AI for Grassroots Advocacy: The Complete

ChatGPT How-To Guide (with Templates!)

1
 Table of
Few professions have as much of a human focus as advocacy.
Whether it’s fighting for visibility for people living with a chronic Contents
disease or protecting the interests of industry organizations,
advocacy professionals are constantly on the lookout for how How to Use ChatGPT
for Advocacy 3
policies and legislation might affect their members.
Grassroots advocacy requires a lot of human interaction. That Creating an Advocacy
Strategy With the Help of AI 4
doesn’t mean, however, that the job remains untouched by the
rise of artificial intelligence (AI). There are many ways in which Engaging and Mobilizing
AI can reduce the workload and increase productivity for Supporters With AI 7
advocacy professionals.
ChatGPT as Your Personal
“AI is not a replacement by any means, but if you know how to use Email Assistant 9
it and can incorporate it into some of your more time-consuming
and mundane tasks, it will help you greatly,” says William Devoe,
Using AI for Reporting 11
director of communications and advocacy at Cerebral Palsy Other AI Uses in Advocacy 14
Associations of New York State.
The AI Tool That Advocacy
In this guide, we will explain how to get AI to help you with those Professionals Need 15
mundane tasks, including examples and templates, freeing up more
time for you to handle the human side of advocacy.

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 How to Use ChatGPT for
Grassroots Advocacy
Over the past few years, one of the major developments was the invention of ChatGPT,
an AI language learning model. Learning how to use ChatGPT, and customizing its
responses to fit your needs, can save you a ton of time on your behind-the-scenes
tasks.
When asking ChatGPT for help, it’s important to provide a frame of reference for the
type of work you want it to do. Establishing ChatGPT as an expert in your field before
asking it to do any tasks will get it to provide more detailed responses, similar to what
you would expect from someone who actually was an expert.
“You want to expose the field that you’re trying to get more insight on,” says Stephen
Massey, director at corporate affairs advisory firm Anordea. “If you want to analyze a
policy brief, ask ChatGPT to act as a policy analyst.”

You
AN
You are a policy analyst with decades of experience working with advocacy organizations. You are skilled at taking complex documents and
breaking them down into an easily understood summary. I am going to provide you with the text of a document and I want you to use your
analysis expertise to break down the main points of the document. I’d also like to know how it may affect the members of my organization,
the American Association of Window Workers. Do you understand your assignment?

ChatGPT
Absolutely, I understand. Please provide the text of the document, and I’ll break down the main points and analyze how it may affect the
members of the American Association of Window Workers.

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 Secondly, do not blindly believe everything that ChatGPT says. While most of its
responses are accurate, it tends to make things up, or hallucinate, from time to time.
“If AI is going to generate any text, there still needs to be a human in the loop to read
it and approve it before it goes out. I’ve seen it hallucinate many things,” says Paul
Ellender, senior product manager at FiscalNote.
With those basics under your belt, let’s look at exactly what ChatGPT can do for
grassroots advocacy professionals.

Creating an Advocacy Strategy With the

Help of AI
No matter what stage of development you’re at with your advocacy strategy, ChatGPT
can round out your thinking, strengthen your plans, and get you to your final product
much quicker than you likely can on your own.
At the beginning of strategy development, ask for an example strategy with the
objectives that you have in mind. It’s unlikely to provide a ready-for-market strategy,
but it will give you a few points that you can build from.
“ChatGPT can put the bones on a plan within seconds,” says Devoe. If you don’t like
the result it gives you initially, provide it with further direction to get closer to what you
were looking for.

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 For example:

Anonymous
You are a well-respected advocacy professional who has been working for decades with the American Medical Association. You are
concerned about the impact that a new piece of legislation will have on medical professionals in America. You want to prevent this bill from
becoming law. Build a strategy to prevent this bill from negatively impacting your members

ChatGPT
To effectively prevent the passage of the legislation, a multifaceted strategy combining advocacy, education, coalition-building, and public
outreach would be essential. Here’s a comprehensive plan:

1. Assessment and Research: Conduct a thorough analysis of the proposed legislation to understand its potential impact on medical
professionals. Identify specific provisions that could adversely affect your members, such as changes in reimbursement rates,
regulatory burdens, or limitations on practice autonomy.

2. Internal Mobilization: Rally support among your members by communicating the potential implications of the legislation. Utilize
newsletters, email updates, and member meetings to educate them about the specific threats posed by the bill and encourage them to
take action.

3. Coalition Building: Forge alliances with other healthcare organizations, professional associations, patient advocacy groups, and
relevant stakeholders who share concerns about the legislation. Collaborate on joint statements, advocacy campaigns, and grassroots
efforts to amplify your collective voice and increase your influence.

4. Legislative Advocacy: Engage directly with lawmakers to voice opposition to the bill. Schedule meetings with key legislators and
their staff to explain your concerns, present alternative solutions, and advocate for amendments that address your members’ needs.
Leverage your longstanding relationships with policymakers to influence their decision-making process.

5. Media Outreach: Generate media coverage to raise awareness about the potential consequences of the legislation. Write op-eds,
press releases, and letters to the editor highlighting the perspectives of medical professionals and the negative impact the bill could
have on patient care, healthcare access, and quality of services.

6. Grassroots Mobilization: Mobilize your members and supporters to contact their elected representatives, urging them to oppose
the legislation. Provide them with sample scripts, talking points, and online tools to facilitate easy communication with lawmakers.
Encourage them to share personal stories and testimonials illustrating the real-world implications of the proposed changes.

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 This is helpful, but we wanted something more specific. A little bit of refinement
might be all it needs.

Anonymous
Rather than providing general advice on what to do, please provide specific actionable steps that we should take over the course of the next
6 months

ChatGPT
Certainly, here’s a detailed plan of specific actionable steps over the next 6 months:

Month 1: Assessment and Preparation

1. Legislative Analysis: Conduct a detailed analysis of the proposed legislation, identifying specific provisions that could impact medical
professionals negatively. Evaluate potential implications for reimbursement rates, regulatory requirements, scope of practice, and
patient care standards.

2. Internal Briefings: Organize internal briefings and webinars for members of the American Medical Association (AMA) to educate them
about the legislation’s potential impact. Provide comprehensive materials outlining key concerns and implications for their practices.

Month 2: Coalition Building and Outreach

1. Stakeholder Engagement: Reach out to other healthcare organizations, professional associations, and advocacy groups to form a
coalition opposing the legislation. Schedule meetings with key stakeholders to discuss shared concerns and strategies for collective action.

2. Media Outreach: Draft press releases and media statements outlining the coalition’s opposition to the legislation. Coordinate with
coalition partners to issue joint statements and maximize media coverage. Identify spokespeople from within the medical community to
represent the coalition in media interviews and press conferences.

Month 3: Legislative Advocacy and Grassroots Mobilization

1. Legislative Meetings: Schedule meetings with key legislators and their staff to present the coalition’s concerns and
recommendations. Prepare compelling presentations supported by data, case studies, and expert testimonials to illustrate the
potential impact on medical professionals and patient care.

( )

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 There we are. Now we can tweak this to meet our needs and be on our way to stopping
that pesky bill.

Use the following template to get your strategy off the ground and into action
quickly:
• You are a well-respected advocacy professional who has been working for
decades with the [insert organization and brief description of it].
• [Input area of concern]
• [Input your goal(s) for this strategy, providing background information if needed]
• Please build a strategy to [input goal(s) again]. Rather than providing general
advice on what to do, please provide specific actionable steps that we should
take over the course of the next [insert timeframe].

Engaging and Mobilizing

Supporters With AI
ChatGPT’s strengths are doing research, brainstorming, making outlines, and
summarizing text. ChatGPT’s message-crafting capabilities are okay, but they lack an
aspect of human connection. This is still an area where humans have the upper hand.
That said, ChatGPT is a valuable assistant.

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 “Having ChatGPT summarize legislation so that it’s understandable for members
is huge. It helps give your members strong background knowledge on the issue,”
says Ellender.
Policy issues are complex and finding points to lean on to engage supporters can take
a lot of time. Asking ChatGPT for help can help you brainstorm, especially if you feel
bogged down by writer’s block.
“You could ask it for a list of things that might be persuasive about a subject, and it
will do that very well,” says Devoe. “But to get it to expound on those things and write
engaging content, that’s where I find it has its limitations at the moment.”

Try using this template to find angles to motivate support and provide the
inspiration you need to make that personal connection:
• You are an advocacy professional and highly regarded as one of the best in
the business. You are working for [insert organization and brief description].
• You want to motivate your members to [insert desired action point].
• [Input any background information that may help ChatGPT provide more
accurate responses]
• Please provide 5 different reasons why it would be in your members’ best
interest to act on this. Along with each point, please provide a message you
can send to your members encouraging them to act.

If you’re still not finding the right angle, refine your prompt or simply ask ChatGPT for
more options.

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 ChatGPT as Your Personal Email
Assistant
Communication is still something that humans do better than AI. What ChatGPT can do,
however, is help you better target your emails, improve deliverability, and raise your
open rates.
ChatGPT provides a strong starting point when it comes to writing emails, but you’ll
want to tweak its response to make it sound more human. ChatGPT can also take a
general email and personalize it so that it caters to each group of stakeholders that you
want to send it to.

Here is a helpful template that can accomplish this for you:

• We are [input organization and brief description]. We are
sending an email to our members with the goal of [input goal].
• Please take this general email and make it more relevant for
recipients who are [input demographic information].
• Here is the email:
• [input general email]

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 Other AI tools, like VoterVoice, can provide more detailed suggestions to strengthen
your advocacy emails and improve your open and action rates.
“The data science team here did research on what makes a really good call-to-action
email,” says Ellender. “There are a few key markers, like don’t put the link to action in
there more than twice, put that link as close to the top as possible, and don’t make the
email too long.”
VoterVoice users send around 350 million emails per year, providing its AI with an
extensive set of data from which it can suggest email best practices like avoiding
certain language that can get your message trapped in a spam filter.
“It also helps people craft better subject lines,” says Ellender. “That is a really important
marker for whether an email even lands in someone’s inbox in the first place. Poorly
written subject lines with too many spam keywords will never get read.”

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 Using AI for Reporting on Your Efforts
Reporting is a key behind-the-scenes task for advocacy professionals. It’s how you show
your efforts, demonstrate your impact, and prove your worth. It can take a lot of time to
convert your data into digestible insights, but ChatGPT is fantastic at getting the ball rolling.
“You’re staring at that blank document and sometimes the first word is the hardest,” says
Devoe. “For some reason, though, if I hand it over to ChatGPT and it gives me a draft, then
I’m enthused about reacting to that. It invigorates me to write something better.”

Anonymous
Can you write me a 5-page report summing up my organization’s advocacy efforts for the year?

ChatGPT
Of course! To create a 5-page report summarizing your organization’s advocacy efforts for the year, I’ll need some information about your
organization’s activities, achievements, and impact. Here’s a suggested outline for the report:

1. Introduction

• Brief overview of your organization’s mission and goals.

• Purpose of the report: to highlight key advocacy efforts and accomplishments over the past year.

2. Advocacy Priorities

• Description of the main issues or topics your organization focused on during the year.

• Explanation of why these priorities were chosen and their significance to your mission.

3. Activities and Initiatives

• Overview of the advocacy activities and initiatives your organization undertook.

• Include events, campaigns, collaborations, and any other relevant efforts.

• Highlight any innovative approaches or strategies used.

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 4. Achievements and Impact

• Summary of the outcomes and impact of your advocacy efforts.

• Include specific achievements, milestones reached, policy changes, etc.

• Use data and evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of your work.

5. Challenges and Lessons Learned

• Discussion of any challenges or obstacles encountered during the year.

• Analysis of lessons learned and insights gained from these experiences.

• How these challenges will inform future advocacy efforts.

6. Next Steps and Future Plans

• Overview of your organization’s plans and priorities for the upcoming year.

• Include any new initiatives, goals, or strategies you will pursue.

• Highlight opportunities for growth and improvement.

7. Conclusion

• Recap of key highlights and achievements from the year.

• Reiteration of the importance of your organization’s advocacy work.

• Thank you message or acknowledgment of supporters, partners, and stakeholders.

Once you provide more details about your organization’s advocacy efforts, I can start drafting the report using this outline.

ChatGPT can provide inspiration for the content and structure of your report, but it
can’t design it for you. For design ideas, VoterVoice’s advocacy report template is
a useful template. It is fully customizable and includes graphics to underline your
standout data points. Take your ChatGPT-inspired content and plug it into the template,
or do the reverse by giving ChatGPT the template and letting it work its magic.

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 Another useful application of ChatGPT is reviewing completed drafts and suggesting
areas for improvement.

Try this template before you publish your next report:

• You are an expert advocacy professional, particularly skilled in
communicating with your member group and demonstrating your value. We
recently wrote a report that [input brief description of report].
• Please review the report and provide any suggestions you have to increase
readability, better demonstrate our value, potential data insights we may have
overlooked, or any other recommendations you can think of drawing on your
extensive experience working in the field.
• Here is the report:
• [input text of report].

Other AI tools are also fantastic at generating data-driven reports and analyzing
advocacy campaign performance. VoterVoice is one such example that even has industry
benchmarking capabilities as well.
“We added several things to help with aggregate data analytics for organizations, one
was industry benchmarking,” says Ellender. “It allows us to take 100 organizations in
agriculture, say, and analyze their rates of action. We can use this data to show if you’re
meeting or exceeding the average benchmark for your industry, or maybe you’re below
and we can suggest some areas to make improvements.”

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 Other AI Uses in Advocacy
While AI isn’t threatening to take advocacy professionals’ jobs, advocacy
professionals who know how to use AI offer more value to their organizations than
those who do not.
Asking ChatGPT to check your work, develop outlines, and round out your thinking
can improve your performance outputs and efficiency.
“It may not be the final product that you use, but if it can get you three-quarters of
the way there in three seconds, that’s a huge time saver,” says Devoe.
Other AI tools, like Canva or DALL-E, can generate images for you based on the
text you input. Grammarly is an enhanced Spellcheck that improves your writing.
There is also a wide range of AI tools for team task management and calendar
optimization, like Motion or Trello.
AI transcription tools, like Rev or Otter, are useful during video calls, allowing you
to stay focused and not miss anything. For AI policy monitoring, FiscalNote has
a suite of tools and features that make sure you don’t miss any relevant policy
developments.

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The AI Tool That Advocacy
Professionals Need
Love it or hate it, AI isn’t going away. The sooner
advocacy professionals embrace it, the better
positioned they’ll be to drive their organization’s
advocacy efforts and stand out in the job market.
While ChatGPT can help in a variety of ways, nothing
is tailored to the needs of an advocacy professional
quite like VoterVoice. From improving email action
rates to generating reports and benchmarking,
VoterVoice is the tool that thousands of advocacy
professionals trust to enhance their efforts and
prove their value.
Explore what VoterVoice can do for you.

Request a Demo

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into action.

Home to CQ, FrontierView, Oxford Analytica, VoterVoice, and many other industry-leading brands,
FiscalNote helps organizations stay ahead of political and business risk.

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