▶️ 5 Key Elements of a Winning Advocacy Strategy Replay

Thank you to those who tuned in for our latest leader seminar, Five Key Elements of a Winning Advocacy Strategy, hosted by Rent Responsibly and powered by HostGPO. The Leadership Series is specifically designed for local short-term rental community leaders but has tons of takeaways even if you don’t fit that description (yet!)

Here are some key takeaways from our webinar on how to build a winning advocacy strategy.

Highlights & Takeaways

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Alice Walker

1. Define your goals for short-term rental advocacy

• In order to define your goals, assess the short-term rental regulatory situation at the city, county, and state levels in terms of policies.
• If there is an urgent ordinance up for consideration, your goals may be reactive; if you have more time, your goals may be proactive. 
• Examine any proposed ordinance or legislation and assess how it would affect your STR business.
• Meet with like-minded STR professionals.
• Set a budget for your advocacy work. This could include things like marketing, hiring a lobbyist, or donating to a political campaign of a candidate who supports STRs.
• Talk through what you would be willing to compromise on and what are non-negotiables.

“There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that you can agree to. And you need to know what that is within your group before you ever go in and start to have any kind of communication.”

Tiffany Edwards, president of Coletta Consulting LLC

2. Identify your target (short-term rental supporters and opponents)

• Where is the current STR regulatory situation coming from? Which lawmakers have proposed ordinances or legislation? Why?
• Reach out to larger STR associations to assist in letter-writing campaigns, provide access to large databases and economic impact studies, and help reach out to a larger pool of people who can help you magnify your voice.
• Identify STR stakeholders such as suppliers who also can pull data for you that can be used in your advocacy communications.
• Local tourism boards, chambers of commerce, and other organizations in your community that help support your business are also good options who can give your communications a different voice.
• Bring homeowners into the fold to tell their stories because they are lawmakers’ constituents.
• Build relationships with decision-makers and elected officials. Get to know your county attorney or your city council attorney. They will let you know if something comes up in a meeting that maybe you didn’t attend.
• Identify exactly where your opponents are – anyone within the community who’s driving proposed changes or conversation.
• Get a pulse on what the media narrative is.

“One of my favorite principles that I live by, in government affairs, is that there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” 

Katrina Yoshida, principal of Kintsugi Consulting

3. Choose your advocacy tactics

• Advocacy is like a stool with three legs: direct lobbying, grassroots activity, and relationships. Without all three, then the stool doesn’t stand.
• Lobbyists know the day-to-day issues and players. They are useful because they glean all the information at City Hall or the Capitol, what is happening, who’s talking to whom, whose ally died, and that bill or issue that is going to be more sensitive. In other words, they do all of the things that you most likely don’t have time for.
• Grassroots efforts – collective action by people at the local level to effect a specific change – complements lobbying. They are the ones that will be telling their stories, talking on phone lines, filling up inboxes, and visiting and giving testimony to try to sway elected officials.
• Nurturing and forming new relationships with community members can unlock a lot of advocacy power. You never know what skills or insight they might have to support your advocacy efforts – whether that’s a lawyer who can help craft alternative language for an ordinance or a neighbor who is friends with an elected official.

4. Define your message

• Define for elected officials the problem at hand – whether it is something that will happen or needs to be fixed.
• Give concrete examples: If x happens, y will result, and this will be positive or negative for me, people like me, or my organization. Weave in lots of stories and statistics as supporting evidence. 
• Remember your audience. Who on the council or in the legislature is friendly toward STRs and who isn’t? Who is on the fence? Craft your messages to those people or votes.
• Always prepare constituents to testify, know what they are saying, and help guide them.
• Choose your medium: grassroots, lobbying, or constituents. Be careful with media outlets and research their past messaging on the issues.
• Identifying the conditions needed to win is important in determining how and when you share your message.
• Focus on policy, not philosophy. Getting on a soap box can get in the way of meaningful policy being passed.

5. Develop an action plan

• A strategic plan to kickstart and maintain momentum is vitally important to your future success.
• Write out your overall plan to achieve your specific goal that identifies where you are, where you want to go, and how you’ll get there. Include your collection of tactics that build towards this goal.
• Without a strategy, your team could waste valuable energy and miss some opportunities.
• Check off actions as you accomplish them.

Want More? Watch Leader Seminar Data-Driven Storytelling for Effective Advocacy

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