Getting to the Bottom of Grasstops
You’ll hear us say often that advocacy is more than just letters, phone calls, and tweets — it’s about the people and community behind that messaging.
Similarly, effective advocacy is more than just grassroots messaging; instead, it’s a combination of factors that help move legislation one way or another. The most successful advocacy efforts are more like alchemy, finding the right balance of grassroots, grasstops and key contact relationships, and lobbying.
In this case, we’re here to get to the bottom of grasstops.
What is a Grasstop?
To put it simply, a grasstops advocate is a key stakeholder who has the power to affect the decision making process. That might be a trustee at a university who has a standing lunch with a Senator’s husband, a store owner who knows the chief of staff at a state representative’s office, or an advocate who has gone above and beyond to show their commitment to the cause. All three are useful to your advocacy effort in different ways.
Tracking Grasstops in SparkInfluence
Recently, we overhauled how we help organizations capture and track grasstops relationships. Specifically, among other functionality, it’s now even easier to:
- Survey your stakeholders to identify, capture and cultivate relationships with elected officials.
- Track relationships by individual, elected official, committee, caucus, district, state and more.
- Cultivate and create a “Farm Team” of advocates through easy-to-use automated messaging, taking the load off of your shoulders and letting the system do the work.
The beauty of SparkInfluence is that all of your grasstop data lives side-by-side with your advocacy activities, creating one larger understanding of your stakeholders and how you can and should mobilize them when the time is right.
No effort should keep their relationships in a spreadsheet, or, worse, risk losing them because an elected official is no longer in Congress. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. It’s with that in mind that we create the most in-depth key contact reporting in the industry.
Get started today with Key Contacts and Grasstops: https://kb.sparkinfluence.net/article/how-to-add-key-contacts/