Here’s how the Diving Equipment Marketing Association (DEMA) increased advocacy engagement from five to 18 percent, in just a few weeks.
With one campaign!
And they used FiscalNote's Advocacy software to do it.
- With no hugely increased workload
- No digital or technical advocacy training
- And with a small budget
Tom Ingram is CEO and president of DEMA, the 1,400-member trade association for the recreational scuba diving and snorkeling industry, based in California. Nicole Russell is vice president of operations.
The Dilemma
Like many similar organizations, DEMA knew their advocacy efforts were not working as well as they might.
Until recently, if they wanted to mobilize members on issues, it involved emailing them through DEMA’s newsletter, using their existing marketing tool.
From there, those willing to take action were sent to a link with a template they could use to write to their Congressperson.
But they would then need to find out who their representative was, as well as their contact information, and forward it to them. It was cumbersome, time-consuming, and next to impossible for DEMA to monitor.
Those grassroots efforts to mobilize supporters were running at about five percent of DEMA’s membership. But even that was a best-guess estimate. They had no clear metrics to see who was taking action, or any way of monitoring what action, if any, was being taken.
“The member would have to take the initiative to copy the template, edit it, put in their name, and send it by email, or mail, to their representative,” says Russell.
“We wouldn’t know what they were doing. And we guessed that they weren’t doing much because it took a lot of time and effort for them to do it.
It wasn’t an easy method for members to participate. We wanted to make it easier for them to reach their representatives, and have an impact on what was going on.”
The Impetus For Change
So DEMA knew they needed to do something different to increase public policy engagement among their members, many of which are concerned about things such as regulations that affect their bottom line, and keeping the oceans healthy so there are clean places to dive and support their industry.
Then came Tom Ingram’s yearly review with DEMA’s board.
“I believed about five percent of DEMA members were involved with us in our advocacy efforts,” says Ingram. “During my review for the year, which included a push for [FiscalNote's advocacy platform], I proposed to the board that we could double advocacy engagement if we could conduct a campaign that was organized, and which could be tracked. No good deed goes unpunished. That 10 percent became one of my goals for the year!”
Now they were committed.
The Process of Finding an Advocacy Engagement Tool
Ingram already knew about FiscalNote's advocacy software from fellow association executives, so he started asking around.
“I serve on the public policy committee for the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and they use [FiscalNote's advocacy tools]. So that’s what got me started looking at it. I’m also involved with the California Society of Association Executives and a couple of their members are also using CQ. So it came highly recommended,” he says.
“When we started looking into what we could do to get that engagement we were looking for, I connected with Matt Linden (one of CQ and FiscalNote's client success directors) and we tried to figure out what we could do that was affordable for us, as a smaller organization.”
The platform was also particularly appealing to DEMA because it was fast to set up, and easy to use for a relatively small, hands-on staff.
Getting the First Campaign Set Up
“It was very easy to implement,” says Russell. “It’s simple. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, which makes it easy to use and means you don’t have to make a lot of decisions. You just put it in to play. So it’s worked for us right out of the box. And Matt answered any questions that we had.”
Russell and DEMA’s communications manager set it up and both use it.
“It’s so easy anybody can do it,” says Russell.
For their first campaign, DEMA chose the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, a bipartisan bill to prohibit the sale of shark fins in the United States.
“It’s an effort central to the diving community,” says Ingram. “Sharks are an apex predator that are a requirement to keep the oceans healthy.”
About 70 million sharks are killed each year for shark fin soup.