Resource Type: Tips & How-Tos

Crazy days! Between Scott Pruitt seeing the door, and Brett Kavanaugh and concerns about his climate jurisprudence entering the national conversation, there’s a lot to follow. Take some time to unplug from it all as you take the Lab’s annual member survey. And apropos of that, we thought this week we’d also share best practices on how  your  organization can survey your members. (First off, feel free to use and modify this basic template member survey* developed by the Lab. You’re welcome!)

We are in election season, and on Tuesday the Lab convened a Peer Learning Exchange to share the latest tips and best practices to optimize Get Out the Vote (GOTV) programs. Watch the recording* and read the highlights below (or go retro with our 2016 GOTV webinar* and alert*).
Two key takeaways: 1) Most GOTV programs leave votes on the table by not fully implementing established best practices; 2) the single best GOTV return on investment in most cases comes from a simple ‘social pressure’ mailer (see below).

Members of the Climate Advocacy Lab, along with experts from the Analyst Institute, held a (strictly C3!) conversation on GOTV best practices and GOTV learnings from members of the Lab community. 
Key takeaways:
1) Most GOTV programs leave votes on the table by not fully implementing established best practices
2) the single best GOTV return on investment in most cases comes from a simple ‘social pressure’ mailer (see below).

Presenter slide decks:
• Karuna Koppula, Analyst Institute (slide deck here)
• Brandyn Keating, United Citizen Power (slide deck here)
• Emily Kreiger & Lennon Bronsema, Washington Environmental Council (slide deck here)
• Marcus Starr, Conservation MN (PDFs found here)

For climate advocates to produce the wins we need in the long run and take advantage of the surge of enthusiasm we have at the moment, we need to move beyond single-click, transactional models of building power. While distributed and relational organizing that fosters sustained engagement from supporters may well be the oldest and most effective form of activism, new technologies and techniques never hurt. Today’s alert is the second part of the Lab’s readout from last month’s Campaign and Advocacy Tech conferences (see our overview of new tools and tech* from the events).

Following last week’s devastating news that more than 4,600 Puerto Ricans may have died as a result of Hurricane Maria, this week’s Lab alert shares the latest on what we know about how Americans’ climate opinions are affected by extreme weather events. The below can help campaigners as you plan responses to the inevitable extreme weather events to come this year, and we also flag potential new approaches worth exploring in the field.

How can climate advocates optimize our work using the latest tools and best practices from across the advocacy and campaigning industry? The Climate Advocacy Lab recently attended the Campaign and Advocacy Tech conferences, where practitioners, consultants, and vendors discussed strategy, trends, and technology. Here are some of our key takeaways. (And keep a lookout for a future Lab alert specifically covering insights and tools for distributed organizing and sustained engagement gleaned from these conferences.)

Last week, Climate Outreach released a revamped version of their amazingly helpful Climate Visuals website (more below). Drawing from that tool as well as other groups’ research, this week we revisit what we know about which climate and clean energy images are most effective at engaging and mobilizing people on our issues.

A common request the Lab team gets from Lab members is “big picture, tell me what works for better public engagement on climate.” This week we offer some answers to that big question, drawing on a multi-year collaboration between the Analyst Institute and the Climate Advocacy Lab.
First, some context on that collaboration. In many ways, our organizations are kindred spirits, a Hall & Oates for the world of evidence-based advocacy. We both help facilitate public engagement-related research in our respective spaces (the broader progressive community for Analyst Institute and climate and clean energy advocates for the Lab) and make the results of that and other research accessible to organizations on the ground. And we both share information with our members through a combination of in-person workshops, email updates, and members-only websites. (If you’re not already a member of the Analyst Institute, you can sign up here!)
Over the past four years, our work together has focused on learning how to mobilize people to take action on climate. In today’s alert, we’re highlighting 5 of our top recommendations based on that work.

Last week a few dozen Lab members convened in D.C. for our fifth Research + Experimentation workshop. The core of these workshops involves Lab members sharing recent field experiments and polling they’ve conducted around how to better engage Americans on climate and clean energy. Over the years, the “R&E” community has grown and diversified, piloted new initiatives to advance our collective learning capacity, and really embodied the Lab’s vision of a creative, generous, fun, and impactful movement! Read on for insights and learnings from a few of the research projects that were shared last week.