Printable Version Email to a Friend  For more tips see Guide to Meeting With Elected Officials, by the Virginia Organizing Project. Is meeting with elected officials considered educating or lobbying? Lobbying is allowed by IRS rules, and is defined as a communication that:
If the communication does not meet this definition, it is not "lobbying". For more details on exactly what activities constitute lobbying, and how much of these your organization can take part in, check out NPAction's Frequently Asked Questions About Lobbying guide |
Showcase: Using Face-to-Face Meetings to Educate Legislators: N2N of Massachusetts
Sometimes the most effective tool for change is a face-to-face meeting with legislators. Such meetings provide an opportunity to educate elected officials about issues important to your organization and to ask for their support. Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts (N2N) works to build power in low-income and working class communities around economic justice issues. To promote these issues, N2N uses a grassroots community organizing model that includes delegation visits to educate legislators about the needs of their working class constituents.
Delegation visits play an important role in N2N’s efforts to hold legislators accountable to the needs of their working class constituents. As part of a larger advocacy campaign to educate legislators and gain their support — which can include mass call-ins, letter writing campaigns and public accountability sessions — legislative meetings provide a key opportunity to put a personal face on issues such as affordable housing, welfare, and child-care needs.
Identify Target Legislators
To maximize the impact of meetings, N2N organizers follow the legislative calendar and work to hold meetings prior to the start of or early in the legislative session, before legislators submit their priorities to leadership. Demonstrating constituent strength increases the likelihood that working family agenda items are placed on legislators’ priority lists. Attempts are made to set up meetings in as many districts as N2N has membership strength. For meetings with State Representatives, N2N tries to bring 5 to 10 members. When meeting with State Senators, who have larger electoral districts, this target is raised to 15 to 20 members, to signal that enough constituents are concerned for the legislator to listen.
Who Should Be In Your Delegation
Each delegation meeting is carefully organized to address N2N’s multi-issue agenda. The core group of attendees are local N2N members — low-income activists who can discuss their personal experiences. Beyond this core, statewide and local organizations that support the Working Family Agenda goals also participate in meetings. At a typical legislative briefing, N2N members might discuss housing and health care needs, while a policy expert discusses welfare assistance, and a union representative addresses concerns about the minimum wage and paid leave regulations.
It is critically important to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the various issues discussed, presenting them as part of a whole low-income agenda. Legislators will often try to pit individuals and issues against each other, saying for example that support for additional education funding will mean a cut to housing. To counter the effectiveness of such claims, N2N works on proposals for progressive revenue-raising, to reduce the need for tradeoffs between one issue and another.
Prepare Your Delegation
Given the likelihood of extensive back and forth discussion on certain contentious issues, such as welfare and taxes, as well as legislators’ propensity to pit coalition members and issues against each other in struggle for funding priority, each meeting demands significant advance preparation. Often, N2N members have never before played a role in politics, so they rely on the local N2N staff organizers to help them prepare. The Campaigns Department develops a list of potential objections the legislator may raise and how to respond to these questions and claims. The local organizers then translate these materials into “people’s terms” that are accessible to volunteers attending the meeting. Each meeting is also fairly scripted, with order of speaking assigned to ensure the strongest delivery of the message.
Finally, emphasis is placed on the idea that “every good meeting ends with next steps.” Attendees are encouraged to make a specific ask of the legislator at the meeting, and someone in the group then takes responsibility to ensure that this happens, often by making a follow-up call or providing the legislator with additional information. If the legislator raises a complicated question or technical issue, follow up may be done by an expert in the coalition or a N2N staff member.
Example of Success
A recent story illustrates the power of the face-to-face legislative briefing as a tool for policy advocacy. Currently in Massachusetts, employers who cover their employees’ health insurance also pay into the state uncompensated care pool (for those without health insurance). In contrast, employers who do not cover their workers do not pay anything into the state pool. Good employers are essentially being charged twice. The Massachusetts House passed a bill that would assess a charge on employers who do not cover health insurance, with the funds directed into the uncompensated care pool, but this bill had not yet passed the State Senate.
N2N set up a meeting with a state senator who sits on the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, and represents a district where the organization has strong membership presence. Fifteen local members attended the meeting along with a representative from the local Carpenter’s Union. Though the Senator began the meeting by telling the attendees there was no way she would support them, by the end of the meeting she committed to supporting employer assessment for any company with 50 or more employees. N2N organizers credit this success with the telling of personal stories, as well as thorough advance briefing of members with relevant statistics and supporting documents. The N2N approach demonstrates that briefing meetings provide an opportunity to educate legislators while also advocating for policy change.