Advocacy organizations and teams can learn a lot from McKinsey & Company's recently released Global Survey on the State of AI. While their survey focused on corporations, the learnings can easily be adapted to help guide your team’s integration of AI into your advocacy work. Here are three points that jumped out at me: ✴️ Lesson #1: Using AI is about more than just efficiency. “Eighty percent of respondents say their companies set efficiency as an objective of their AI initia

Was your Thanksgiving dinner filled with talk of click-through rates, action taker conversion and A/B test results? I certainly hope not! But, this is definitely something your team should be talking about before everyone heads out for the year. The most effective advocacy organizations (and even mildly effective ones) keep close tabs on the performance of their emails and digital content throughout the year. This data drives decisions around email content, segmenting, pacing

Is the date on your calendar yet? Of course, I mean the day your team will come together to create your organization’s 2026 grassroots strategic plan. This is the exciting, immersive day when your team reaches consensus on your grassroots goals for next year (which should be measurable) and lays out the strategies and tactics to help you achieve them. A big differentiator I see with high-performing advocacy organizations (and grassroots staff) is that they spend the year exec

Is your advocacy team going to get left behind AGAIN? It’s pretty typical that when an organization rolls out a new piece of technology that its focus is on fundraising or membership. In short, the revenue-generating parts of the organization. Don’t let this same thing happen with AI! While you might be shy about using it now, I’m confident those feelings will change over the next 18-24 months. As your leadership team contemplates how the organization should (and shouldn’t) u

Congress is coming! Congress is coming! While we don’t know the exact date, it’s (mostly) certain that, at some point this week, Congress will vote to reopen the government. The only question is: will your grassroots be ready? While the CR is getting a lot of attention, there will be plenty of other bills debated and voted on before the end of the year. Now is the time to start priming your advocacy volunteers and members for action.  Be sure you have a strong and deliberate