Nguyen’s team tabulates all the results in their database and then calculates what they call the advocacy index score at the end of the year. “And then at the end of the year, if they get the hall of fame designation, they get a certificate they can use to report in any competitive grant that we're doing, so folks are incentivized in multiple ways to participate,” she adds.
Examples of Advocacy Metrics to Track
While measuring advocacy is not a particularly easy or straightforward task, seasoned professionals have a few key advocacy metrics they constantly keep track of not only for reporting but also for evaluating and optimizing their advocacy efforts.
Open and Action Rates
Consider for a minute that the average person gets more than 150 emails a day, and a good percentage of those have an “ask” — buy this, read that, take this action. That number includes your advocacy emails.
Tracking the percentage of recipients who received your emails in their inboxes and opened them, regardless of whether they had a call-to-action or not, can be an important digital advocacy metric to understand if your messaging needs some tweaking or if perhaps your email lists need updating.
Once you get people to open your messages, the percentage of recipients who followed through by taking the action you requested of them is another vital advocacy metric to understand how effective you are at relaying a sense of urgency and moving people to take action.
Tracking these numbers will also allow you to create internal benchmarks and compare those with your overall industry’s advocacy benchmarks.
Outreach to Legislators
Naturally, the main goal to measure is how many messages are your supporters sending to legislators to help you show the urgency of your issues. Be it email, phone calls, or social media posts, when it comes to lawmakers hearing from their constituents on a specific issue, volume counts.
“We have a grassroots program of supporters and what we do is we set metrics each year on the number of actual actions that take place by our grassroots supporters: calls to Congress, emails to lawmakers, and petitions signed,” Nguyen says. “Depending on what kind of legislation we're working on and how busy we think we're going to be, we set a different number for what we think we will need to achieve. We try to be outcomes-based and so we look at a number of legislators that should be working on our issues each or actively speaking out on our issues every year and taking positions on our issues.”
Keeping track of the outreach to legislators from a 200+ food banks network can be a real challenge, though. Nguyen’s team has devised a workflow that allows the staff from the individual food banks to log their interactions quickly and efficiently.
“We have a reporting system that they can use every single time they have an interaction or a meeting with a lawmaker,” she says. “There are three or four different questions and they can use that every single time to report.”
At the end of the day, the best way to know if your advocacy efforts are paying off with legislators is hearing directly from them.
“We want to know if we’re moving the needle, so our ultimate goal is feedback from the Hill. The best is when we receive a call from Hill staff, saying ‘we’re hearing from a lot of principals about XYZ,’” says Karhuse.
Total Number of Engaged Advocates
To make sure you have that volume of outreach to legislators, you must keep a close look at the number of engaged advocates sending messages. This can help you address issues early on in your campaigns, allowing you to pivot and try to maximize engagement or set out to acquire new advocates.
“How many members of Congress have received these messages, how many people have sent out messages, and then, what are the total number of messages sent out so far. Those are the three key numbers that we report,” says Patton.