Coalitions and Grass Roots

My 25 years of experience has been focused on getting the message out and moving people to take action.

It’s not enough to have the winning message and getting the word out, you have to show that you have public support. Grass roots activity shapes and galvanizes public opinion. It gives form and credibility to your message. My political experience working on hundreds of projects and campaigns – we know how to mobilize public support. To make this happen I:

◦  Identify people and groups who have an interest or stake in our issue, making them prospects.

◦ Contact and recruit those prospects to the cause, making them allies.

◦ Educate those allies and strengthen their commitment, making them more articulate advocates.

◦ Mobilize our advocates to deliver a powerful and compelling argument, making them an effective voice in creating public opinion.

Whether the approach is grass roots—which tends to focus on a high volume of contacts being made—or grass tops—where connections with key influencers and opinion leaders are the objective—a successful operation involves attention to detail. And each of the four steps is a necessary component in the program.

Not every issue is the same. On some issues the company wants to be out front, other times issues can get so controversial that it is against the client’s interests to be a public leader – but winning the issue is still important. We will work with you in whatever capacity you need us.

Lobbying is still a critical function. Your lobbyists are the point of sale representatives. So the better they are supported, the more effective they will be. That’s one of our functions.

Working with the lobbyists, we anticipate the reactions and needs of key decision makers. We build media and grass roots support to reinforce our messengers and make them more influential. We mobilize real people to add weight to our arguments.

Successful environmental conditioning persuades decision makers of the correctness of our position and also provides them with a safe place to land on the issue by showing them how much public support exists.

But in most cases, traditional lobbying by itself is not enough to overcome a perception of serious and focused public support or opposition. Public officials are responsive to a variety of constituencies and to what they see as public opinion.

When we work with you, are two main concerns are who will your targeted decision makers respond to and how do we mobilize them to take action? We build the program that yields results. When necessary we can begin a systematic review of thought leaders, supporters and donors, personal friends, colleagues and confidants, and the great variety of interest groups produces the most effective array of advocates and allies.

The program can be precisely targeted or widely applied, but the result is the same. Decision makers feel the public support for our position.

We have the ability to bring to the table a wide variety of constituent groups, or create new ad hoc organizations to mobilize the supporters of our clients.

When Downtown Oklahoma City Inc. needed to build up support on the City Council for one of their issues, they called Shelley Strategic Services.  Within 72 hours we had identified over 1000 supporters and generated hundreds of phone calls and letters to the council in support of their position.  

I can help you with cost effective strategies to help find supporters and generate the coalition support you need.  Sometimes you need to find like minded groups -- we have contacts to groups you may have never heard of, but they can help you get your project done.

I have over 25 years of experience in using targeted direct mail to get your message out.   We can create newsletters that have the same credibility as a newspaper article.  We’ve created mail packages that have generated stacks of mail at the capitol that legislators just could not ignore.

I don’t just create slick ads and then hope they have an impact.  We test response by checking with allies in the legislature or creating special phone numbers so you know that your money is being well spent.