The Influence Tactics of Fortune’s “Power 25”

Background

It is our interest in excellent government relations programs and “best in class” organizations that inspired our second research project with Fortune magazine’s “Power 25.” The first project focused on how they recruit, retain, and motivate their most productive grassroots advocates.

This research seeks to answer a second vital question: “What influence tactics predict success when attempting to gain legislative support”? We believe the answers are vital, because there are competing mythologies about what works in the legislative influence arena.

For example, when a group wins a high-profile campaign, the campaign is usually dissected for strategies and tactics, disregarding the influence context or the influence target that helped those tactics succeed.

We were also intrigued that workshop audience members (government relations staff and their grassroots and PAC volunteers) routinely asked questions to find out the “most influential way to communicate with legislators,” as if the communication method was the main predictor of influence success. This focus on downstream, rather than upstream issues concerned us, because the actual communication is only one part of the influence equation. There is an over emphasis on communicating at the expense of influencing legislators. Communicating and influencing are two different objectives.

Third, we saw a challenge with the focus on the tools, rather than an integrated-influence approach. We believed that this over-reliance on the tools denigrates the value of the government-relations function. This research is our effort to help government relations professionals better understand the complexity and need for their strategic counsel to their board members, employees, and senior organization leaders.

In fact, we tend to attribute success to one thing, when in fact it is many things working in concert. There simply is no “easy button” to push.

We asked the organization representatives how they influenced undecided legislators, since that is where true influence skills become apparent.

The research tells us:

• What types of legislators are most and least difficult to persuade
• The #1 factor that determines whether a legislator will favorably consider your position
• How PAC contributions rank as successful influence tactics
• Which types of grassroots constituents are most influential
• Which methods of communication are most influential
• Which grassroots tactics are most successful, and which are a waste of time
• The #1 way to get a legislator to co-sponsor your legislation
• The best ways to get a legislator to lobby his or her colleagues on your behalf

Based on the findings, we have created a comprehensive implementation checklist of the tactics you can immediately implement to experience more influence success.

Methodology

Because we wanted to look at the practices of “best in class” organizations, we interviewed the groups on Fortune’s Power 25. Since there were a few groups who chose not to participate in the project, to supplement our dataset, we included three groups not on the Fortune “Power 25” but who were nevertheless involved who were involved in high profile grassroots campaigns.

We asked participants to cite two undecided legislators who were the targets of a particular grassroots influence campaign. We asked that one of the legislators be an example of a successful influence attempt, and the other one be an example of an unsuccessful attempt.

The methodology of including various levels of success is important. If only successful campaigns were examined, trivial correlations would appear to be important. For example, it might be found that the wearing of clothes was highly correlated with every campaign success. By including a range of influence successes and failures, analyses allow us to spot those factors that truly impact influence success.

We conducted half of the interviews by phone, and half in person. We asked the participants to account for over 40 conditions which may predict an outcome relative to each influence campaign attempt. The inclusion of a broad range of variables from many sources makes this research different from more commonly encountered case histories that look at a particular group winning a particular campaign, and then hypothesizing what might have caused the win. The range of variables across many campaigns allow us to isolate the conditions under which certain techniques become more successful.

The analysis consisted of locating significant correlations and performing a multiple regression analysis to locate variables that most strongly predict campaign success.

The results and my tactics for implementing the findings were unveiled at our Innovate to Motivate conference.