Research and polling are not just for political campaigns! Advocacy campaigns must also use research to assess the issue landscape and polling to determine what messages work. In this episode, Joe and Martín explain what you can learn by conducting research, what mistakes you must avoid, and how your research consultant’s expertise should complement your own. Joe speaks with Anna Greenberg, PhD about different research methodologies, how low budget campaigns can still conduct research, and why it’s so important to be transparent about your budget.
Research and polling are essential parts of advocacy campaigns. Understanding the policy arena and testing your messaging will prevent your organization from wasting limited resources and help keep you on track to win. Tune in to learn about some different research methods, how to make the most out of a limited research budget, and what to look for when hiring a research consultant or pollster. This episode’s guest is Anna Greenberg, PhD, a pollster and former professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Greenberg discusses why you must be upfront about your budget with your research consultant and what you need to have in mind when putting together a research plan.
Resources
Advocacy Research—Know Your Options
Polling, Research and Focus Groups for Advocacy Campaigns
Using Google Tools for Advocacy and Political Research
Connect with us!
If you have campaign questions or want to learn more, reach out to us using the contact information below.
Twitter: @cmpwrkshp
Instagram: @TheCampaignWorkshop
Email: marketing@thecampaignworkshop.com
Joe Fuld
Twitter: @joefuld
Instagram: @joefuld
Martín Diego Garcia
Twitter: @gmartindiego
Instagram: @gmartindiego
Presented by The Campaign Workshop
(Intro Music)
Joe Fuld (00:07):
Hey folks, you're listening to How to Win an Advocacy Campaign, where you'll get an insider's perspective that teaches you not only had a fight for what you believe in, but how to win. I'm Joe Fuld.
Martín Diego Garcia (00:19):
And I'm Martín Diego Garcia, and you can find us @CMPWRKSHP on Twitter or @thecampaignworkshop on Instagram. Welcome and thanks for listening to episode two of How to Win an Advocacy Campaign. On the last episode, we discussed setting your advocacy goals with Molly Daniels and talked about how important those are and how, although it sounds like a very simple step are very critical to make sure that you're focusing your resources to help you achieve those very specific goals. Today, we're going to be talking about diving into research and particularly advocacy research, what it takes to make a plan, how to run an effective advocacy program, and the part that research plays in developing your overall message, your theme for the campaign, your strategies, and figuring out how to move your target audiences. Joe, can you talk to us a little bit about what you overall defining and explaining what advocacy looks like in the research space?
Joe Fuld (01:13):
Sure. So, you know, advocacy research could be any number of things, right? It could be message testing, focus groups, triads, right online panels. It used to be that public opinion research was just for political campaigns. Well, not anymore. Over the last decade, I would say I've seen more and more using these types of political tactics, especially around research for advocacy because advocacy has become much more of a public facing thing than just grasstops, which we're going to talk about later. So there's a real need to do research with the public around advocacy research. And that's why it's so important to understand these different tools and utilize them in the advocacy space.
Martín Diego Garcia (02:04):
Absolutely. And just for folks to know, so dyads and triads are just specific terms used in the research and polling space. And so dyads is a conversation between two people who know each other triads similar for three people who know each other, whether they're family members or coworkers, they work in a similar field, et cetera.
Joe Fuld (02:21):
Right. Or it could be three strangers, just a smaller group. It's like a mini focus group, but we're going to get pretty wonky in this episode. So get ready. It's going to be all kinds of fun.
Martín Diego Garcia (02:32):
Totally. Let's go a little high level here. What do advocates and organizations who are thinking about doing some research in the advocacy space, how should they start setting up those programs?
Joe Fuld (02:44):
The first thing is you want to think ahead of time about what's your goal for advocacy. And we talk about this. It we've talked about this in the episode with Molly Daniels, right? The idea of having a goal, have an understanding of what you want to do to start is really important. So you want to start with a goal and then you want to think about who your audience is to achieve that goal. So if you have a goal, you have an audience, then you're going to do research around what that audience wants, what that audience cares about, how to approach that goal to the specific audience. Like let's say for instance, that you're working on an issue you're working on criminal justice reform, and you know that you have to persuade Republicans around criminal justice reform, and you want to talk to single white men in Republican districts around criminal justice reform. One of the ways that you may be talking about it that really relates to them is around taxes and cost, right? That might appeal to that group then around more of a social impact message. So thinking about what is the specific message, how does it relate to the specific group that you have to persuade? Doesn't mean that you're not with another group going to be talking about social impact, right? But with this specific group, the thing that you may prioritize is this is costing X amount of your tax dollars.
Martín Diego Garcia (04:14):
And so once we have a goal and we figured out what, we're sort of why we're doing the research, can you talk a little bit about budgeting? Right? Like small organizations is this accessible to them, large organizations, what is a Cadillac research budget?
Joe Fuld (04:29):
Right. So small organizations, it may be, you have no budget for research, but it might be that you're getting a group of people together and talking about the issue and talking about approaches and getting an understanding of what people care about. It might be that you're your, so you're having listening sessions around this issue. You're thinking about non-traditional partners that you want to engage in this advocacy goal. And so you might just be doing calls with them to say, what do they care about? How could we get them involved and see could we do a call with a bunch of your membership that aren't the leadership of the group to talk about this issue and see how they react and do that kind of a listening session. There's no money, there's no cost in that, right? Doing exercises like a message box where you're really defining what the dialogue in a campaign would be, no cost to that. Power mapping, right? Takes time, but no cost to that. So those are the things, and I would consider all of those to be part of the research phase that you want to do. If you have more money focus groups, right, where you're actually testing creative testing messages that you're going to be using with folks that will cost you more money, but I think it's really important. Online panels, again, could cost you money, but there are ways that you will look at and talk to different partners in different groups that may be already are doing research and ask, if you can ask a couple questions on a poll, ask a couple questions on something that they're doing on an online panel that they're already doing. So there are ways to do this in a more expensive manner or a cheaper manner. And the good news is is that if you work with, you know, the right coalition partners and the right experts, you may be able to figure out how to save yourself some money and be very focused around what your research is.
Martín Diego Garcia (06:22):
Yeah. And, and, and definitely as we're thinking right. Of, of as the pandemic continues. And even though you can't do in-person focus groups, there are still a lot of options out there to sort of not throw out this idea of doing online panels, doing surveys, doing some of this stuff that is accessible to folks online, even though we can't be in person.
Joe Fuld (06:43):
Yeah. And I would say starting early and planning is one of the most important things. I think sometimes people get into a rush to do these things and lose the opportunity to do research and then have create almost a false sense of urgency around themselves that, Oh, we just have to go and launch a campaign without doing any research. Well, there is time to do it. Now you really have to look at the calendar and make sure you're not waiting to legislative session starts to start doing your advocacy research. You need to do it before.
Martín Diego Garcia (07:16):
Definitely. And so, Joe, can you talk a little bit about choosing your targets for research and how they should either be similar to, or different from the target audiences you are communicating to, with your message or your efforts?
Joe Fuld (07:29):
Yeah. What, what I'd say is you really want to think about the goal and then who are the people you're going to be influencing in order to achieve your goals. So if these are Republican districts, you want to think about how are you talking to these Republican voters. If these are going to be more progressive districts, how are you talking to these progressive voters? If it's a little bit of both, right? If there are, you know, how does the issue appeal to different demographic groups? You want to think about that, but in the end, all of this needs to match up to your goal and you want to make sure you're not wasting your limited resources on research, around things that are nice to have, but not helpful in achieving your goal.
Martín Diego Garcia (08:13):
Yeah. And I think that, that goes to a couple of some myths that exist around research, particularly in the advocacy space. Most folks see it as a like electoral political thing, right? Like we have to do trekking poles and we're talking to voters and therefore we need to know what they're thinking. Same goes for advocacy. The same concepts apply in that the more research you're able to do. And the more information you have about the audiences and whom you're talking to, whether they are legislators or right, like you're doing public education work and it is the general public or a specific constituency group. You want to know what they're thinking so that you can craft a message and create a plan that is again, effectively using our most, most of the time limited resources. And just to put a, put a finer point on, on what Joe mentioned, right? Yes. You need to plan and planning is helpful, but you also need to understand that the, the research work, yes. It could take months, but also, right. Like it could take weeks. Right. And so thinking about this idea that there isn't enough time to do it. You don't want to be creating a message that isn't going to resonate with your with the audiences that you are communicating with, because you were assuming what they care about versus asking them what they care about.
Joe Fuld (09:24):
Bottom line, don't skip the research step, right? That's the point that we're making is that you want to have a research step. You want to make sure whether that is with money or with no money that step still needs to happen.
Martín Diego Garcia (09:38):
Definitely. So we're super excited to be talking to Anna Greenberg who has over 20 years of experience polling in the political and non-profit sectors. She's going to walk us through what to include and some mistakes to avoid in doing your advocacy research. We'll be right back.
(Music)
Joe Fuld (10:05):
And we're back. I'm so lucky today to be joined by Anna Greenberg. Who's the managing partner at GQR and Anna has worked on a ton of issues with a ton of organizations ranging from women's health, LGBTQ rights, reducing gun violence, reforming drug laws, and money in politics. Anna is a research fellow at the American university center for congressional and presidential studies. She's on the board of the Roper Center. She has been a pollster for 20 years, as well as taught before then. We're really lucky to have Anna Greenberg with us here today. Anna, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Anna Greenberg (10:49):
My pleasure.
Joe Fuld (10:50):
So Anna, talk to us a little bit about how you got started in the world of polling and opinion research.
Anna Greenberg (10:57):
Well, I appreciate that question. You know, when I, when I give talks or lectures young people will come up to me afterwards and say, how did you get into this? I'd love to do that myself. And I have to say, well, my story is not really, you can't really replicate it. So, you know, my I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and my dad was a professor at Yale. And while he was teaching, he started a public opinion research firm in our basement in 1980. So it's 40 years this year. And I was about 12. So now, you know how old I am. And I started doing jobs there after school. So photocopying questionnaires stapling questionnaires, coding questionnaires. This is when you know, it was all pencil and paper. And then I graduated to data entry for a while. And so I kind of worked on and off as my summer job, my after school job there for all of high school and college and a little bit of, of grad school. So when I decided what I want to do with my life, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professor. And I, I taught at the Kennedy School for four years and I taught public opinion research methods, gender and politics. And after about four years there, I decided to leave academia and joined my father's firm. So that will be 20 years ago next year. So, you know, I can't, they can't, everyone's father can be a pollster, then you join their firm, but that that's how it happened. So I always tell everybody who works at my office, that I've done every single job. And I know I was a programmer at one point programming data in 1992, when we did Bill Clinton's polling. So I've kind of done just about everything you can do at the company, but I think, you know, I think what has helped me tremendously is my academic training. So having the methodological underpinnings of survey research methodology and econometrics and also kind of like historical understanding of public opinion so that when I do a poll and I see the results, I'm not just learning for the first time that women are more Democratic than men, for example, and right. I know sort of what the trajectory of the gender gap has been since 1980. So I think I sort of have this combination of this kind of real world experience through, you know, most of my life in polling, but then also the academic training in it.
Joe Fuld (13:11):
What are some of the things that an advocacy group should be thinking about if they're just getting started?
Anna Greenberg (13:17):
Well, I think a few things, I mean, one, you should make sure that you retain somebody who will do what I'll call for a lack of better phrase, a lit review. Like what's already out there, like, what do we already know about something? Like no one should be starting from scratch. So that's, that's the first thing second you had, know what your goals are. Are you trying to target voters? Are you targeting, you know, members of Congress, the press? Who are, who are you trying to move? Right. And it's amazing how often advocates don't know who they actually, what they're actually trying to do with the data. So I always push really hard to say, like, let's not do this poll, so you actually know what you want to do with it, because once you spend the money on it, you're not getting that money back. You may not have money for anything else. And then the third it's like, what do you, what do you want to actually do with it on the backend? How can you most, how can you best leverage it? So I think those are all kind of the three, the three questions that that groups need to ask themselves when they commission research.
Joe Fuld (14:07):
And so when you think about big mistakes folks make at the beginning, is it that goals piece that people sometimes miss, or what are other mistakes that you see folks make at the beginning of these advocacy projects?
Anna Greenberg (14:21):
I think the primary one is the goals thing, because there's nothing worse than doing a survey and at the back end, they say, well, we wanted to release this publicly, but there isn't any question here that we want to release publicly. It's like, well, we needed to know that when we wrote the survey so that we would make sure there were questions you could release publicly. So like, that's just an example. So I think not having, so often when you don't have clear goals and you've got a committee of people giving input, your poll ends up being kind of like a mishmash of stuff at the back end. It's really hard to come out with any actionable sort of advice for, for the client.
Joe Fuld (14:56):
So often in the advocacy space, we hear people talk about online panels versus polling. Can you tell folks just what the difference is between an online panel and a poll
Anna Greenberg (15:08):
There's in one sense, there's no difference. All it is is a different form of data collection. You're either collecting data over the phone, you're collecting it through a survey that's done online. You're collecting it by looking at the number of times, "hoax" and "pandemic" are mentioned on social media. It's all just, everything's just a form of how you gather data, the real differences. How do you figure out who you're talking to? And with traditional phone polling, 90% of time, 99% of time, you're doing representative random sampling. You're taking, you know, a sample you're, you're taking a database you're selecting your respondents randomly, and then you are calling them, giving them all. You know, everyone has to have a known probability of being included in your sample. You can't systematically exclude some group. Otherwise it's biased. And with online, most online panel are what we call convenience samples. They are people who have opted in to be in a panel and take surveys, and they are self-selected and tend to be more political and more likely to vote and tend to be better educated. And so if you're trying to understand the attitudes of low-income African-Americans, you are not going to get that from an online panel. So in addition to being self-selected, they also have significant bias. So I use them all the time. You just have to understand what their limitations are. So I tend to use online as more of a qualitative tool, right? It's like giving people a message paragraph and having them highlight and write their responses to it, which is stuff you cannot do over the phone.
Joe Fuld (16:33):
Sure, absolutely. But you talked a little bit about qualitative and quantitative, right? And so these days with COVID-19 where we're not, it's very hard to do in-person focus groups, right. Which is where we used to do ad testing. Now, folks are using some of the online panel work, as you said, to sort of replace that. What, what are the benefits of that? Let's say you were doing both, you're doing a poll, but you wanted to use the panel for, for online testing. How can that be useful?
Anna Greenberg (17:03):
Well, to be clear, pre COVID, we were doing all of our ad testing online. So I mean, I much prefer to focus groups, bigger sample size. It's more like the real experience someone has. Like people don't sit around with 10 people and talk about an ad. They see it on their TV by themselves or with a couple of people. So that had already moved online. We also had started doing online focus groups which can be like really helpful. If you are doing, say a population that's going to be really hard to do in one town, you can do it nationally by using online panels. So let's say you want to do science teachers. It's gonna be really hard unless you go to like, I guess New York city maybe to get 12 science teachers, but you can absolutely get 12 science teachers and an online panel if you have a national sample to draw from. So we were also doing online know focus before now it's all online. And the real question is, is it video or is it text driven? We're still doing a little more text-driven because it's still very hard to make sure all your respondents have sufficient technology to do it. I mean, all, I mean, all of us are experienced zoom people now, but, you know, imagine like getting your 65 year old mother doing a Zoom focus group for the first time and you know, it all will go downhill from there. So I'm still have a bias towards the text, you know, where people are just typing in their answers, but I'm sure I'm going to be pushed to do the, the video groups. I'm just trying to not do it as long as I possibly can, because I know it's going to be harder.
Joe Fuld (18:28):
I totally understand. All right, for those running a advocacy campaign on a shoestring budget, how can they utilize their resources effectively to, to test messaging? What are ways that you would recommend?
Anna Greenberg (18:43):
Well, I always say like, you know, go and talk to people and tell them what your budget is. I can't, I hate it when someone comes to me and says, I want to do this work. And it's like complicated and big picture. So I give them a $50,000 or a hundred thousand proposal. And they're like, Oh, I've got $20,000. Like tell me at the beginning you get $20,000 and I will give you the best thing you can get for $20,000. Right. Or I'll tell you, I can't do this for you, but here are some other places where you could do this for the amount of money that you have.
Joe Fuld (19:12):
So Anna, how much does all this research cost?
Anna Greenberg (19:17):
Well uh I'd say as a starting point, you have to understand that there's always a cost quality trade off. Nothing cheaper is ever going to be better in polling because high quality data collection costs money. Now that doesn't mean that stuff is cheap is useless. Especially if you have a limited budget, it's almost always true that something is better than nothing. So I have done really cheap research and I've been really expensive research. But you should not let anybody tell you that the cheaper version of something is going to be better than the more expensive version. So traditionally, you know what, where we are right now on phone polling, which is actually almost now it's 50, 60% on cell. Let's say a 20 minute survey, 500 sample, 40, 50% on sales going to be $35,000 or so. But you can do a survey for a hundred thousand dollars. If you're in California, you have to do a much bigger sample because California is like a country, right? And of itself, regionally demographically. So you're doing 800,000 sample California's survey will cost you the same amount of money is doing a national survey. So that could be 70, $80,000 to do a survey, a statewide survey in California. And then also you can add over samples. Let's say I'm pulling someplace where I really understand what Hispanic voters think. So I need to do an extra, a hundred interviews with Hispanic, you know voters, that's going to cost $15,000. So you can spend a lot of money on polling. The cost is less for online. So know probably about $10,000 less. So people are wrong if they think online is like dirt cheap because these vendors have to maintain their panel and they have to maintain panel quality and they have to constantly be recruiting and trying to retain members. So buying sample from online panel is not cheap. So people are a little shocked that, you know, if it's 70,000 for the phone and it's 50 for online, like I thought it should be 20 for the online, like, Nope, it still costs money. And then IVR automated voice recognition where it's kind of a recorded voice and you push the button you know, generally those can cost around $5,000, right? So that's pretty cheap. And if you're doing it someplace where that's older and white and people are not mobile, so that there's a lot of landline usage, your IVR poll can actually be pretty accurate. It's never going to work in a city with high minority population mobility where people are in cell phones. So that's a huge range of what polls can cost.
Joe Fuld (21:42):
Totally. And then online panels, just like if you're trying to test ads or do online focus groups?
Anna Greenberg (21:50):
Online panel is the same, right? Like, you know, it's maybe cost extra to show video, but it's all about the sample. It's not about the in fact survey length is almost irrelevant for an online survey. It's really about the, how, how many people you're talking to. So whether you're doing an ad test or a survey, doesn't really matter. Focus groups though online focus groups are pretty expensive. I mean there one online group is about $20,000, 22,000. Now you have about 30 respondents. So it's about three times as many respondents as you have in a focus group, that's in a focus group facility, focus groups will cost you in person somewhere around 10 or $11,000 per group. So if you think about it that way, online's not more expensive, but it can be a little sticker shock for people are used to paying 11,000 to get that $20,000 focus group.
Joe Fuld (22:39):
So what, last question, what should advocacy and member groups be doing on a consistent basis to stay on track with their message? What are things they should be thinking about?
Anna Greenberg (22:51):
Well, I think this is a broader question than just, you know, survey research or public opinion. But just generally discipline, right? Like, especially cause most advocacy groups are not on our side of the aisle are not like rolling in money. And so every time you get a chance to advance, whatever your message is to have it be consistent and clear every time, you know, it's just so important because again, I feel like a lot of progressive groups have a fairly limited ability because they don't have like not gonna spend a hundred million dollars in television trying to convince somebody of something they're going to do it through elites. They're gonna do it through social media. They're gonna do it through digital. And with, with that, you just need to be really, really consistent. And you know, if you hire the right person, you can always come back to them and say, am I, you know, can you look at this thing I'm doing? Does this make sense? Does it fit? The other thing I would say is messages never divorced from messenger or the creative execution of the message. And one of the things that is true now is there's a lot of really cheap ways to test your digital content as I'm sure you probably do it, Joe. And so, and so like once pollster says, here's the message. It's not the work's not done. Like you have to actually figure out how to execute it. And it has to be, you know, whatever it has to be, whether it's emotional or compelling or funny or serious, whatever the actual right execution is, is not something that polling necessarily tells you. So your message work is not done once you get the polling memo from the pollster.
Joe Fuld (24:16):
Well, that's a lot, but I mean, it's really, but it's important, right? It is really is. I think that this is there is some science to it, but there is art to it too. And I think it's the combination of all those things when it comes to delivering a message. Well, Anna, listen, thank you so much.
Anna Greenberg (24:32):
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Joe Fuld (24:34):
If folks want to reach out to Anna you can find her at GQRRr.Com. Anna, thanks a lot. We really appreciate the time.
(Music)
Martín Diego Garcia (24:57):
And we're back a big thanks to Anna for joining us and giving us her insights on advocacy research. And I wanted to highlight a couple of things that Anna mentioned just to make sure that they're resonating with folks. The first one that she mentioned is really to be upfront about what you want out of your research, right? So she mentioned, if you want a specific question asked in your polling or you want specific data in order to be able to put it out in a public facing manner, you want to know that ahead of time, right? So that's going to take some planning. So how do you think about what are the questions? What are they advertising? What is the communication you might be doing as part of your advocacy efforts, whether to legislators or to again, to the general public that you may want, you may want a specific answer to a question or a specific data point in those tools and those tactics. So think about what those are and make sure that those are included on the front end.
Joe Fuld (25:47):
And another thing you really want to make sure that you are upfront about how much money you have, both in your overall campaign and for research, right? A good team is going to let you know how to use those resources best. It might be that you have more money budgeted for communications and not enough budgeted for research. So you want to let folks know what you have and we, as a team can work with you
Martín Diego Garcia (26:12):
Help figure that out. Yeah, definitely include that in the RFP, as you're thinking about, if you're considering hiring an outside firm or an outside researcher pollster, right? Give them some parameters, even if it's a ballpark so that they can give you the best ideas for the budget that you have versus coming back and saying, we can spend a million dollars doing research and you were like, I have $5,000, right? So letting them know on the front end of what you think a ballpark number is going to be, would be super helpful for them to give you the most effective resources as Joe mentioned. And the last piece that think Anna mentioned that I think is super important, right? Is consistency. And we talk about this all the time in terms of messaging, right? That a person needs to hear your message regardless of the platform, anywhere from eight to 12 times in order for the message to really start to resonate with them. So think about, as your research can help you figure out what the message should be, but you and your team are going to be thinking about how to execute it correctly across TV phones. Right. Did the digital space, right. And thinking about what does the audiences in those particular mediums and how do you make sure that the message you're sending through those tactics are the right one to the right people?
Joe Fuld (27:21):
Yeah. I mean, Martine, I mean, you and I have been involved in lots of different campaigns for advocacy that involve a limited amount of research and a lot of research. I do think there's a happy medium between the two due and really thinking about timing. I mean, I think sometimes organizations and groups are doing ongoing research and these sort of campaign issues can be brought into the, that polling to save yourselves money. But then also like thinking about specifically, what is the target audience that you're trying to reach, knowing what your goals are. These might be audiences and frankly, goals that are new to the organization. So you have to think about Anna talked a bit about that. But to me that is really important. Just because you talk to your membership about this in a certain way, doesn't mean that you can talk to the general public in the exact same way. You might have to change your message slightly. So doing research with them to understand how the message conveys to a larger group or a more targeted group is super important.
Martín Diego Garcia (28:24):
Yeah. And one of the things is like, as you're thinking, right, that you have had polling or ongoing polling that's happened. When was the last time you did it and has a pandemic happened since the last time that you conducted research, right? Or has some other larger change happened that may change the way that people are viewing or responding to that particular topic, that particular issue when you're going to be communicating to them. So even though research may already exist, you have to take into consideration any large sort of national public opinion changes that have happened that may sort of change the outcome of that research.
Joe Fuld (28:55):
Well and also like how you're doing research, right? The actual tactic of that research may work for some audiences and not for others, right? So if you're going into a, you know, more bilingual community, if you are going to an older community, a younger community, you know, those, the ways to reach those different communities is going to be slightly different. How you communicate and find out information about those different communities is going to be different. Whether you're reaching them on cell phones, reaching them on landlines, whether you're making sure that you have like bilingual callers, all of those things are going to be really important for you to dig into and know about the audiences that you're trying to reach. And again, you have to plan that ahead of time.
Martín Diego Garcia (29:40):
Joe, can you talk a little bit about, as campaigns may be doing ongoing research, right? And they, how should their messaging change based on the research that they find and more specifically, what if they find something totally unexpected that needs to fundamentally change their messaging? What should they be doing?
Joe Fuld (29:57):
Well, I think there's a couple things, right? I think if you're, if you find something in the research that means you have to change your message to address it, you need to make sure that one, that your core group, that your board, that your constituency is comfortable with that message. It might be that there's something that great that comes out of the research, but it's against your organization's values. And you can't talk about it in that way. Right. But it might be good for you to know that because it might be how your opposition is talking about the issue. So that is really important too. You've got to put that sort of into the general mix of how you're discussing the issue in general, right? You want to inform your core constituencies about what you're talking about and how you're going to be talking about an issue, get them on board. Talk about, get coalition partners onboard about how you're talking about an issue, but what can be really cool about it is that with the right message, advocacy can really expand your audience. So it might be that for instance, right, that you were talking about an issue just in one very specific way, but now you have a new group of people that you can get into the mix because you're talking with slightly different terms around your advocacy issue.
Martín Diego Garcia (31:14):
I want to bring up as we talk to groups and organizations, and I train on this, I also often remind organizations that you're hiring these folks, right? So, so you're the boss in this situation. So the, the pollster and the researchers, or any other consultant that you bring in, right. And brings in a good bit of experience and what your goal is, is to marry, right? Like your understanding and expertise on the, on the issue and the community in which you have built trust and relationship with, with the expertise of the consultant. Right? So if they come in to say, this is impossible, or, or we can't do that, right, you need to push back and say, well, this is what we hired you for. And you need to figure out a way of making it happen, right. And that may mean being specific about oversampling of particular communities, right?
Martín Diego Garcia (31:57):
Young folks, communities of color, et cetera. How do you make sure that we're oversampling to make sure that if we just do a general swath of the public, it leans very older and, and mostly white. And so how do, if you need messaging for specific demographics, how do you do that and know that whatever they come back with, you have the better gut check in terms of, does this language make sense? Does this messaging makes sense to what I know is true for my community and my audience. So remember, you're the boss and to do a gut check is totally valid to push back on these, these experts.
Joe Fuld (32:32):
And also like research is a learning opportunity and that it should allow you to have a greater conversation with your, with coalition partners and use this research as a way, work with your pollster is in your consultants, or just like the folks in your listening tour to write up a report and share it with a core group of people that you want to want to expand your issue with. So thinking about that and being the boss and using this as a way to build bridges is also I think, like super important.
Martín Diego Garcia (33:03):
Well, hopefully that was super helpful in terms of you all thinking about incorporating advocacy research into your campaigns. That's a wrap for this episode. Thanks for tuning in. If you have specific questions or comments about advocacy, polling, and research, feel free to contact us via social media and the email address that are in the district.
Joe Fuld (33:19):
Yeah. Well, on our next episode, I am super excited because we're going to be talking about messaging for advocacy with my old boss, the always entertaining Rich Neimand. Tune in to find out how to tailor your messaging, to reach the right audience and leave an impact with your audience
Martín Diego Garcia (33:36):
Until next time. This is Martín Diego Garcia.
Joe Fuld (33:39):
And Joe Fuld, breaking down how to win an advocacy campaign.
Joe Fuld (33:44):
How to Win an Advocacy campaign is Joe Fuld, Martín Diego Garcia, Hope Rohrbach, Daniel Lam, Heidi Job, and Elena Veatch. Music by Mike Pinto. Sound editing by The Global Startup Movement. Special thanks to the team at The Campaign Workshop. Remember to review, like, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
(Outro Music)