Engage with your Community to Build Effective Advocacy

We’re running a series of posts on the theme of Engagement to count down the days until The Engagement Party. Today’s guest post comes from premier party sponsors KnowWho. This is adapted with KnowWho’s permission from a recent GovAffairs Matters post by Matt Rothman.

When I started my first job out of college, I needed to build an advocacy network. I started by attending networking events and conferences to meet others in my community.  Building mailing lists, crafting faxes and letters for advocates to send, and organizing meetings consumed my schedule. I handed out a ton of business cards and made valuable connections that I still maintain today. Back then it was all about being social in person and email served only to help us stay in touch. Today, being social means I’m constantly connected online and active with social media.

Building an effective advocacy community takes time and effort. Here are a few keys to building a great community leveraging social media:

• Content – Good content focuses on the needs and interests of the community. Better content is about the community itself. The best content is created by the community.

• Consistency – Being consistent can be tough. To be successful you need to post regularly and often. That means having content, which is why engaging your community to create and not just consume content is so important.

• Engage – You must engage outside your community. Having a closed approach will doom your social media strategy to failure. To be successful in social media you must engage with other people and communities.

• Promote – Be willing to promote others and enable them to promote your work. These online relationships can help drive the growth of your community, so make some friends on these social media platforms.

• Feature – Bring in an outside perspective by featuring guests on your posts. A good guest post will link back to your community in meaningful and unexpected ways to inspire your advocates.

After content, the engagement and outside sharing pieces are likely the biggest challenges for an advocacy community. By engaging as widely as possible and participating in vast conversations we’ll reach a larger audience and grow our reach to unexpected places.

Of course, social media alone will not yield an advocacy community: you need great tools too. As the first native Salesforce online advocacy solution, KnowWho's Action Center Toolkit for Salesforce has a number of features and benefits that will be helpful to advocacy organizations:

• The Action Center Toolkit contains all of the code you need to create a basic Action Center App, so you can modify or customize to meet your specific needs.

• All your current tools will work with our Action Center because you can manage all of your advocacy requests in Salesforce's built-in Campaign Management functionality.

• Your actions or messages from supporters are tracked within their contact record and on the account record for the elected official who received the message.

• View actions by supporters, by issue, and by elected official with built-in report tools in Salesforce.

• Our Action Center Toolkit is scalable to include federal, state, and/or local elected officials.

To see the Action Center Toolkit live, be sure to stop by KnowWho's booth in the Foundation Center at Dreamforce 2014 in San Francisco. Or meet them at The Engagement Party October 15!