What does modern-day advocacy look like?
For certain, it’s still pounding the pavement of Capitol Hill, pressing the flesh, putting in face time with your members of Congress. In my time serving in office, the stories that struck me the most were always those I was told in person; stories told not only with a voice, but with the look on someone’s face, strained in passion, knotted in concern, as an individual who I’d been elected to represent told me why they had traveled to Washington and what I could do to help them.
These meetings, which are simply crucial to any industry’s advocacy efforts, are why we push so hard for credit unions to attend events like CUNA’s Governmental Affairs Conference and League Hike the Hill events. To this day, I find it difficult to imagine a time in which in-person advocacy doesn’t play a central role in how we fight for our interests, in how we convince lawmakers of the need to stand behind our movement and the 110 million members we serve.
But the world is changing. The way we communicate, whether you’re talking to your friends, your colleagues, or your member of Congress, is changing. I saw the emergence of this new world of advocacy in my final years in Congress, with the advent of email, which placed my constituents only a few keystrokes away from injecting themselves into my office’s decision-making process.
Since that time – I’ll let you do the math on how long exactly – those lines of communication between constituents and their lawmakers have only grown in number, ease and speed. And I assure you, the most powerful organizations in Washington, those with their fingerprints all over the policies promulgated on Capitol Hill, are leveraging them all. And we are too.
Between CUNA and the Leagues, with contacts and relationships with lawmakers from every state in our union, with targeted social media strategies, a Grassroots Action Center, a network of credit union professionals with key contacts in Congress, I’ve been told directly by lawmakers that our advocacy ground game rivals – and in some cases beats – that of some of the heaviest hitters in the beltway.
Look no further than what we accomplished this week with the massive advocacy victory we achieved together as an industry.
Nearing midnight Wednesday evening on Sept. the 6th, CUNA/League professional advocates worked closely with Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) to introduce an amendment to stop the NCUA from being placed under the congressional appropriations process. The bureaucracy in which the NCUA would have found itself in that process would have ultimately raised its operating costs and, as a result, raised costs for credit unions.
This amendment was our opportunity to head off what would essentially be a new, hidden tax on credit unions and their members.
We called an early meeting on Thursday the 7th with professional advocates from every state League in the country. By eight in the morning, with, at the time, what we believed was a single day to make our voices heard, governmental affairs professionals from Maine to New Mexico, from Florida to Oregon had assembled on a teleconference call to map out a plan to activate our member credit unions and send a clear, strong and unified message to Congress about the need to support this amendment and keep the NCUA a strong, independent agency.
In the next 12 hours, as CUNA and the Leagues sent urgent messages to member credit unions directing them to our Grassroots Action site, urging them to send emails, make phone calls, and send tweets to their member of Congress – all the ways in which advocacy organizations must engage with their lawmakers in this hyper-connected and digital age – more than 3,000 messages to Capitol Hill were generated by credit union activists with broad coverage from states across the country pressing for their support of this amendment.
In the days that followed – following the postponement of the vote as Hurricane Irma approached the Florida coast, sending lawmakers back to their home districts – our contacts on the Hill relayed to us that lawmakers had heard our collective voices loud and clear; that we’d successfully convinced dozens of House members to support a measure that, at first, hadn’t even received the blessing from House leadership.
The intervening days before Congress returned to normal operation allowed us more than enough time to drive this victory home. Taking up our continued calls for action, member credit unions poured thousands of additional messages into Washington. And in the end, the industry had compelled so many House members to support this measure that when House leadership learned the vote wouldn’t be close this week – that the amendment would pass overwhelmingly – even they decided to throw their support behind it.
It took six days. Only six days – in the midst of a natural disaster and one of the most massive data breaches consumers have experienced – to sway a critical mass of lawmakers to support our position. That’s advocacy influence.
As Congress shifts its focus to tax reform this fall, we may again have to step up, band together as an industry, and remind lawmakers from all corners of the country of the value credit unions provide their communities. Similarly, to battle data breaches and enact meaningful financial regulatory reform, it will take credit unions from all 50 states and Washington to make a strong case to achieve victory.
The credit union industry has that reach. In CUNA and the Leagues – named two years running as the most effective advocacy organization in financial services by National Journal – using every avenue, every channel, every modern method available to us, credit unions have a very formidable protector in their corner.
Though, it’s our contention that the credit union voice is only at its most formidable and its most effective when we all get involved. So when the time comes again, and believe me it will come, please be ready.
Jim Nussle is President/CEO for CUNA. He can be reached at 202-638-5777 or officeoftheceo@cuna.coop.
