How to Educate & Influence New Stakeholders

Manage Your Stakeholder Network

In each congressional office, administration, state legislature, or local government, there are countless stakeholders, from lawmakers to staffers, that you need to be able to find before you can begin to educate or influence them. With new Congress and statehouse turnovers following an election, you’ll often need to start building some of these relationships from scratch, and then connect the dots on how and who in your network knows them. 

Whether that’s a colleague who used to work for a member of Congress or a grassroots advocate who’s a neighbor of a state senate staffer, being able to keep track of all these professional relationships in one place is key to driving your legislative and regulatory agenda. 

Additionally, you need to be able to collaborate internally so everyone on your team knows who is having meetings and communications with whom, which lawmakers or stakeholders are sympathetic or key to driving your issues, and where to leverage resources or build closer ties. PolicyNote lets you do all of that while monitoring the policy that matters so you don’t miss a beat.

Use an Up-to-Date Directory with Contacts from the Local to Global Levels

New lawmakers mean new staffers and contacts that you’ll immediately have to begin liaising with. In order to educate and inform lawmakers and their staff on why they should listen to you, you have to first know who to even talk to. 

FiscalNote has the largest database of policymakers’ contacts, including staffers, so you’re able to know who your key legislators are, what they do, and how to reach them. 

With CQ’s member profiles, you have access to detailed information about a member’s staff, state and district, biography, voting history, legislative priorities, committee assignments, and more at your fingertips. 

Additionally, with Knowlegis, FiscalNote’s Congressional directory, your team will be able to build mailing lists and compose emails all in one place; create highly customizable, saved lists based on issue area, party, role, staff, chamber, delegation, or voting record; and send messages that look like they came from you, rather than a mass-mailing tool. Having a comprehensive messaging system and strategy will allow your team to reach out to the right people at the right time with the message that will resonate the most.

Show Elected Officials the Value You Bring to Their Constituents

Constituents and their votes matter more than anything when it comes to building relationships and showing lawmakers the importance of your legislative and regulatory agenda. By being able to educate lawmakers on the financial impacts of your public policy issues, you’ll be able to have a more direct line of communication and influence with state, local, and federal legislators. 

The PolicyNote+ district mapping solution enables teams to visually understand where their assets and lines of business are located and what their organizational footprint is in congressional and state districts. 

By providing elected officials with an “at-a-glance” visual with metrics such as the number of jobs your organization provides, locations of offices or factories, property tax paid, sales tax collected, and payroll generated, you’ll be able to show your financial value to their constituencies making it easier to educate them on your issues. When there are dollars and cents on the line, stakeholders tend to listen more.

Keep Your Team on the Same Page with Collaboration Tools

With the sheer volume of information teams have to navigate, spreadsheets and emails are far too easy to lose track of. Add to that the scary thought of your most critical team members taking all their institutional knowledge with them if they leave or move to an entirely different role within your organization. 

PolicyNote allows teams to be able to log their notes all in the same platform for seamless collaboration and communication. Your team will be more productive by connecting your notes to every legislator to create a holistic view, and your legislator engagement will be more successful because you’ll be able to quickly identify which legislators and staffers affect your issues. 

Work faster by messaging colleagues no matter where they are, and work smarter by keeping a record of conversations and interactions directly in PolicyNote.

Create and Share Legislator Scorecards

Keeping track of which new lawmakers are favorable (or unfavorable) to your issues is one of the most important things you’ll need to do with a freshman class of officeholders. 

Using PolicyNote+, teams are able to put together comprehensive reports and develop their own legislator scorecards that highlight the most and least effective legislators with regard to their industry. In order to create scorecards that help your key audiences understand your organization and hold elected officials accountable, the best scorecards offer a snapshot of:

• The top bills-of-focus for your organization 
• The frequency and reliability of key incumbent’s votes on the issues 
• The most recent vote on a specific piece of legislation and the timeline of when it passed or failed 
• The least and most effective legislators on the issues

Scorecards are highly customizable and scalable and include a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) that your team can use to measure success. Ultimately, legislator scorecards help mobilize your constituents and members to hold lawmakers and their staff accountable for the promises they made on the campaign trail.

Build a Social Media Strategy

With the rise of social media, the legislative process is beginning earlier than ever. For many politicians and their teams, as well as government relations professionals, social media is the easiest and most effective way to communicate with their constituents and monitor growing trends and public sentiment. 

Social media is often the first place where legislative action begins. By following what legislators and their constituents say, you can inform your strategies and bring awareness to stakeholders well before issues fully take shape and become top legislative priorities.

To see where legislation is trending and how stakeholders are thinking, teams are turning to PolicyNote+, which can monitor a variety of sources like major U.S. media outlets, press releases, and social media platforms for legislators mentioning key topics. 

Amplify Your Message Through Modernized Advocacy Campaigns

Advocacy can be a way to show membership and leadership that your organization is leading the way on the public policy issues that matter most. In today’s digital age, advocacy needs to be transformed as it rapidly defines brand reputation, identity, and organizational future. 

Teams rely on FiscalNote’s flagship advocacy solution, VoterVoice, to help them educate the public and other stakeholders about the most critical issues facing their industry as well as report on the successes and wins of their organization. With a new field of legislators and their staff entering Capitol Hill and statehouses, grassroots advocacy tools are an easy investment to make to prove the actual value and ROI of each campaign you run. 

By adopting FiscalNote’s technology-driven grassroots solution, teams can determine which campaigns were most effective, where they are seeing the most results, who the most influential and productive stakeholders and lawmakers are, and the direct budgetary impact of their campaigns. You can also use our grassroots advocacy solution to educate lawmakers by showing the number of advocates you can activate and move your issue to the top of their queue. 

For professionals seeking premiere support for their government affairs and advocacy teams, FiscalNote is a singular source to meet their needs. Our AI-powered policy monitoring, professional news and analysis, advocacy, PAC compliance services, government procurement, tailored analysis, custom research, and more, are all conveniently available from one provider. Talk to us about solutions to help you achieve your organization's goals.