Advocacy Blogs

In May 2019, the Congressional Management Foundation's Citizen Engagement Team conducted a one-day advocacy training for approximately 50 of Catholic Relief Services' advocacy leaders. The interactive training gave participatns opportunities to learn about and practice advocacy skills, including the following:

• Building relationships with lawmakers and why it's important
• Tailoring your pitch to resonate with any public official
• Creating advocacy stories to to win the hearts, minds and votes of lawmakers and their staff

Afterward, Deacon Don Weigel explained why he felt CMF's training was so effective and valuable. 

CMF thanks its Partners for helping CMF to set another record. In 2018, CMF's Partners collectively trusted CMF to educate more than 13,000 Americans to effectively engage Congress through one of CMF's advocacy training programs. This includes more than 1,600 individuals who attended one of CMF's Citizen-Advocate Webinars. 

These Webinars are recorded to provide citizen advocates opportunities to review them anytime at their convenience? CMF makes the past year's Citizen-Advocate Webinar recordings available exclusively to its Partners, so their supporters may review them at relevant times and at their convenience.

CMF encourages its Partners to make recordings of past Citizen-Advocate Webinars available to their supporters by simply copying the links within CMF's Citizen-Advocate Webinar archives and distributing to their supporters using methods that secure CMF's intellectual property.

Login to the Citizen-Advocate Webinar Archive.

Like other parents, I fell into the travel-soccer trap. I spent a lot of time thinking about the ins and outs of soccer all those countless hours watching their games from the sidelines. One day, it struck me that there's a lot of overlap between their sport and the "sport" of advocacy. I realized that there are three lessons that soccer can teach us about advocacy.

I'll be candid. I had serious reservations when my colleague, Jaime Werner, suggested that we co-present a webinar to provide tips for planning fly-in events. Ask anyone who has planned a fly-in with me (by the way, I understand there's a regular support group for those who have), and they'll emphatically warn you: "never-never-never-ever let Seth plan a fly-in – EVER!"