This week we’re excited to offer another guest post from one of our brilliant colleagues in the world-changing business: Karen Uffelman at Groundwire recently wrote about finding your “engagement superpower.”  We were inspired and think you will be, too:

Nonprofit organizations all have missions, expertise, and a dependence on other people who care about our missions to get the work done. In a perfect world we would not have to compete for the time, attention and pocketbooks of those people upon which our success depends. We’d have all the support we required and we’d achieve our missions in no time. Comic book villains defeated. Climate change fixed.  Toxics outlawed. Urban sprawl, deforestation, disappearing biodiversity – all of that stuff would be a thing of the past.  Unfortunately, the world’s not perfect yet, and all of those good folks whose help we need have loads of other things on their minds, schedules and budgets.

To make the most difference in this imperfect world, your organization needs an engagement superpower. Here are three bits of guidance as you identify your organization’s superpower and use it for good:

1. How Are You Special?
So how do you build relationships with the good people who care about your cause, make them prioritize your cause, better engage them in your work? One excellent way is to use your unique expertise, access, skills – whatever you’re super at – to provide a product, service or experience that really matters to your target audience.   A value proposition.  And not just some vague value proposition, like, “we protect the environment,” but more along the lines of what can you do for me today? Wonder Woman, for example, fights crime, but her superpowers? Invisible plane, “lasso of truth” and, hello, magic bracelets.

Your engagement superpower shouldn’t distract from your mission-related work. In fact, your superpower should advance your mission, even be integral to it. However, an engagement superpower may be an expansion of or a departure from your historical strategies and tactics. Or something you’re already doing, but not doing much of because you didn’t realize it was a superpower.

2. Learn from Good Examples: Engagement Superpowers in Action
•    Conservation Minnesota – These guys have developed a bunch of engagement superpowers, but the one that I really love is the weather service they offer on their website. Weather is something that people want to know about everyday – and really, it’s probably the most common way that people relate to the natural environment. It’s also the starting point for any conversation about climate change. Offering a weather information service on their website has doubled Conservation Minnesota’s web traffic over the last year, and has served as a gateway for really important policy conversations about climate. Awesome engagement superpower.
•    Washington Trails Association – WTA is working to preserve, enhance, and promote hiking opportunities in Washington State. Cool, right? They lobby the legislature, they organize volunteers to repair trails, they have hiker education programs.  But their engagement superpower is a hiking trails database that is not only a great resource for hikers looking for trail information with recent updates, it’s also a place for those same hikers to post trail reports – giving back in a way that is both fun and useful. The easier it is find a hike and the more you hike, the more invested you are in the Washington Trails Association. In the last year, over 700,000 unique visitors visited WTA’s website to find or post a hike.
•    Ecology Center – The folks at Ecology Center have developed an incredible superpower and you can check it out at their HealthyStuff.org website. Once there, you can research over 5,000 consumer products, including toys and other children’s items, and find out exactly what’s toxic and what’s not. It’s a great service, behavior changer and action motivator all rolled into one. Nothing will get you more fired up about the sad state of consumer product protections than discovering that the Dora the Explorer activity tote you just bought your niece is chock full of lead, chlorine, arsenic and bromine. Yuck! This is a site that I started visiting all of the time once I found out about it.  I’ve told all of my friends with kids about it, and it has seriously engaged me in the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families campaign.

3. Important Superpower Questions
How do you know if an experience, service or product you offer is actually an engagement superpower? Or if it has the potential to become one, if you just invested a little more?
•    Is there a market for your superpower? Is it something people actually want? Really? Would people pay for it? We’re not saying that you should charge for your superpower, but if you’re doing something that people would be willing to pay for, that’s a pretty good clue that it has superpower appeal. If you have to organize, cajole or guilt people into using or taking advantage of your superpower, well….it’s probably not a superpower.
•    Does your superpower attract people with whom you’d not otherwise be in contact?
•    Does your superpower cause people to identify themselves to you and enter into the beginning of relationship that you can further develop?
•    Is your superpower uniquely excellent? Is it something that your target audience can’t readily get from anyone else?
•    Does your superpower make your mission personally relevant to the lives of the people with whom you’re seeking to connect? This is really the key. For the true believers in your mission, they already take your issue personally. But for all of the rest of us who might be volunteering, taking action, contributing or otherwise supporting you, providing value around what’s personally relevant to us related to your issue is the best way to engage and expand your base.

We know our client isn’t alone in this situation, so this week: three things to help make the best of scary levels of uncertainty:

1) Articulate and clarify the costs of failure. That’s a big scary word: FAILURE.  Break it down.  If the launch is a dud, then what? What is lost?  Is this the last chance to get it right, or just the first? Will funding evaporate? Board members be mad? Will you lose face in your community.  Lay it all out there… then you can work through the Plans B, C, and D.

2) Identify what you think is the weakest link, and work through any potential fixes. Maybe your website still isn’t up to snuff, even after investment and work, but you’ve got to launch now. Is there anything you can do before you can go in and fix it? Perfect a landing page? Focus on making the main ask perfect?  What are the immediate next things you can do to make it right, just as soon as you have time/money/capacity?

3) Figure out the first thing you need to learn. You’re about to jump: what’s the very first bit of data you’re listening and looking for?  Maybe it’s low hanging fruit: see if this landing page results in email signups better than that landing page.  Or maybe it’s partners: did any of them go above and beyond in helping spread the word, or was any partners’ community particularly receptive?  Pick one or two things that you can change quickly in response to data that will arrive shortly after launch, and focus on learning what you can.

Making the world a better place is big important stuff, and sometimes we need to leap in big scary ways to make it happen.  We can’t always make our efforts perfect, and even if we could “perfect” may not be what’s required.  So… we hope you’ll do your best and learn from your successes and failures to make it better.  Onward!  (And wish our fab client luck!)

1.  What’s your “raison d’etre?” In other words:  What are you doing here?  Why are you running this campaign?  What problem are you going to solve?  This may seem like a no-brainer, but all too often we see candidates, organizations and coalitions who don’t take the time on the front end to get on the same page and really answer this question.

And your answer should be as specific as possible, so you can better do all that comes next.  You can’t solve World Peace, but your campaign efforts might be convince President Obama’s State Department to put money for universal education in their budget request.

Just like when defining your goals, defining your campaign’s reason for being should be clear, focused and specific.  And all of the major players need to be in agreement on the front end to avoid bickering and disagreement later on.

2.  Who are the major players? In an electoral campaign, this would be your candidate, leadership staff, core “kitchen-cabinet” advisers, and a few major donors/raisers.  In an issue campaign it’s most likely going to be organizational staff (who’s in charge of this specific campaign), board members, top external advocates, elected officials supporting your issue, partnering organizations, and key donors.

Identifying who needs to be brought into the fold early on will help you accomplish goals later, and again, help diffuse any potential conflicts before they begin.

3.  What is your true capacity? The answer to this question will dictate the rest of your campaign planning.  Building a beautiful plan that requires 37 staff members and $27 million dollars to execute won’t do you any good if you’ve got a budget of $27 and a staff of 1.  Take a hard look at each of your major player’s capacities and abilities and then design your initial campaign plan around those elements.  Part of the plan should most likely include using your current capacity build and expand that capacity by bringing in new money to hire new staff to manage new volunteers, but off the bat you really need to be honest with your expectations and abilities so you don’t set the whole campaign up to fail before it even has a chance to succeed.

There are many, many, many other factors to consider when beginning a campaign, but without these first 3, it will be nearly impossible to go wrong on the rest.

Tell us what we missed:  drop us a line here.  Or, be in touch if we can be helpful getting you started with your new campaign!

Compelling personal stories put a human face on complex or abstract issues.  The success of some recent issue advocacy campaigns, including an effort to pass a comprehensive clean indoor air law in Kansas and a campaign to protect a program that reimburses hospitals for the care provided to the poorest Minnesotans, spotlight the important role that grassroots participation can play in influencing public policy.

Upon closer inspection, these winning issue advocacy campaigns shared common characteristics and offer up an opportunity to review some important lessons for grassroots success:

1.       Use “Old” Technology in Unexpected Ways (otherwise known as a story about phones!): We get excited about experimenting with new tools for grassroots advocacy and organizing, but let’s not forget about using tried and true methods in new ways!   In recent issue advocacy campaigns in various states, phones have be used creatively (e.g., decentralized volunteer phone banks and capturing messages from constituents) to influence elected officials, increase public support and awareness, and generate earned media.

For example, an innovative phone program helped the Clean Air Kansas campaign to rapidly identify supporters in key legislative districts and capture recorded messages from constituents.   Through the phone program, more than 11,000 supporters of a statewide clean indoor air policy were identified, and nearly 3,000 constituent messages were recorded via phone, burned onto CDs, and sent to elected officials.  The CDs allowed elected officials to hear directly from smoke-free supporters living in their districts, and gave them an important perspective on the scope and depth of support for a comprehensive smoke-free policy in their state.  In certain districts, messages from constituents were also shared with media outlets, which generated coverage of the Clean Air Kansas campaign and its unique phone program.

2.       Integrate Online and Offline Calls to Action: Remember, even those who are very supportive of your issue still have a number of other causes competing for their attention.  The more you can reach people through various means, the more likely they will be to take action.  Recent success in Minnesota demonstrated the effectiveness of, for example, layered outreach through email alerts, social media, and calls from decentralized volunteer phone banks to increase supporters’ actions.

3.       Cultivate Leadership: Identify rising stars among your issue campaign’s supporters and nurture their efforts.  Be transparent and share expertise, knowledge, and strategic thinking.  This requires time and a willingness to relinquish some control to your volunteers, but the trade-offs of empowering more people to assume more leadership within your issue campaign far outweigh the risks.  Not to mention, the lack of opportunities to grow skills, connect with others, or provide input on the campaign’s direction are all surefire ways to diminish supporters’ interest  in your effort.

Lindsay Hanson is a senior consultant at Grassroots Solutions, a national consulting firm that specializes in the areas of grassroots organizing, strategy, training, and evaluation.

We can start to bridge the gap by getting a handle on three things:

1. What’s the ideal profile of a superstar for your organization? Is it a monthly donor? Someone who signs up and then shows up for offline events?  Someone who organizes those events? Do your superstars submit content for your website, emails or direct mail? Do they forward, post, and retweet your content?  If I told you I could bring you 1000 people who would consistently deliver on three things – what would those things be? What contributions made well and consistently would move the ball furthest for your organization?

Being clear about what you need from the most active 20% of your supporters, activists, readers, or volunteers is the first step to ensuring you’re building structures to find, cultivate, and support those critical folks.

2. How will you know who your potential superstars are? With a clear profile of an ideal superstar in mind, you can set up the analytics tools and reporting to help you identify them – the first step toward learning more about your superstars and cultivating them.  If you’re all about content and ideas (i.e. Mother Jones or the New Republic) then you should set up analytics tools to help you identify the people who both read and share your content most.  If your focus is advocacy, then you need analytics to surface the people on your list who are taking action (maybe online, maybe offline, maybe both).  If your superstars are donors, then craft a clear definition of a superstar donor (i.e someone gives at least the average donation once per month) and embark on a quest through your data to find them.

3. What is your capacity for supporting your superstars? So you know what your ideal superstars do, you’ve figured out how you’re going to find them, now how are you going to build your organization’s relationship with those superstars? Is your operations structured to conduct meaningful, personal outreach? Do you have an organizational culture that can grow from the meaningful feedback you’ll get in return? Do you have a list of high level asks to make of your superstars, and the capacity and materials to support them in delivering on those asks?  Knowing who your superstars are isn’t enough.  To truly make the most of your relationship with your superstar donors, activists, readers, and volunteers you’ll need to have the structure, plan, and capacity to encourage, support, and integrate their efforts.

And perhaps a 3a: Establish mechanisms to discover what makes your superstars tick and how you can apply that information to the rest of your list. On the consumer side, marketing firms have found that learning what drives “super consumers” doesn’t help cultivate more super consumers, but it does help drive effective messaging and asks for the rest of us. While there’s not a ton of research on this point on the donor or advocacy side, it stands to reason that the same principles apply.   Surveys, focus groups, and even informal conversations should be integral to engagement ladder planning.

*Cross posted in slightly modified form on Frogloop.

Here are three things to think about to improve the chances that your op ed will get published and help advance your organization’s agenda:

1)  Choose who signs your op ed carefully. High profile names help in getting placed, but op ed editors are also on the lookout for ordinary people with firsthand experiences with an issue. Consider inviting an “unlikely ally” to be your by-liner or co-signer.  By offering an unexpected point of view, unlikely allies add credibility and attract attention to an issue.  For example, a prosecutor who used to support the death penalty, but recently changed his mind, would be interesting to readers.  Exploring relationships with new or different messengers is also an important way to go beyond preaching to the choir.

If you plan to write frequently, you might decide to open an account at a website that is popular with your target audiences and allows people to post their own pieces (e.g., The Huffington Post).  If you take this route, you should also plan to respond to readers’ comments and encourage friends and supporters to share your content.

2)  Begin with an introduction (or lede) that makes your readers want to keep reading. It’s best to tie your lede to an event in the news or – better yet – news that’s about to break. This is what makes your op ed timely and therefore publishable.  Common ledes include: new research studies or statistics; holidays or anniversaries of historic events; references to popular culture; and unique personal experiences.

In the internet age, op eds written in the first person and disclosing personal information have become a common and effective technique.  For example: “Breast cancer.  Hearing these two words will truly take your breath away.  As a person living with the disease since 2004, I know firsthand the impact those heavy words can have on individuals and their families.  As a South Carolina legislator, I have seen how breast cancer affects our communities and our people ….”

3)  The good news is you already know the basic structure for an op ed. You learned it in high school: introduction ending with your main point; three supporting paragraphs backed up by evidence (e.g., statistics, studies by experts not affiliated with your organization, lessons of history); and conclusion. The better news is that you don’t have to follow a set structure, but this one works for getting started.

There are two important additions to the high school essay formula.  First, you will need to add a paragraph between your last supporting point and your conclusion that refutes the opposing side’s main arguments. This paragraph is essential for reinforcing your credibility and addressing the concerns in your readers’ minds.  Second, your conclusion should include a proposed solution or a call to action. Now that you’ve educated your readers about the issue, tell them what should happen next and how they can help make it happen.

The opinion editorial pages offer nonprofit organizations a chance to deliver their messages to key target audiences in an unfiltered way.  A good op ed can add what has been missing from the public debate, steer policies in a new direction, or help set the agenda for a community or the nation. With these three things, and a little strategic thinking, op eds can become a powerful component of your next campaign plan.

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This weeks 3 Things has been brought to you by a special guest poster!  Margot Friedman is the principal of Dupont Circle Communications and specializes in writing opinion editorials, press materials, speeches, email campaigns, website content, and special reports for progressive nonprofit organizations and Democratic PACs.  Thanks for the great post, Margot!

Three Things to make your goals a more valuable part of your toolkit:

1) Some is not a number. Whatever your goal is – be it mobilizing your grassroots, raising money, educating volunteers, or winning over legislators – it should include a tangible, specific, and measurable specific number.

2) Set Deadlines. Sometimes, deadlines are difficult because there are no single dates or moments that are key. So…make one up. We’re not joking. Pick a day – it can be totally arbitrary (March 3rd because “I said so”), or it can be meaningful (March 3rd because that is the birthday of our organization’s founder) – it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that everyone has a deadline to work toward together.

Then, once that deadline is passed: set another one, lather, rinse, repeat.

3) Set Benchmarks. Once you have your number and your deadline, set “check-in” dates to help you measure progress and ensure you are on-track, as well as to let you know if your goal is reasonable and attainable. If you need 4,000 petitions signed by March 3rd, do a team check-in 6 weeks out to make sure you are on track. If you only have 15 petitions signed, that might be a sign that you need to deploy more resources to your effort…or if you’re already giving it all you’ve got, it could be a sign that your goal was too lofty and should be reset. So, rejigger a bit, then check in again 4 weeks out, 2 weeks, 1 week…until success!

Hopefully revisiting these basics will help you and your organization redefine the goals you are working toward to you ensure you are putting your time, treasure and talents to the very best use.

(And a quick plug: we’re always happy to help you take a step back and think through your strategy, define your goals, and evaluate the available tactics, so get in touch if we can be of use to you!)

First, the vernacular.  Longtime readers will recognize this hobbyhorse: tools aren’t strategies, and neither are plans.  You need all three to get the job done.  (See some of our past musings on the topic here, here, here, and here).  We think about it this way:

• Strategies are the big picture, or the general orientation.  Is your organization going to make change by being the friendliest, most accessible organization on your issues, or are you going to be the strident flank?  Are you going to build a base of advocates who will take action in even the most effort-intensive ways, or is it big numbers on online petitions that are most important to your success?

• Plans are the detailed sets of activities and timelines that follow from strategies.  Protests might make sense if you’re the strident flank, less so if you’re the sober bipartisan element in your movement.  In the typical parlance, once you’ve decided your strategy is to drive somewhere, the plan is your roadmap detailing what roads (highways or side streets?) you’ll take, where you’ll stop for gas, and how long you expect the journey to take.  It’s in the planning that details about your goals should be considered.  For example, to deliver on a grasstops strategy, how many prominent leaders do you need on board, from where, to do what?

• Tools and tactics are the task lists in the plan.  To fully wear out the metaphor:  If the strategy is to drive there, the plan is the turn-by-turn directions, the tactics are the kind of car, the type of gas, and the choice of driver.   If your strategy is high-level grassroots mobilization, and your plan is to generate as many personal contacts to targeted members of congress as possible; including in-person meetings, phone calls, personal letters, asking questions at in-district events, and calling in to local radio shows the congressperson is scheduled to appear on.  Your tactical question would be:  Is email, direct mail, phonebanking, online advertising, a combination of all of the above and/or something else altogether the best way to get your activists to do one or more of those things?

In a comment on last week’s Three Things, PR pro Margot Friedman asked, “Why do so many organizations have strategic plans that are sitting on a shelf? Why are so many organizations operating (often successfully) without a strategic plan?“  Two good questions that get to the heart of the value of a strategic planning process.  If your strategic plan is sitting on a shelf with no bearing on your day-to-day activities, you didn’t do it right. We’ve worked with many organizations who’ve presented us with past strategic communications or advocacy plans that are, to be blunt, neither strategic nor plans.  They didn’t lay out the organizational approach to communications or advocacy, so they couldn’t detail a path to deliver on that approach, which meant they wound up either as vague descriptions of aspirations and restatements of the mission, or a hodgepodge of tactics and metrics.  We wholeheartedly feel that the time and energy that went into those documents could have been better spent.

However, strategic plans that articulate an approach and the rationale behind it, the steps required to deliver on that approach within a given timeframe, and tools and tactics to achieve those steps can and should guide day-to-day organizational decision making, day-to-day-activities, and even better hiring through better job descriptions (what do you need a new member of the team to be capable of?  It’s all right there in your plan!).   Strategic plans needn’t be long, wordy documents.  How they’re bound is irrelevant.  Ditto for fonts and bolding and bullet point styles.  The value is in the clear articulation of focused thinking and decision-making regarding how your organization can make a mission-driven difference through communications or advocacy.

To kick off the new year of 3 Things, we offer up the three things we’ve found helpful for organizations working on setting goals to guide strategic decision-making.

1)  Goals are made up of 3 parts:  Objectives, Metrics, & Targets. For example, your field director might have a goal of increasing the number of volunteers.  That sounds great, but really that is a very vague goal and you have no idea what type of volunteers, what value recruiting them will add to your larger objectives and how you will measure success (one new volunteer is an increase – is that what you were looking for?).  A better way to formulate this goal would be:  Increasing the number of City Captains (meaning they lead our local volunteer recruiting efforts, can deliver our message points and can be called upon to attend meetings & events so staff doesn’t have to) in major metropolitan areas in the Northeast from 12 to 24 by June of this year.

2)  Goals are SMART*. This means they are:  Strategic, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Time-Bound.  Without these five characteristics, a goal is just words on a page.  We think the best way to illustrate this point is again with a tangible example.

Bad Goal: Get More Media Coverage

Good Goal: Get at least one article, Editorial or OpEd and 2 Letters to the Editor placed in the hometown newspapers of our 6 top congressional targets prior to the August recess.

Bad Goal: Pass Comprehensive Universal Healthcare

Good Goal: Working with partner organizations, we will leverage our relationships with 3 top Senators with a goal of getting 2 signed on as public supporters of a bill that includes X, Y & Z before the Holiday break.

3)  Goals are properly assigned. Often, the key element to a good goal is the accountability piece.  A goal needs to have a specific person or department tied to it’s success or it simply won’t get done.  That’s not to say that more than one person or department will be working toward that goal, but there needs to be one person in charge of rolling the ball forward and keeping everyone else on task.

Setting tangible, accomplish-able and strategic goals is really, really hard and there are so many sand traps the unwary and under-informed can fall into.  We all have the best intentions, and with so many fires to put out every day it can be difficult to take the step back and evaluate whether or not what you are doing is actually what you should be doing.  But not taking this valuable step – both as an individual and as an organization can have an unfortunate effect on your ability to effect the change you are working so hard for.

*For more information on setting SMART goals, we highly recommend the book “Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Leader’s Guide to Getting Results” by Alison Green & Jerry Hauser of The Management Center.

Leveraging the strengths of online campaigning – efficient, affordable, trackable, flexible – with those of offline campaigning – targeted, long-lasting, high-impact – can make all the difference, and I’ve developed a few big picture best practices to help guide the way:

Build Momentum
The cardinal rule of offline campaigns is layering: multiple contacts on the doorstep and on the phone build on each other to create momentum.  The more times a voter, donor, or advocate sees, hears, reads, or experiences a message and call to action the more likely it is to penetrate the noise of every day life, and each successive layer builds on the last.  More than a rule, layering has proven effects.  For example, online donors are more likely to donate and donate more if they receive a snail mail reminder.

Be Consistent and Self-Referential
In order to build momentum and truly integrate your efforts, choose elements that are consistent across channels.  Use the same images, taglines and branding to clearly tie the layers together. Moreover, reference the other elements of the campaign as much as possible.  Remind your audience that they’re seeing you everywhere, and that you’re excited to engage them wherever they want to plug in.

Be Focused on High Value, Strategic Action
A fair criticism of online action is that it’s too ubiquitous to make a difference anymore.  It’s hard to find recent examples of online-only campaigns winning the day.  Consider carefully what actions are most valuable and drive online and offline enthusiasm to those activities.  If an email campaign isn’t going to help win your campaign but calls into a state legislative office will make a significant difference, integrate tools like Advomatic’s Click-2-Call into your emails (no, I don’t get any kickbacks) to make it almost as easy to make a phone call as it is to sign an email petition.  Or go low-tech and focus your online outreach on moving your supporters and volunteers to download a PDF postcard, print it, sign it, and send it to your targeted decision-maker (or back to you to deliver in bulk).

Insist That Strategy Drives Integration
Sophisticated databases, exciting new technologies, and marginal costs that allow implementation for ever-more creative ideas for action are all pushing the boundaries of what nonprofit campaigns can look like.  Before investing in innovative tactics, test them against your strategy and in the real world.  Cool and new may work; but venture in that direction with as much back-up as you can get.

Test Integration
Like all campaign tactics, best practices for integration may work differently for your organization than they have for others.  Test them.  You might test a phone outreach campaign to your younger activists asking them to patch through to a decision-maker, a snail mail program that includes tear-off and return cards you can deliver in bulk, or even a highly targeted door-to-door canvass to collect petition signatures.

So… what do you think?  Let us know in the comments below or over on the frogloop blog!