Reinventing Advocacy

27 Mar 2009

by Rebecca Rolfes

Last October when the severity of the financial crisis began to become apparent, a group of builders, contractors and manufacturers, all related to the housing industry, formed Fix Housing First. There were three main aims for the site:

• Enhancement of the homebuyer tax credit, set by Congress in 2008 at $7,500 for first-time buyers
• Lowering the interest on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages to 3%
• Alternatives to foreclosure for both lenders and homebuyers, and increasing the capacities of federally-insured refinancing programs

The site enrolled 2,500 organizations, with more than 100 associations. With a timeline pegged to the stimulus bill, the coalition won an increase in the first-time homebuyer tax credit to $8,000.

In 5 months:
2,500 companies joined the coalition
44,000 activists sent letters to their members of Congress
180,000 letters were sent
25,000 people opted-in to email updates

After starting the Twitter feed:
10,000 letters sent to Congress in 24 hours
20,000 letters sent the next day

The effort was funded by the for-profit members but involving associations always was part of the idea, according to Ken Gear, executive director of Fix Housing First and vice president of government affairs at Pulte Homes. “Associations have the political clout in DC and networks of members that could help build the grassroots movement. The not-for-profit side took it to scale and put in the sweat equity.” Fifty-one state and regional chapters of the National Association of Homebuilders took part, for instance.

Such efforts indicate a potential future of advocacy for association advocacy. “Associations really are by definition silos,” says Pat Cleary, senior vice president of digital public affairs at Fleishman-Hillard, the public relations and public affairs firm that built and maintained the site. “They represent a high, vertical segment of the economy; the auto people represent auto, the steel people represent steel. They don’t think collaboratively. But the public doesn’t think that way. They have interests in common—home buyers, home builders, home sellers, home owners all could benefit from this. Even though they might be represented by vertical associations, this process allowed everyone who cared to come join in the fight.”

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President Obama campaign’s success with digital outreach let the coalition see “the power of an online campaign,” Gear says, “we saw what an online grassroots group can do.” Gear and Cleary admit that such an effort would be difficult for a single association but that the first step in reinventing advocacy is a change in mindset.

“We all are really good at pushing information out,” Cleary says, “but increasingly we live in a pull world. Eighty percent of all web traffic starts with a search engine.”

Using powerful digital tools like Twitter, blogs, Facebook and Google AdWords enables “associations to mobilize quickly,” Gear says. “The old way of third-class mail newsletters is dead. As an example, I was in the Speaker’s office as the bill was being voted on Tweeting on what was happening. People knew what had happened before I left the office.”

Tags: Advocacy, Facebook, Fix Housing First, Fleishman Hillard, Google AdWords, National Association of Homebuilders, Pulte Homes, twitter
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