Amyism #40
Education v. Persuasion

“It’s a mistake to believe non-contributors who tell you they need to ‘learn more about the PAC’ before they will contribute. You educate them, and they still don’t contribute. That’s because people are not educated to contribute, they are persuaded to contribute. The link between educating someone and persuading them is weaker than you’d think. There is much to persuasion beyond education.” -Kelton Rhoads, PhD

Sometimes an Amyism comes through a conversation worth quoting. This Amyism is another reflection of my consulting philosophy. My colleague and research analyst Kelton said this  about a decade ago, something to the effect of, “Oh, education has very little to do with persuasion. When we conduct a statistical analysis, the correlation is very low. It’s a small piece of the influence puzzle.” I asked him to explain further.  As usual, he had a lot of evidence for this assertion.

He explained that the social sciences have found over 100 influence tactics. When social psychologists research the impact that education has on influence, while it can be considered an influence tactic, education has a very low statistical correlation to changing someone’s mind.

His words stuck with me because I’ve been to just about every government relations conference known to mankind, and the ubiquitous answer to every challenge regarding mobilization or motivation is, “Well, we just have to educate them more.”  Smart influencers know that it takes a variety of tactics to attain successful influence.

Amyism #89
Resting the Roots

“Keeping your advocates active ‘all year’ isn’t a best practice. It’s a prescription for clinical issue fatigue and ultimately, advocate burnout.”

Another piece of conference mythology is that grassroots leaders must keep their advocates “busy” all year, which usually means keeping them on alert, in a state of constant agitation. This doesn’t square with the ever-present challenge cited by staff that their advocates suffer from “issue fatigue.” I think the former leads to the latter, and advocates need rest to be effective when it really counts. Keeping them “active all year” is for the benefit of the staff, not the volunteers, and there’s no evidence it leads to more legislative success.

Amyism #57
Grassroots Training Rigor

“Teaching people how a bill becomes law or the structure of a Congressional office doesn’t get to the end result, which should be grassroots persuasion, rather than just grassroots advocacy. Your training should be rigorous, challenging, and fun. The more we sweat in training, the less we bleed in battle.”

Our research with advocates who routinely attend lobby day events indicates that even they get frustrated and burn out, because they are disillusioned by legislator behavior —- behavior like “legislators talking at them,” “legislators who won’t change their minds,” etc. In other words, normal legislator behavior. Why does that behavior surprise them? It’s because someone told them that if they just “tell their story,” “stick to one message,” and “be polite,” they’ll get the lawmaker’s vote. I believe advocates are smart and can handle the truth of the competitive legislative advocacy arena. I won’t ever “dumb down” my advocate training or content. Advocates are much more sophisticated than even 5 years ago and they deserve to know the realities of the legislative process.