What To Do when You Have Too Many Competing Advocacy Priorities, and Everything Feels Urgent - Episode 39

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode, we share what to do when you have too many competing advocacy priorities, and everything feels urgent. 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 in to another episode of the nonprofit power podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. I frequently hear from nonprofit leaders that they feel overwhelmed by the amount of strategic relationships they're trying to build. And they get both frustrated and exhausted trying to move them all forward at once. And it just feels like an endless hamster wheel and it doesn't ever feel like there's an end in sight. You don't have to live there. And I want to help you get out of that. Hey there folks. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. There are some really basic things you can do when you feel like you're being pulled in multiple directions like that, especially around strategic relationships. And I think in some ways, strategic relationships present their own set of challenges with respect to this because it's an infinitely expandable list of all the possible strategic relationships that it would be a great idea to have. You think about all of the money and policy things that you would like to have happen in the world. Plus you want to anticipate possible threats and challenges and have somebody guarding against those on your behalf. And then you want somebody out there being your champion and bringing opportunities and resources to you. We want all of that. And then we also have initiatives and opportunities that we're going after at any given moment. And each of them comes with a set of strategic relationships that it would be incredibly useful if not outright necessary to have, in order to successfully get what we want. So. Ack! That's a lot. Even if we just think about elected officials for a second. Suppose you know you're going to need something from your city council in the fairly near future. And a common mistake is to say, well, we need relationships with the city council then. That's a right instinct and yes, you do need those relationships, but you can't build a relationship with a council. You build a relationship with individuals on that council. And perhaps if you're in a large enough municipality, You may also want to build relationships with some key staff to that council. So let's say your city council has 10 members. Oh. Okay. That's 10 relationships we probably need. And then similarly, let's say there's something you want from your state legislature. So even if you begin by saying, okay, let's figure out which committees will be involved in this thing. And we'll identify the specific committee members we need to build relationships with. Plus our own state legislators who represent us from our districts. And by the way, if you're in a large metropolitan area and you've got a large service area, When you say 'our legislators', you may be talking about anywhere from two to six state assembly or house of representative reps. And then possibly two or three state senators on top of that. And then let's say there's a house committee and a Senate committee, and each of those have 10 members. Well, now you're up to maybe. 25 ish relationships in the state legislature that you've identified as probably you need. Or perhaps you want something from a state or county or city agency, and you need relationships within the agency. So again, you need to identify individuals. You figure out who's in charge of the decisions that you care about and you work back from there. But it's not going to be just one person. There'll be several. And then you also have running around in the back of your head that we really should have relationships with our US representative and senators. And if you're in that large metropolitan area, you've probably got more than one us house member that covers your service area. And maybe you don't need anything from them right this minute, but you know that you should at least have one solid relationship with a US house member and ideally also at least one US Senator. So even as I just run through that very briefly. It's really easy to see why it can quickly get overwhelming to start thinking about how do I even do this? How do I, I can't even keep track of them in my head. Never mind put energy into all these relationships. This is impossible. I'm drowning. It's horrible. I need a staff of 10 advocacy people who just do this. So that would be awesome if you had a staff of 10 advocacy people and you know, if you have them, yay. You probably are good to go. But for everybody else, we need some other kind of help. So a couple of things to keep in mind. As we take a giant breath and say let's step back a sec. There's gotta be a way to wrangle this and not feel so overwhelmed all the time. And there is. Whatever size team you're working with, there is a way to manage this. And that's probably the most important thing I want to help you understand from the get-go is that it does not have to feel overwhelming. And in fact, we want to make sure that it doesn't, because nobody does their best work in a state of overwhelm. Remember that the first thing, anytime you're talking about strategic relationship building, is always to get clear on your desired results. What do we need from this relationship? What is the outcome we're looking for? And what specific actions do we need this particular decision maker to take? Start with that. Having just that clarity will then allow you to take the next step. To do a fairly simple, in terms of its structure, a fairly simple analysis. That will help you identify where you need to be focusing your energy right now. And that's half the battle, really. The cure for overwhelm is clarity and clearly defined priorities. So I want to talk you through a fairly simple analytic framework that will let you do this. And as you use it more frequently, it can become a standard practice and a habit. That once it's ingrained will serve you incredibly well. But even while you're still experimenting with it, it's going to help. I promise. .If you've worked with me or if you've listened to many of these other episodes, I've talked a lot about how you lay out a strategic relationship building plan, how you analyze where you are in the relationship, how you plot a path from where you are now to where you want to be, and to ultimately getting that decision maker to take the action you want. So I'm going to assume that you're going to do that. But I just want to talk about a couple of strategic analytic tools that will help you filter out and clarify what needs your attention right now. Or in the next couple of months. And then what can wait a little bit. This is really crazy simple. You want to start with what I call an urgency filter. An urgency has two components to it. Time. And importance. Let's say you want something connected to the county board's budget. And the budget process is clearly defined. You can look it up. Let's say they're drafting the budget right now. You know that In two months a committee's going to vote on it. And in three months, the full board will vote. Okay. So that's what you know about timing. You are wherever you are. This is the thing I want to stress. There will be times, and budget processes are a really good example of this. Except in Congress, which completely blows its budget schedule all the time and is notorious for just limping along on continuing resolutions. But most cities and counties and states keep to their schedule pretty tightly. When they say this is the the budget schedule, the process. It is what it is. And it doesn't slide a whole lot. This is not part of the filter, but just a useful piece of advice, that if you know that you have at any point in the future, a desire to have something from the budget process in any elected body. The most important thing is to know what is the schedule for that. And when is the best time to get your idea into the mix. Often the time to start is way before the drafting process is actually in progress. Because before the drafting, there's conversations. There's a lot going on as members of the board think about what their priorities are going to be. People are lobbying them, saying what they want in the budget. You want to be in, in those early stages. But, you know what? If you weren't, and you find yourself wherever you are right now, and you need to impact the budget process and you didn't do that, you didn't get in early. That's okay. You got to work with wherever you are. So one thing to say about time urgency is that, to the extent you possibly can. One way to reduce the overwhelm associated with time urgency is to know schedules and cycles and processes thoroughly. And know what really happens when, so that you can be on time or ahead of time with stuff that is operating on a predictable schedule. Now stuff that's not predictable. Then that's where you're going to find yourself yikes. This thing is happening right now. We need to affect it. Here we go. So you take a look at, when is this thing happening? Where is it in the process and how soon do we need to make an impact? And how soon do we need our end result? That's a critical question to answer. Because here's a little truth. Lots of things feel urgent. But in terms of timing, some things are more urgent than others. The thing that's happening next week, from a time standpoint only, is obviously more urgent than a thing that is happening three months from now. Right. It's pretty simple concept. So we want to separate the components of urgency and time is the first one. And the second one is importance. And by that, I mean, cause again, We wouldn't be paying attention to it if it wasn't important. I get that. But everything's relative. In terms of how consequential this thing will be for the organization and or the people we serve. If it's super consequential then that has a high importance urgency. If it is nice to have, but not critical to have, then it has a medium to low importance urgency. And there's lots of, you know, gradations. You could make gradations in this to your heart's content. But the two basic components of urgency are time and importance or If that's a word. So the way to do this that is the most orderly and will help your brain and your team calm down. Is to list out, by desired outcome, the relationships that you feel you need. And that are crowding your, "ah, we got to get this all done" brain space. So you might organize it by saying. Okay. Uh, County budget. And then you list all the relationships that you need for the county budget process. And then let's say you have an amendment to a piece of state legislation. And you know what committee it's assigned to. And so you know which legislators are going to be the most relevant and the most important relationships. And then you also have a feel for where you are in your relationships with your own elected reps. So then you might categorize that by XYZ amendment, state legislature. And then whatever else you got. Maybe you've got something with, a City agency, and you need them to approve a rule change or something like that. So then you have city rule change is one of your categories, and then you list your relationships under that. With each of these outcomes that you're seeking, there's a specific timeline attached to the outcome. Or there's not, and you've got one of those "sometime in the future, we would really like it if we got a comprehensive piece of legislation created and passed, that would do amazing, wonderful things and cover a lot of territory." And that's your, pie in the sky goal. That has an extremely flexible timeline, especially if the thing hasn't even been created yet. But it's on your radar. You really want it. So that can be your dream legislation thing. Even though that doesn't have an official timeline attached to it, it can be labeled for timeline to say, this is in the future at an undetermined date. Just clarifying that is incredibly helpful. Okay, so you take your outcomes. And then the relationships that go with the outcome. And you're going to do an assessment about timing for each of them. But let's just take one of them. Let's say you've got your county budget item. And where things are in the process is that the final budget decisions are three months out. But a critical decision is going to be made in the next six weeks that you need to affect. so the most. Immediate piece of time attached to that is six weeks. So you've got three columns. You got a column for outcomes, and relationships underneath them. And then you've got a column for time, and then you've got a column for importance or consequentiality. .Next to each outcome you want to mark the time column. And there might be a couple. So like with the county budget thing, you might have ultimate outcome final budget. That's three months. Key committee decision, six weeks. That now governs your county board relationships that you've identified. And let's say you listed all 10 county board members, but you realize that only three of them are involved in this first six weeks from now step. Already you have more clarity than you did 10 minutes ago. Yeah, we need the votes of a majority of board members. But if we don't have the support of this committee chair, or this other key person on the board at that six week interval, then our thing won't even be in the budget three months from now. So those are the two people. They are a six week timeline. That is clear. Then next to that is your importance column, your consequentiality column. This is really urgent in terms of time, but let's say we're only talking about $5,000 in the budget. And really your goal here is to get a toehold in the budget. You just want to get your marker in there so that in future years you can wedge that open and expand it further. So this is somewhere between a medium and high consequentiality or importance, depending on what your longterm ambition is. Let's say your longterm ambition is a dedicated line item to fund your program to the tune of a quarter million dollars a year. But that the way the process works in your county is first you got to get in there at all. So depending on how important it is to you. How soon you want to get into that better category later on. Determines the level of importance or consequentiality for your organization right now. In the grand scheme of your budget, $5,000, probably not that important. And if that were all we were talking about, and it was never going to be more than $5,000. Then honestly, unless your annual budget is $50,000 and it represents a 10th of your budget. For most healthy nonprofits, $5,000 isn't going to be a make or break thing. So if you don't have larger ambitions for that line item down the road, and this is a $5,000 thing. I would probably attach relatively low importance to that. It's a nice to have. It's not a need to have. So super urgent in terms of time it's coming right up. But how much difference will it make to our organization? Eh, not that much. .High urgency on time. Low urgency on importance. But then let's say there's a different scenario. Same county budget timeline, so the timing hasn't changed. But now let's say that you already have a $250,000 line item in the budget for the county. And there is a strong possibility that it could be cut because the county's having budget issues. They're looking for places to cut and they're eyeing all of the social service stuff, and you're in there. And what you really wanted was an increase. You now realize that's probably not likely to happen, but you want to defend that 250 K. And it is a significant portion of your budget. Well then in that scenario, the importance or consequentiality urgency is high. So now you have high time urgency and high importance urgency. See how that works. Now your outcome is marked for time urgency and importance urgency. And you go through and you do that for each of your outcomes that you're looking for. That will then shape how you view the time and importance urgency for the relationships that go with that outcome. So let's say you have four outcomes that you have strategic relationship building associations with. And you do this analysis for each of the four outcomes. For sake of illustration, let's say that you've got this county board thing and you've marked it high time urgency and high importance urgency. We'll go with that $250 K scenario. And then you've got something with the state legislature that's more aspirational and longterm. And then you've got something with a county agency that you've been working on for a while. It's maybe going to happen six months out. But if you could get it done, it would have a lot of positive consequences for the organization. So maybe that's a medium time urgency and a high importance urgency. So you've got all those identified. What will typically happen is that for your outcomes that you've identified, they're not all going to be high time urgency and high importance, urgency. It's rare for multiple items to all be happening right now, and have equally intense consequences for the organization or the people you serve. So already you have beginnings of guidance. When you look at that and you can say, okay, I've got a double high here. I've got a medium high over here. I got a low, low over here, and then I've got a medium, medium. Let's say. That's information. Even if you stop your analysis there, which is perfectly okay to do. Simply doing that will give you so much more clarity, so much more understanding of where your energy should be going. And then what you can do within each outcome, is you can do the same exercise for the individual relationships that are there. Because not all of those relationships that you've identified are likely to be equally important in terms of their consequence. If there's a key gatekeeper or decision maker who controls the yes or no on all of something, you need them. Now, maybe there's a second relationship on that list that that gatekeeper listens to. And so maybe you target them as well and say, we want to get these two. And we have an easier way in to the one who's the counselor to the gatekeeper, so we're going to focus there. And maybe you have another one where they're not super important, but you have a super strong relationship with them. So other information does come into this. But then the focus of your work with the person you have the super strong relationship with is to influence those ones who are super consequential. Now you have a much more targeted strategy for how you're going to leverage the relationship you do have. To influence the ones where you may not be as strong. But you start with the outcome. How urgent is it? How soon is it going to happen and how important is it that it happen, how consequential is that outcome for us? So this simple analytic tool will give you so much more clarity than you had, if you weren't using it already. Now you can go another level deeper yet. And this will further reduce your overwhelm and stress. But I am happy to say that if you just do the time and importance urgency analysis the way I've described. That alone will help a lot. But let's talk about what the next level of analysis looks like. If you take this a step further, Then you take your high time urgency, high importance urgency outcomes and relationships. And you look at degree of difficulty, level of effort, basically. How hard is it going to be to get this done? If you're pretty confident because your relationship there is so strong that if you go in with the right messaging strategy, that you can probably get this done in one or two meetings. That's a relatively low effort. Versus you really need a particular decision-maker to do a thing. And you hardly have any relationship with them at all. And it's high time urgency. That means you've got to somehow figure out how to influence them in a constricted timeframe. That is much higher level of difficulty, much higher level of effort. You're going to have to really work this. And come up with a strategy that's going to involve bringing in some bridges. You're going to have to identify those bridges, leverage those bridges. Come up with some pretty brilliant messaging. You've got a lot of work to make that happen. And then the other piece is how long will it take us to get this done, given where we are now. So if you need to make sure you get a meeting or two with this decision maker sometime in the next six weeks. Okay. How long would it take to make that happen? Hopefully you can get that done in that six week timeframe. It might not be easy, cause probably a lot of people want to meet with them. But if you have a decent relationship and already you said it's only going to take a couple of meetings because you have the relationship. Then okay. You need to make sure your messaging is on target. That's some effort, but you can do that because your messaging is already pretty good. And then you just got to get a meeting, so you may have to push on that, but that feels doable in the six week timeframe that was identified in the earlier timetable. Okay. Cool. But. If you are in a situation where you need to influence this person. And you've got to build all these bridges You got to find the bridges, leverage the bridges. Get them engaged. Get your messaging dialed in right for this person that you don't have a relationship with yet. So you got to figure out what the right messaging is going to be for them. With the bandwidth available to you and your team, realistically, how long will it take you to get that work done? If you think that it's going to take you two months to get that work done, and you're on a six week timetable, then you've got a decision to make. You always have options. One option is to let it go. But if it was high importance urgency, as well as high time urgency, then you probably don't want to let it go. So now you got to think, all right, well, what do we have to do to make this happen? How do we make what we would normally label a two month effort, how do we shrink it down to four weeks, for safety's sake. Even though technically the timetable's six weeks. Don't immediately assume. Okay, well then we can't do it. Ask the better question. and ask what would it take for us to be able to do this? And the answer might be, we put something else on the back burner during those four weeks. Because it's that important and that urgent, we got to get it done. So we will back-burner something else consciously. Not all hands on deck, we go work on this, and then we don't think about what happens when we let the other stuff slide. Anytime we shift priorities like this, we got to be conscious of what we're putting on the back burner, and have the same analysis of what's that going to cost us if we do that. So you have a clear discussion about what would it take, and how can we make it happen? Now it might mean that all of the other outcomes that you had on your original analysis grid. And. All the rest of them are going to have to sit for a bit. Because this one is so important that you've got to pull out all the stops. But then you make that decision. What you don't do to yourself is to say, yeah, but we have to keep going on all these other things. If you don't have the internal bandwidth, it's not humanly possible even when you back-burner some of your regular business. Then your remaining options are to hire a consultant of some kind. Hire a lobbyist, a Messaging person. wherever you most need help. You might be able to bring somebody in. Or you might be able to bring somebody in on a short-term basis to cover one of the other things that you want to put on the back burner, but you can't really leave it just undone. So you might say, all right, we need all the members of our advocacy team to be focused on this and get this work done. But that means that because they're not full-time on this. They have other parts of work in the organization. We have to have somebody else cover their other parts of work. How do we make that happen? So you've got options. You can shift people around on the chess board in the short term if you decide something absolutely has to happen. But it's going to require some pretty deliberate thought and action taking to say, yeah, this is important enough that we're going to do that. We're going to invest. It's probably going to take some money. It's going to take some disruption. It's going to take doing things a little differently than we normally do them. But you've always got options. There's always a way to get it done. You may decide it's not worth it. And that is perfectly okay. But this set of analysis will give you the framework and the information you need to have the conversation and to make the decision from a strategic framework, and from a level of clarity that lets you know, that whatever decision you make is going to be the right decision. Because you've done the analysis. You understand what you're trading off, and you're good with it. Or you at least can live with it. I've just presented a really challenging scenario, but often what happens is that it's less challenging and it's not that dire and crazy-making. It can be that you do your initial analysis of urgency for time and importance, and you discover that everything on there is kind of a medium time urgency and a medium consequence urgency or importance urgency. So you've got flexibility there. So then when you go to your level of effort and how long would it take to get it done analysis with those, you can say, oh, Hey look. This one over here would be really quick to get done. Huh. If we just did this thing and this thing we can take care of that. Well, let's do it then. And then at least we got that done. And then that'll allow us to move forward on this other piece of that outcome that we're working on. Or maybe you have some medium, medium. Items. Or you have a medium time urgency, but a high importance urgency. Those are the best ones, because you can say, okay. This is really important, highly consequential. And we've got time to build a strategy and execute on it. Let's start building that strategy now while we have the runway to get that done. And then you build out. .Begin with the end in mind. You start with your outcome that you want. Identify where you are now and you figure out what the pathway from here to there looks like. And then you map out a plan. And you make assignments and you get to work on it. But then you get to work on it without the panic factor of, oh my God. This has got to be done tomorrow. It's like, okay, we're going to do this in phases. And when we get to the point where we're in a shorter timeframe, we will have done the advance work and we'll be in really good shape. Yay. So this helps you from no matter where you are. Whether you're just looking to accomplish new things and you're feeling pretty calm right now. Or if you're in a state of complete overwhelm. Or somewhere in between. When you put to use these basic analytic tools, it can give you not only a strategic framework to figure out where to focus your energy. It also let's you take a breath. A lot of this really like so many of the things that we talk about here on the podcast. A lot of this is about training yourself and training your team to use this kind of an analytic framework on a regular basis. And as people become accustomed to using it and using it in team meetings, they will begin to apply those same filters and screens and analyses in their head to everything they do. It will take time. That won't be instant. But if you make regular use of this with your advocacy team, You will find that people find it very helpful and will start incorporating it into their other work. And then it just makes all of your conversations about what do we need to focus on? It makes it so much clearer and so much easier. Now one caveat is that if you had some things in your outcomes analysis or even the relationships analysis, where you said medium importance, low time urgency. If you've got some other high highs on there, then obviously those lower ones are going to get put on the back burner. Those back burner items don't go away. And this doesn't mean you ignore them forever. It just means you put them on the back burner for now. And then you set a time certain when you'll revisit them. And the way this analytic process works best is if it becomes a regular practice. Maybe not every time you meet, depending on how frequently your advocacy team meets. But at least quarterly you would want to be revisiting your analysis. And you will have already done a lot of the heavy lifting on most of these. It's just a recheck. Is this still rated the way it was three months ago? Or, you know, three months have passed, so obviously timelines have changed. And things that were low time or medium time urgency three months ago might now be a bit more urgent and they get a new rating on time urgency. So it's things like that. You want to just keep checking back in on stuff. You don't have to spend a ton of time to do it. But you want to check in so that stuff doesn't get lost. And then you don't find yourself in a panic some point down the road, when you forgot to bring your back-burner items back onto the front burner. All of this is really helpful if you're finding yourself going in a hundred different directions at once and feeling like you're getting nowhere. This is a super handy tool. Relatively easy to use. It's not the be all and end all. It's not the only thing you need to do. But for purposes of getting clarity about where you need to focus your energy right now. It can be super helpful. You can apply this simple screen to help bring some order to the chaos. And a lot of times that alone will make you feel like you can breathe again. And that's worth a lot. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.