A non-profit serving 35 million Americans needed to grow their advocate support base.

Their legislative issues were federal, but their organization membership was locally based.

They had long been successful cultivating financial donors, but had difficulty converting donors into advocates. 

DDC Advocacy’s Response: Target Prospective Advocates in a Different Way

DDC Advocacy understood that, fundamentally, donors and advocates are not the same. There may be some overlap between the two audiences, but people who give money and people who become advocates often have different motivations and backgrounds.  They tend to support causes in different ways.

Working closely with the client, we developed audience profiles of likely advocates—helping the client better understand why different types of individuals were likely to take grassroots action.

We then worked with the client to create a recruitment strategy tailored to those audiences—using new approaches to messaging, outreach, and advocate development to cultivate a different kind of relationship between the organization and its advocates.

Deploying the Strategy

DDC Advocacy used interactive grassroots outreach and activation tactics to help the client identify, energize, and deploy advocates, resulting in an online community that could grow organically and keep advocates engaged over time. 

We also used the online advocacy community to involve greater numbers of advocates in local initiatives, serving as a bridge between the national organization and the advocacy needs of its local chapters.  

To achieve these objectives, DDC Advocacy executed the following tactics:

• Identify and recruit advocates online through targeted advertising, social media, and an interactive Web presence 
  
  
• Continually engage the advocate community through tailored communications
  
  
• Mobilize supporters on critical policy issues
  
  
• Empower advocates to translate their personal stories into effective advocacy
  
  
• Connect online advocates with offline activities in their communities