Grasstops Lobbying: Step 3 Identify

A magnifying glass inspecting a keyboard

The Identify step involves:

creating an extensive list of prospective influencers in your area
prioritising them based on their Impact on your goals, the Likelihood of their taking action, and their Accessibility
assigning a team delegate to high priority influencers to "own" the relationship and profile them

List

Understanding your prospective influencers is the foundation of effective relationships. Time spent here will pay off later, so take time to do it well. Generally speaking, the more potential impact an influencer has on your MP, the more you will need to do at this stage.

Make a single, extensive list of qualified prospects by brainstorming with your team. For now, do not worry about ‘how’, simply identify the names and don’t evaluate them yet. Keep all your team members “on the same page” by maintaining only one list. When you add names to the list, take care to avoid duplicates.

Conduct a Relationship Inventory in your Team

Who do members in your Group know and possibly have connections to in Parliament, with local organisations, and community leaders?

Develop a quick survey for volunteers in your Group. Ask questions like:

Have you ever met our Member of Parliament (or met other Members?)
Do they have connections in the second, third or fourth degree? (i.e. do their daughters go to the same school, do they know someone else that attends their local church, does an old colleague of theirs share the same work background?)

Use a system for organising what you collect. Take notes on the quality of your volunteers’ relationships, how trusted they might be by the MP, what kinds of skills they have, what other connections they have, and how much these connections might be willing to do.

Brainstorming in the Wider CCL Community

At CCL meetings you could do a ‘Who Do You Know’ exercise. Adapt your techniques if you are meeting on Zoom as opposed to in person.

3 x 5 Cards: if you have larger turnouts (10 or more), schedule 5 minutes near the beginning of your next meeting or conference. Explain the importance of Grasstops and the role of a Connector. Pass around a big stack of 3x5 cards to everyone at the beginning, and ask them all to write the names of organisations, businesses, or other community leaders they want to connect us with.
Call-outs: for a smaller group, have people call out names, and one person writes them down on a whiteboard or flipchart, or on a single list.
Post-its: for a smaller group, give everyone a stack of Post-its, and spend 5 minutes writing down names, placing them on the wall and group together.

Some good prospects include large local employers, local elected officials, faith leaders, community groups.

Prioritise

In order to narrow the focus of your team’s extended list of identified influencers to a more manageable size, the next step is to prioritise. There are two steps to prioritising: assess an influencer against the A.L.I. criteria and then allocate a priority rating based on your current focus.

A.L.I. Assessment

Do this by evaluating their ‘ALI’: your Accessibility to the influencer and energy to pursue them, the Likelihood of the influencer taking action and their Impact on your goals. Aim for the ‘sweet spot’ when prioritising, where these three criteria overlap.

Evaluate each influencer on your list based on their proximity to the ‘sweet spot’:

Priority Rating

After conducting an assessment using the A.L.I. criteria, rate each influencer with a current overall priority rating of either ‘P1’, ‘P2’, or ‘P3’. This priority rating should be based upon the A.L.I. assessment and your current focus.

Priority 1: high ALI assessment, and actively working on them now, or ready to start with them now.

Priority 2: medium ALI assessment, and ready to start working with them when time permits (when you or your team has more “bandwidth” (time, attention, and energy).

Priority 3: low ALI assessment, maybe someday (review quarterly). These influencers are still worth keeping on the list for when circumstances change. For example, it may be the local farming association, which has been very sceptical about climate impacts, but you keep them there because agriculture is important to your electorate.

If you think you will never want to work with an Influencer, simply do not put them on the list.

Priority ratings also help with your strategy. For example, you may want to try mass mailing your Priority 2s while you focus on individual email and phone follow-ups to get meetings with your Priority 1s.

Assign

Next we assign a team delegate to high priority influencers to "own" the relationship. Delegates are like our Liaisons to MPs. They are the main link between the influencer and CCL. Ideally, they have either a personal connection with the community leader or with someone in the organisation and/or experience/understanding of the organisation’s work. They typically act as an Outreacher and initiate the contact (make the phone call, send the email). They also keep track of their contact and engagement efforts, and record these details in the system.

Assign a primary delegate to each of the highest priority influencers on your list.

Each active team member should aim to be the primary delegate for roughly 3-5 active P1 prospects at any one time. Having too many makes it hard to focus; having too few reduces efficiency (e.g. if you secured a distant meeting date for a P1 prospect, you want to have other P1s you can work on while you are waiting).

Profile

Just like working with an MP, when meeting with a community leader, you really need to do your homework to understand what their priorities are.

Where have they already been successful? Have they done any advocacy for clean energy or endorsed different climate initiatives? Make sure to acknowledge that through appreciation and respect.

Try to understand their position and make our ‘asks’ consistent with what they're willing to do.

Research the community leader or the organisation and its leaders to learn how to best ‘reach’ and ‘connect’ with them.

Who are their leaders, what have they done?
What is the organisation’s history and accomplishments?
Who and what have they contributed to?
How might they be affected by climate change?
What have they done, ideally in terms of climate action, environmental sustainability, or social responsibility, which you can show appreciation for?
What values can you connect over?

Sources of Information

Social media, websites and search engines, your team’s relationship inventory, your community, for example through business organisations like Rotary and Chambers of Commerce.

Find and record email and phone numbers of key contacts

Identify a “Leader” -- the highest level decision maker who is willing to talk with you. For smaller companies, this could be the CEO, owner, manager. For larger companies, it might be a VP of Corporate Responsibility, or a Director of Policy or Environmental Health and Safety. It will be their job to make your case to the decision maker(s) and bring back the answer.

Alternatively, identify an “Intermediary”, your initial access point into an organization. This could be someone you know or who has been introduced by a colleague/”connector”. It’s often someone whose job makes them a likely supporter or champion: look for “sustainability” in their title. If they have a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report, see who authored it.

Get their contact information and record it in the system.

Consider also:

a. “Contact Us” forms: does your prospect’s website have a “Contact Us” form. Craft a short, appreciative and clear ask, borrowing content from your intro email

b. Social Media: Connect with them on LinkedIn, follow them on Twitter, retweet any good content with comments connecting it to climate, CCL if possible. Both platforms have a direct message feature.

c. Face to face: will they be at any meetings, conferences, parties, or other events where you can approach them? Note: this is not for the faint of heart, but you can get fast results!

Make a careful record of all your findings in your system. Use a template for these records. CCL can provide suitable templates.