Choosing the Right Tools

Building a grassroots advocacy program is more than messaging. Your program needs tools to target email, manage lists, monitor analytics, generate reports and conduct all the other activities that make advocacy effective.

The tools you use will largely be determined by your budget and they will have a significant impact on the difficulty of your work and the capabilities of your program. It’s a topic worthy of research and consideration.

Having said that, the first decision for most programs is relatively simple: will you use free and low-cost tools or will you purchase professional advocacy software? Both have advantages.

The Pros and Cons of Low-Cost Tools

Plenty of effective advocacy programs have been launched with low-cost tools. You don’t need a substantial budget to get started.

If an organization didn’t already have a website, you could power an advocacy website with WordPress, a free and highly capable open-source software that has powered hundreds of millions of websites. The program might use Mail Chimp to send email. This is a low-cost solution that is extremely capable, with templates, list segmentation, scheduling, basic analytics and other helpful features. Using Resilia’s Stories tool (included with your Advocacy Toolkit) also offers an easy and AI-optimized method of crafting meaningful communications with your audience.     

Most analysis will be done in spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets. For example, if you want to see how a certain campaign performed in one state over another,  you will likely have to put your data in a spreadsheet and manually build a quick chart.  

The primary downside to running a program like this is a large amount of manual work. If you want precise targeting or insight beyond the basics, you will have to generate it yourself. It is true that low-cost tools are getting far more capable, adding features that were once the purview of more expensive solutions. But this is true of professional tools as well, some of which now have artificial intelligence features that add next-level capability. 

The Benefits of Professional Advocacy Software

Professional advocacy software like Quorum does for advocacy what tools like Raiser’s Edge or GiveButter do for fundraising and stewardship. It puts advanced tools that perform all the tasks you need in one place, and provides the support to ensure they work.

The largest and most effective advocacy programs are using professional tools because they provide so many advantages:

• Ease and Automation. Professional tools are built for advocacy, so they make basic tasks simple and allow you to automate some aspects of your program. They also offer advanced capabilities. You can build custom landing pages, match supporters to the lawmakers who represent them, and conduct many other tasks. 
• Sophisticated Analytics. Obtaining the analytics you want will be far easier, without all of that manual work. You are unlikely to need those spreadsheets because the system does the crunching for you.
• Advanced Reporting. Most advocacy software will generate customizable reports showing exactly the information you want. This makes it easier to brief internal stakeholders, from the C-suite to the board. It also makes it easier to optimize your program.
• Professional Help. Professional advocacy solutions offer technical support, which can be enormously helpful—and not just to solve technical problems. Many of the reps who work at these companies come from the advocacy world, and they all see hundreds of campaigns launched every year. They have insight into what is effective and can bring expertise to your program.
• Additional Capabilities. Professional solutions are often required for nonprofits that want to deploy advanced strategies such as phone call campaigns or text messaging. 

If your organization wants to explore professional tools, start by pulling together a working group of all the people in your organization who impact the advocacy program.  Together, you can draft a requirements document, which is simply a list of all the features and capabilities that interest you, sorted into those you must have and those you would like to have. Consider what your budget looks like for investing in more sophisticated tools. This requirements document will clarify your needs and equip you to begin talking to representatives for different software tools.