The Future of Advocacy: Stakeholder Management
The future of advocacy is being shaped by a growing need to control the outward message
across all teams in an organization, regardless of where they operate from.
It’s no longer enough to silo off the grassroots and advocacy teams to email and petition for
change; it’s also about who the people you're interfacing with know, how your communications
and corporate affairs teams are messaging and mingling with, and how you can manage all of
these relationships, easily, and from one single place.
In order to stay ahead of the trends occurring within the grassroots, grasstops, and direct
advocacy space, it’s important to understand the concept of what stakeholder management is.
Modern Stakeholder Management
Stakeholders are the people or organizations involved anywhere along the continuum your
issues touch. They are the group whose activities minimize (or possibly maximize)
organizational risk and leverage opportunities.
How FiscalNote Leads the Way in Stakeholder Management
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They can be divided into two groups: internal stakeholders and external stakeholders.
Internal stakeholders can be an organization’s members, employees, contractors, and
subsidiaries, while external stakeholders constituent everyone from public officials, staffers,
affiliates, clients, supporters, and even competitors, to name just a few.
Wrestling this large group into one cohesive alliance, projecting the same message, around a
common issue is stakeholder management.
For organizations involved in grassroots, grasstops, and direct advocacy, the needs and
opportunities are obvious. The solution on a scalable way to advance your agenda might not be
as apparent.
The Solution
For years organizations have been underscoring the idea that managing and aligning
stakeholders is a critical part of the issues management process.
Being able to better understand how the people and organizations in their compilation of
contacts are related to each other, and how they’re related to the issues, geographies, news,
and policy is an obvious win.
FiscalNote’s data, workflow, and analytics platform is designed to help organizations of all
shapes and sizes manage the impact of the outside world. The platform allows for combining
key internal information (from PR strategies to projected regulatory impact), with a massive
amount of external information (including current and pending government policy from the
statehouses to Congress, and around the world) in a single location.
Then it lets you organize all of that around the issues that affect you most.
The end result is a single source of truth, updated in real-time, that connects everyone in your
organization to the information they need, wherever they go.
For organizations that need to advocate for or against change, FiscalNote serves as a central hub
from learning, to strategizing, to acting, in one location for seamless collaboration.
Internal and external stakeholders are able to share knowledge between grassroots, federal,
state, and international government affairs teams, coordinate media and PR efforts across
global offices, and manage resources and efforts across different functions.
Teams and organizations are able to build and launch advocacy campaigns, track progress with
real-time activity reports, mobilize supporters with acutely targeted messaging, newsletters,
surveys, report cards, and post-mortems, all in one place.
Everyone on the platform can follow the beginning and end of the entire legislative and
regulatory process by monitoring how issues begin and develop. That breaks down the silos
that hinder effective and actionable stakeholder management.
How it Works
Let’s say a Transportation Network Company (TNC) wants to start a grassroots campaign for an
issue related to their industry, specifically ridesharing.
The issue that prompted the launch of the campaign revolves around the fact that one of the
cities in which their company operates is facing challenges from a local government trying to
pass legislation to prevent TNCs from operating and offering rides to the people living in this
city.
In order to prevent the cessation of this organization’s operations, this TNCs’ government affairs
team, as well as other internal stakeholders, launches a grassroots campaign where passengers
and partner drivers are able to email, tweet, text or call legislators to convince them to support
TNCs and oppose the introduced bill.
With FiscalNote, this TNCs’ government affairs team can launch the entire grassroots campaign,
prompting their partner drivers and the public to reach out to legislators, and also start building
the networks of influence needed to stop legislationbanning their operations.
With each point of outreach done by the public and partner drivers on behalf of TNCs, the
government affairs team is able to learn what messaging is and isn’t working, the most effective
strategies that gain support, and who the top external stakeholders are within the government
and public space to drive change.
From this, they can map out which influencer networks can be activated through social media,
and other mediums.
In addition, every data point, from an email sent, to a meeting held, and subsequent notes from
these meetings, can be logged into FiscalNote for all TNC team members to collaborate on to
drive the necessary legislative outcomes.
By keeping all internal information and external stakeholder engagement records in a single
system of record, the TNCs’ various teams are able to collaborate across the country on
preventing anti-ridesharing legislation from passing.
All the teams and departments involved in this process know the entire cradle-to-grave life cycle
of this legislation and can monitor it in real-time; from the tweets surrounding their issue, all
the way up to the passage of the piece of legislation that prompted this campaign
In another brief example, let’s say a large steel manufacturing company with offices and plants
across the world wants to launch a major sustainability effort across the world to prove to the
company, the public, and the market that environmental issues are at the forefront of their
business.
With FiscalNote, this major corporation would be able to launch an organization-wide
sustainability effort using a digital issues management process involving multiple departments
all aligned on the same outcome.
This corporation would, using FiscalNote, launch an outreach campaign to the various
international stakeholders across the EU and other political entities to begin setting up
meetings. The Communications team at this organization would be able to use FiscalNote to
input the corporate-approved talking points and messaging for the government affairs
representatives to use in their meetings across the globe around the sustainability effort. All of
the meeting notes and talking points from the government affairs team meeting with these
officials would be available in a single system of record updated in real-time for the C-suite to
access and report on the successes and failures on the effort to the necessary stakeholders i.e.
the media, other members of the organization, etc.
FiscalNote would allow this steel manufacturer to be able to launch and control the messaging
of the sustainability effort using the built-in outreach tools as well as contact the necessary
stakeholders to manage the issues affecting their organization.
Why You Should Care
Being able to manage all the relationships and networks your organization maintains in one
place for easy cross-departmental collaboration is the key to effective advocacy.