Design Your Capitol Hill Visits with Members of Congress for Maximum Impact - Episode 38

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode, we share how you can design your Capitol hill visits with members of Congress for maximum impact. So stay tuned. If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I'm Cath Patrick and I've helped dozens of progressive non profit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter. It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner and to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. Hey everybody. Kath Patrick here. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the nonprofit power podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. Whenever you have the opportunity to meet with your us representatives and senators in Washington, DC. You want to make sure that you get the greatest possible impact for your efforts? A lot of time and expense goes into that trip. And too often folks come away disappointed in the results. There's a handful of things that can make or break your visit with congressional offices. Let's make sure you get them right. so that you can get the results you're looking for. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. Cherry blossoms are emerging in Washington, D. C., and that means that Hill visit season has arrived. For those of you who are familiar with this concept, it's very common in the spring and the fall for lots of national organizations to host National gatherings in Washington, D. C. with the primary or secondary purpose of making sure that all of their members get to Capitol Hill to visit with their members of Congress and advocate for whatever is on their agenda. And if you're part of a larger national association or coalition, I'm sure you've been part of one of these or certainly have heard about them. So what I'd like to talk with you about is the challenges that come with that, and how you can set yourself up to have maximum impact when you go to do those visits on Capitol Hill. Because the last thing you want is to go to all the effort of getting here and then be disappointed in the results of your meetings. So let's talk a little bit about how these things work, first of all. These coordinated visits all have a primary purpose, which is to bring a large number of people together, showing up on Capitol Hill on the same day, and reinforcing the same set of talking points with lots of different congressional offices. The idea is, same talking points, same asks, repeated over and over again, with as many members of Congress as possible, ideally from multiple delegations from that home state or home district. But even if it's just one per district, everybody talking about the same thing on the same day does actually create some buzz in capital offices. Staffers talk to each other all the time, and if if XYZ group is there talking about a set of issues, then they're all hearing about it and they may be talking with one another about it. So it definitely amplifies your voice in a couple of different ways. So that's an important part of what you're doing is contributing to raising a level of attention that's being focused on the things that you're asking for that are tied to federal policy or appropriations or both. And generally speaking, the way national organizations will set these up is that they always have some concrete asks, things that you are specifically requesting the member of Congress to do for you. Often it'll be around a piece of pending legislation or in many cases, particularly with social service related programs that have been around a while, it'll be reauthorization legislation. Every X number of years, a particular piece of legislation that authorizes both programs and sets the maximum spending levels for those programs, need to be reauthorized on some kind of a regular basis. Most of them have some sort of a sunset provision in them that triggers a reauthorization process. As you know, the appropriations process is separate from the authorization process, but often there will be a set of asks that cover both. And so you may be saying we want you to support or vote for or become a co sponsor of this particular legislation or this provision within the legislation. And we would also like you to support an appropriations level of X dollars for this program. And you could be advocating on two or three different pieces of legislation and a couple of different appropriations requests all in one visit. So whatever your basket of federal asks are, that the national organization has assembled for you, that's kind of what you're there to talk about. But you're also there to do a couple of other really important things. So first of all, as I'm sure you know, the best way to get a member of Congress and or their staff to focus attention on an issue is to have two things happen. A constituent bringing them that message, which is you. And helping them to see how this issue or this particular ask impacts the district or the state that that member represents. Since their number one job as an elected representative is to do right by the people back home. So that's all great, but you want to make sure that you get maximum benefit for your organization too. And that becomes a very interesting exercise in messaging and relationship building. So the first thing is to understand what you're heading into. Now, if you've done a bunch of these before, this will be familiar information, but for folks who aren't as familiar it can be pretty overwhelming. So first is to understand who you'll be meeting with. It could be anybody. You're going to visit the office of a member of Congress. It could be that you're going to meet with the member of Congress themselves. Or perhaps a senior staffer or a primary issue staffer, depending on how their staffing is structured. Or you might meet with a low level aide who's basically a note taker. And you're not always going to know ahead of time which one you're going to get. Even if your appointment is with the member themselves, sometimes they're called away for a vote. Sometimes there's something else going on where they simply can't be available to meet with you in the time slot for which you made the appointment. In which case you're going to meet with the best person available that you can have access to. The environment itself is pretty unique. It's often noisy, somewhat chaotic, even when there's not a vote going on and people are running up and down the hallways trying to get to the vote. You might meet in the member's office or you might meet in a hallway with a bunch of people milling around and talking and all kinds of noise happening. Even if you're in an office, you might be in a staffing area where there are 3 or 4 desks with a staffer at each desk and each of them is meeting with someone on the phone or in person or they're on a zoom call, whatever they're doing. There's a lot going on. So you want to be prepared that this isn't going to be a standard meeting where you sit down one on one with somebody from that office and have a nice quiet conversation. You might get that, but you should anticipate that you'll probably get the noisy chaotic version. A couple other things to know is that getting through security takes a bunch of time. There's always been a lot of security at the Capitol, but post January 6th's insurrection and coup attempt, security is a lot heavier, as it needs to be, unfortunately. And so, you want to build in time between your appointments to be able to get through security in each office building. So, if, for example, you're going to go meet with the office of your House of Representatives member, and you've got meetings with both of your U. S. Senators, you're going to have your meeting in whatever House office building that your member's office is in, and you'll go through security in that building. When you go to meet with your senators, they may or may not be located in the same Senate office building, there are several. And each building has its own security. So every time you enter a new congressional office building, you go through security another time. Also, the House office buildings are clustered in a row on one side of the Capitol, and the Senate office buildings are clustered on the opposite side of the Capitol, which is a goodly distance. Now there is a cute little subway that runs between the two, and you can sometimes hop on that to get across. But you may also have to walk to get from one side to the other. So you want to factor in a chunk of time for all that walking around. So that's logistics. Then there's the messaging part. One of the things to realize is that you're carrying double messaging. You've got the national organization's messaging that you're working with and want to articulate. And then you've got the messaging from your program. And you're integrating them so that you're using the strengths and impact of your program to highlight the impact it will have if the member does the thing you're asking them to do on the federal policy thing. And then you have to take all these factors and come up with strategies for messaging delivery and relationship building that's going to fit with all those crazy circumstances. So, to help make that easier, before you ever get to Washington, there's a bunch of advance work to be done. The first and most obvious is scheduling. Now, of course, your first request will be to meet with the actual member of Congress themselves, unless you have a very specific reason why you want to meet with an issue staffer instead. And that would be a situation typically where you're already working actively with that staffer on something and you want to continue that conversation. But barring that, your goal would be to meet with the member. Now, if you already have a strong relationship with the member, your chances of meeting with them go way up. You can also work your relationships with the local district or state office of the member to help you get the meeting that you want with the person that you want. That is presuming that you have a relationship with the local staff. However, you're going at it, you're going to do your very best to make sure that you're meeting with the correct staff person. If they tell you ahead of time sorry, the member won't be in town or they got something else that day, but you can meet with the staffer. .Before you make the scheduling call, do an internet search and find out the names of the staff in your member's Washington office. This is easily searchable, and most offices, particularly house offices, don't have that many staff. There'll be a scheduler, there'll be a chief of staff, there'll be a communications person, there'll be some sort of senior legislative aide. There'll be a constituent relations person. And they might have another issue staff or something like that. Look that up ahead of time. So that when they say very sweetly to you, well, I can have you meet with Susie Q and you look at your little notes and you realize that Susie Q is the lowest possible level staff person. You can say, well, thank you. Would it be possible to meet with Mary Smith, who's the say, legislative director, somebody who's a little further up and has more say in what goes on in the office and has the ear of the congressperson more effectively. Do what you can. If the only thing you can get is the meeting with the low level note taker, then you'll take it. But if you do your homework, you should be able to at least push a little bit to see if you can get a meeting with somebody who's going to be more helpful to you. Now, ideally, long before you're making this scheduling call, you've already done some groundwork on your strategic relationship building. And if you know that you've got a national conference or something coming up, or you're going to be in D. C. for some other reason, and you just want to schedule your own visits. Now is the time to begin doing this relationship building work at the ground level, if you don't already have it in place. Because it will massively enhance your ability to set up a successful meeting. So ideally you have met the representative or the U. S. Senator, and you have had a conversation with them at a minimum. They know who you are. They know what your organization does. Hopefully they know more than that. Hopefully they are well versed in your work. But at a minimum, they at least know that. And you have a relationship with the local district or state staff. If that isn't something you've already got squared away, even if you don't have any immediate plans to come to Washington, those are relationships you should have. You never know when you are going to need the help of a Congressional office for something. And having pre existing relationships make that conversation so much smoother and so much more productive, no matter where it's taking place. The other thing you're going to be preparing ahead of time are your materials. So, first of all, when I say materials, you can bring paper. Paper's fine. Lots of folks like to bring folders with their logo on the cover, and an infographic about their impact, maybe a news article that highlights something really unique that happened in the district. Whatever you've got that's going to help explain and show your impact and the good work that you do. And the national organization has probably given you some sort of a leave behind handout, that highlights the messaging they want to highlight. So you can bring those paper packets, but be prepared to have the staff person or the member decline your offer of paper. They may very well ask for you to send it as a PDF instead. So you want to be ready to do that and say, yes, of course, you'll have that, and then say whatever time frame you can do. That said, there may be a couple of things in your paper materials that you have in your hand that are particularly visually impactful. An infographic that shows a couple of pieces of information about really significant impact, or surprising information about level of need, about the percentage of people in the district who have the problem that you solve, whatever it might be. Something that's very attention grabbing. You may pull that out of the packet and say, I'll be happy to send you the PDF, but I did just want to show you this while we're here so that you can see what I'm talking about. And then you say a little bit about it and then you can offer it to them. And if they're like, no, I'm good. Send me the PDF. That's totally fine. But sometimes it can be very helpful to have a little visual assist when you're in the meeting. Generally speaking, less is more. Short and easy to read is best. One pagers are your friend. No fluff. Don't stuff your packet with 10 news articles or a full research study or anything that's extra or that's TMI, frankly. Remember the focus of what you're trying to get done. What is the message you want to get across? Everything in your material should support that messaging, and do it in a very concise and compelling way. But don't put extra stuff in there. It will get ignored, and worse than that, your fluff may actually obscure the one thing that you really need them to see. So, be really disciplined with that. It should contain messaging around your four essential pieces of messaging, which are what your organization does, explained in a way that when they hear it or see it, they could then turn around and explain it back to you. The specific problem or problems that you solve. What's unique about your solution, what's different about it. What do you do that others don't to solve this problem. And what is the impact of your unique solution, and how does it create exceptional outcomes. And what are those exceptional outcomes. So you've got three messaging objectives. You've got your federal policy and appropriations talking points and asks. You've got your four messaging essentials. And you've got your messaging that ties those two together, and that drives home the local impact of whatever you're asking for. This is how this thing that we're asking you to do, if it gets done, this is the problem that will solve in the district. This is how it will impact. This is how many people it will impact. This is what it will mean for them. This is what it will mean for the community. If there are any cost savings implications, you highlight those. And you want to be able to do this set of stuff in 10 to 15 minutes. Because that might be all you get. If you get more time, awesome. Then you can be ready to expand on any of those pieces. But you should be able to deliver that set of three things in 10 to 15 minutes. That is the essence of what goes in your messaging, and when you've got that as your core messaging around the work of your organization, it becomes fairly straightforward to translate that to whatever your policy ask is. You just draw a line between one or more of your four essential pieces of messaging. And you tie it directly back to the federal policy ask, or the federal appropriations ask. So, you did your advance work. And you've arrived for your meetings, And now it's showtime. I'm going to talk about meeting with staff first because it's the most common scenario. If you only have 15 minutes to talk to a staffer and maybe you're meeting in the hallway, there's not going to be a lot of relationship building opportunity in those 15 minutes. You're going to be forced to just deliver your message in the most compelling way you can. That said, you do not talk nonstop for those 10 or 15 minutes. The rules of engaging a person are the same, no matter the setting. If you want to engage them and have them really listen to you and take in what you're saying and care about it, you're going to want to ask them some questions. You want to give them an opportunity to be part of this. You want it to be a conversation. And regardless of the level of staffer you're talking to, but particularly with the note taker variety. Understand that they meet with dozens of people during a week and hundreds over the course of a year. And part of their job is to just take notes while constituents talk at them. And I've seen a lot of encounters where that's exactly what happened. The constituent goes in, they're freaked out because they thought they were going to be meeting with the member and now they're standing in a hallway talking to a staffer and it's noisy and the staffers sitting there with their little notepad. And it's really tempting to just blurt out all your important talking points to make sure you get them all in before the staffer runs away. And if your only goal is for the staffer to take notes and possibly never do anything about it, then that's a good way to go. But if you actually want them to engage with you and your cause, the thing you want. You got to slow down and pick the one or two, maybe three things that are going to hit with the greatest impact. And what that is, is going to depend a little bit on what you know about that member. Even if you're talking to their staffer, The staffer's job is to serve the member. So if the member is all about ROI and cost savings and data, then you're going to pick a couple of pieces of really impactful information that center on that. And lead with that. If the member is more heart centered and they really care about social justice or equity or things that predispose them to care that every member of the community has the ability to thrive, then you can emphasize that piece as your lead. Whatever you choose, you want to focus on the things that will help them understand the positive impact that the federal policy or appropriations thing you're talking about will have at home. I encourage you to lead with impact. It's so tempting. We always want to, especially if we don't have much of a relationship there and we want to make sure they understand the part about what we do. You do want to explain what you do. They need to know who they're talking to, but resist the temptation to tell them all about how you do it. Another very useful thing you can do is you can ask if they know about your program already. Maybe they do. You can also ask if they've had much opportunity to spend time in your town. First of all, that's an opportunity for them to talk. You're not just talking at them. If you know about yourself that, particularly if you're a little nervous or stressed, that you're inclined to talk nonstop or talk really fast. Write yourself a note, do whatever you have to do to make sure that after the first two or three sentences you've uttered, you make a point of asking the person a question. Even if it's just, you know, before I tell you a lot about what we do, I'm interested to know if you already are familiar with our program. I know you're really busy here in Washington, but do you get much opportunity to get back to X, Y, Z town where we work and live? You're inviting them into the conversation. It's over something small, but it's a question they can answer. Yeah. And if, in fact, they do know about your program, then you can explore that a little bit. If they get to spend a lot of time in town, then you might say, well, then you might be familiar with the problem that we are working on. And then you lead with the problem and watch their body language. If there's recognition on their face, then they probably have something to say. Invite them to stay it. You want a conversation, even though I know you've got this messaging you've got to deliver and you're going to feel like, aah, how do I get it all in? The more you can make this be a conversation, even if it's just a little bit of give and take, the more involved they are and therefore the better they are listening and taking in whatever it is you have to share. And you already have their attention because you're a little bit different. Most of the people who come through there, talk at them. Especially on these Hill days. It's a chronic problem. So if you're the rare bird who comes in and engages in a conversation and has something really interesting to share, something surprising, something they didn't know, and are interested to learn more about, that is really, really helpful. Because part of what you're doing is you're looking to get them out of note taking mode and into engagement mode. the lower the level of staff person, the more challenging that can be because that low level staff person really is just there to take notes. And so, no, they don't have any influence, they can't go back and say to their boss, Well, I just had the most amazing meeting, and I think you should do X. That's not really their role. But it will change how they report back. Maybe they met with 50 people that week and they're going to summarize to their boss And they go in and they say, okay, so I had 50 constituent visit meetings this week and they grouped into these issue areas and whatever they have to say. And the three that really stood out to me were boom, boom, boom. You want to be one of the ones that really stood out to them. You want to rise to the top in their report back to their boss. Now, you can't completely control that. You might have come to talk about an issue that the boss really, really, really just doesn't care about and is never going to care about. That'll be harder. But all you can do is do every incremental thing possible to increase your odds of rising to the top, having attention drawn to your ask, and putting the spotlight on you and your concerns. And hopefully having more conversations in the future, longer term engagement. If you're talking with a staffer who's got more of an issues focus, and they say they are familiar with your program, great. You can ask about that. If they say they're not familiar with your program, you can ask, well, here's the problem we work on. What do you know about that? Or you just lead with impact. Again, you're taking a lot of your cues from what the member cares about. .If they're all about ROI, then that's what you come in talking about. But you do still have to engage the actual human being you're having the conversation with. Even though the ultimate target is the member of Congress. You gotta talk to whoever you're talking to. And the more that that's a conversation, and the more they're engaged, the better. So, if they don't know anything about your program, and they don't know anything about the problem, then you're gonna have to paint a quick picture. And that's where having your four messaging elements clearly in your head, will help you. Because you can just paint the picture of the problem from the perspective of the person who experiences it, and its impact on them, their families, and their community. And then you talk about what they're not able to do, what restrictions it puts in their life, the ripple effects that has. And then you talk about, but we have a unique solution. This is what we do, this is how we solve it, and when we solve it, these are the amazing impacts we get. Again, you're going to have to be brief with this in this environment. So, you want to have a couple of hooks that are, as I said, surprising, unusual, something that shifts their perspective. You want the person to lean in and say to themselves, I didn't know that. Whoa, that's amazing. Really? You want them thinking. Because once they're thinking they're engaging. And if they engage, they will remember you. They will respond to you differently than if you're just kind of spraying them with your standard spiel and hoping some of it sticks. Some other things that are helpful to do are, if the member of Congress has not yet visited your program, you're going to want to make sure that you include an invitation to do that. But while you're inviting the member, because you're talking to the staffer now, invite the staffer too. Say, I know you're really busy and you probably don't get to get out of Washington too often, but if you're ever back home in the district, we would love to have you come and visit too. We'd love to have you meet some of our staff, our volunteers from the community. If it's appropriate, you could say, and you could meet some of the folks that benefit from our program. Anytime you're in town, you just give me a call and I would be delighted to give you a personal tour. That would be really an honor. And if you have an event coming up, you can invite them to that. If you have any sort of special occasion coming up, definitely invite them to that. Even if they never go, the fact that you asked matters just a little bit. It just says to them, I see you. I acknowledge you as a actual human being and we'd love to have you come and visit us. Those are all things you can do to engage a staffer. Now, from a messaging standpoint, your approach to the member isn't that different. What's different with a meeting when you actually get in a room with the member is that you're also focused on long term relationship building with them. Like I said, hopefully you've met them at least once before, and you should definitely mention that and say, it was such a pleasure to meet you at such and such place, such and such time, that was wonderful. If you've only met them once. Or if you know them better than that, great. The best thing in the world, constituents who are able to go in with a member of Congress that they have a really strong relationship with and it's so much fun because the member already knows who you are, you have already built know, like, and trust with them. There's already a rapport, there's alignment, there's affinity. And so in that kind of a scenario, let's say you have those same 10 to 15 minutes, you can spend 8 of them on relationship reinforcement. How are the grandkids? How's the basketball team? Whatever you've bonded over, you're going to call on all of those points of affinity and alignment, and you're going to just touch on them. to reestablish and build the warmth and the affinity that goes with that. It's a back and forth and you can spend most of your time on that. And then you can say, so the reason I'm here today in particular is.... And if you know this member and their issue politics and preferences pretty well, and you have a good relationship with them, you can fine tune your messaging. And you should tailor it very tightly to what you think is most going to align with their existing interests. And say I'm here to talk to you today specifically about something that's of great concern to our program. And you may not know that there are several hundred other programs similar to ours around the country and all of us solving XYZ problem in each of our communities, and there is federal legislation that supports that work. But here's the thing, that's under threat. Or here's the thing, that's slated for cuts. Or there's an opportunity to make it so that it supports this particular solution even more robustly. And that would really be a help not only to us in our work, but to the folks back home in the district, back home in the state and would lead to fill in the blank outcomes. And then they'll have questions and you can talk that through. But you see how the stronger your existing relationship with the member, you approach the conversation differently. And if you have no relationship with them, then you're going to structure your messaging about the same as you would have with the issue staffer. You're going to try to figure out how much they already know. Do they know anything? Have they heard of you? Do they understand the issue? And you then jump into your. messaging at a place where it will give them enough of the basics that they can then understand what you're asking for. And then you most definitely, if they have not yet been to visit your program, you're going to want to invite them to do that. And then you're going to want to listen to episode 31, where we talked about how to get maximum results from a decision-makers visit to your program. So you're going to do all of that, and you're going to do two more things when you're done. The minute you walk out of there, or as soon as is practical, because you might be running to your next meeting, in which case it wouldn't be practical right that second. But before the day is over, you're going to debrief the meeting. Debrief whatever you learned about what part of your messaging landed and what parts didn't. You're gonna debrief any commitments that you made to them about follow up. You're gonna debrief any commitments or promises that they made to you. You're going to make note of anything they said that was of interest, language they used to describe the situation, the problem, the legislation, the people you serve. Any of that that was new information for you, you want to capture all of that and do it before you go to sleep that night, because it will fade. And honestly, if you have time in between meetings, debrief between meetings, because they will run together after a while in your head. And then a minimum, the first day you're back in the office, you want to follow up. Send them a thank you for the meeting. You do your little recap of what you talked about, you send them the PDF of the stuff that you said you were going to send. In your follow up email, you call attention to any piece of the PDF pile that you particularly want them to pay attention to, and why. Bye bye. If you invited them to come and visit, you reiterate that invitation. And then you figure out what are the next steps in the relationship building for you to do with that member of Congress and with any issue staffers or other higher level staffers that you met. Also, make note if there's any follow up you need to do with the local office. If they helped you with scheduling, if they helped you in any way connected to that meeting, thank them. And tell them that it was a great meeting and you so appreciate their assistance. If you have a relationship with them and their boss made a commitment, you want to let them know about that. Also, let them know about that invitation that you made and say, Hey, you know, we were talking with congressperson so and so, and we invited them to come and visit our program, and they sounded very interested. I just wanted to follow up with you and say, the next time they're in the district, we'd love to set that up. .You're just maintaining that communication, you're building relationships, and keeping it moving. Because long term, you know, national priorities come and go. The set of asks that you had one year for a Hill Day, odds are they'll be totally different the next year. But the stuff that you need locally, the stuff you need your member of Congress or your senators to be paying attention to, that doesn't change all that much. And you want to be on their radar. So you're doing both. And that's what you're building for in the long term. So whenever you're coming to Washington for some visits with your congressional delegation, whether you get to see the cherry blossoms or not. I hope this helps you prepare and feel ready to take on whatever comes your way. And most importantly to build awesome relationships and get the results you want. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.