The Big Secret

Hi, I want to run you through a little thought exercise here so you can get an idea of what many people who are politically frustrated are trying to get done. So let me start here.

This is you, the voter, the average person, and what you want to do is you want to reach this person here and this person is the politician and obviously there are many problems getting to them and there's lots of obstacles in the way and there's many ways that people choose to do it that are not that effective, but there's really only two reasons why you want to talk to your representative. That's either to get something done or to stop something from happening.

Now, the key here is that if you want to get something done, what you're really addressing is this issue right here, which is the US budget. So you're looking at $3.8 trillion dollars and the question you might ask is, well, why do companies lobby? Or why do they engage their representatives?

And the answer is they want to get a piece of this or they want to reduce costs, reduce regulations or prevent something from happening. Now on a big scale, you can see why that makes sense for a company. But for individuals, you know, you may say, well, it doesn't really apply to me. I'm just working on some local issue or whatever it happens to be. But obviously there's still the issue of how do you go from here to here, reach the politician, convey your idea and get something done. And it's a challenge and a problem that everybody is facing who has any sort of political aspirations or policy aspirations in terms of making something happen. So that's really the big game.

You're either going to try to get a program launched and move forward or have some advantage or you want to stop something from happening. Stopping something from happening...

Pretty common. Look at the marches we've had recently where people want to ban assault weapons. That's changing the law to stop something from happening because they don't want to have the violence in the streets. And that's their way of pursuing that particular agenda and obviously you have people on the other side or organizations who are very well funded and very well organized and they are doing the opposite. They have a different point of view.

So as a sole person, can you make a difference? Well you can make a difference with your ideas, but you have to realize in here are all kinds of obstacles preventing you from moving ahead and you're going to encounter them, get frustrated and not know what to do. And so our job is to alert you to these obstacles, help you go from point A to point B, and whether... obviously it's much more difficult at the federal level.

So let's say it's at the state level or the local level, you know, go from a to b. Make sure that you find the right person over here and that he or she is your representative. And then we also want to show you, or I want to show you another obstacle that comes up that is insidious and people don't realize it until they're fairly far along. So let me grab this other chart.

This is one of my favorites and let's take a look at that.

So let's say you're here in California, OK? And you want to get something done. Well, you know that your representative is in this area. So that's the person that you can reach. Your one person that you can reach is right here next to you and you're in a district with 720,000 other people and you have a point of view.

You want to get something done, et cetera. OK? So here's the interesting part. What if your person, your representative, and this happens at the state and not so much the local, but you know the state level as well. What happens if your person, your representative does not sit on the committee related to the issue that you want to deal with?

So for instance, if you needed to pursue something and they know that it's going to end up in the Judiciary Committee, well the chairman of the judiciary committee might be sitting over here in North Carolina or some other, some other state. And guess what? You probably know this already as a constituent of this representative, you cannot go to this person and say, "Hey, you know, I'd like to get something done. I'd like to change the gun laws. I'd like to implement a new idea. I'd like to do whatever it might be." You actually can't do that. They will ask you what your address is and then send you back to your representative so you can't do it. So what do you do? This is the problem.

You're stuck here and you need to convince your representative to either write a dear colleague letter and influence this person or do something else. OK? And I'm going to suggest you do something else. But what happens here is if this person here happens to be,

- - we'll use it this way, blue (D),

... and the chairman of the committee happens to run the committee and be an (R) you need to ask yourself, what is the likelihood that when you contact your rep and you want to get something done, they are going to be amenable and this person in North Carolina is going to say, oh yeah, I really need to help out the person in California? Chances are pretty slim.

The other thing you need to realize is you need to get a coalition of these members and so you actually need 218 of them to agree with your idea and you need to get them to focus on your bill when in fact every session they're looking at 10,000 bills in approximately 25 different committees and it's all broken up. So when people say it's hard to change a law, that's exactly one of the problems. Let me take this off for a second. And do something else.

This person, the chairman is not sitting alone on the committee. He has lots of members from lots of districts. So he's got somebody here, here, here, here, here, here, and on and on. OK, so let's say for sake of argument, you've got 20 or 25 members who are sitting on this particular committee, so they're all networked in, right? The question becomes, and I'm not putting all 25 up, but the question becomes, if you're here with this great idea, and even if it's clear and you can't influence this guy right here in this committee, well, the question becomes, can you influence any of these other members? And with many of the methods that you're using, whether it's calling talk radio, writing a letter to your particular representative, writing an op Ed, calling in, faxing, emailing, Twitter, et cetera. There's one thing that's missing. OK?

And the one thing that's missing that becomes apparent in this model is you don't have the ability to build an ad hoc coalition.

There is no platform for that. And that's where our solution comes into play. So what we do is we say, look, let's say your grandmother lives here, OK and she's got five friends all here, OK? And let's say your uncle is here, your friend you went to college with is up here, somebody else you know is here, and then they know other people, so all of a sudden they know some of the other people who are either in this district and can be part of this network and these are people that you don't know. This is the whole point of how the Internet works in terms of how you build networks of people who are able to get something done.

The key is you need to have one central issue that they all agree on. So in this case, they have to agree on your brilliant idea, which we say you pose in the form of, we can call it a debate or a campaign. It starts as a debate because you want to get people to participate and you want them to say yes or no. Yes, I agree with your general idea, or no, that's a bad idea. And here's some ways to improve it. So on the debate side, that's what you want to happen. But as you build this all up, you're gonna end up with lots of people who say, OK, yes, this is a great idea. Maybe get a little bit of no, but ultimately you are going to have this coalition and these people are actually... The intent is these people are voting on your debate who are sitting in these other districts and the reason they're doing that is because your grandmother or your friend from college or your business partner, they have shared this with their network. OK?

So when that happens and they are a constituent of the other district, then you start building this coalition of people. And what we do is we aggregate all these people. So instead of you going back to the chairman and saying, look, I want to get a particular thing done. You come in and you say, Hey, guess what? I have 20,000 people now who say yes to this and I have 800 hundred who say no.

So let that sink in for a minute.

You've got lots of people. They're in an ad hoc coalition. They're coming together and they want to help you out. And if you already have your idea connected to a bill that has been already sponsored in the legislative body, you are farther ahead.

We have an individual who has already done that and he is Chet Campanella... He has two bills in congress, H.R. 1706 and 1707. He got them there on his own, which is fantastic and he is pushing to move them forward.

So the key here is you need to build up that coalition. Otherwise you're back here. You're like a sole person trying to get past all these obstacles and trying to get to the law maker and you might not even have the right one. So the key is you need to find who is the chairman of the committee or what committee the bill is going to be on.

You need to get the bill sponsored and that's going to happen if you have some level of interest and you have thought through how what you're doing is going to benefit a number of people. So if you have a crummy idea that is going to harm people, chances are you're not going to get wide acceptance. But if you have a positive bill that helps victims or changes things in a positive way or solves a problem that the lawmaker hasn't yet found a way to solve, then you stand to be in a much better place to begin to implement this model. But the key is you need to vote on other people's issues.

Most people don't think about that. They only think that they vote for candidates. What we're saying is you're almost acting like the lawmaker. You're not the lawmaker of course but you are getting insight into the problems with the issue.

You are pulling it together and then you are sharing it with enough people who agree, but then the information is there so that you can move forward. And there's obviously two or three ways as you go down this road where that can happen, 1) where you have this coalition and it becomes self evident that you have a lot of people who support you or you end up saying, hey look, we want to raise money and do it in a crowd funded model. And instead of spending 20 bucks on something else, you say, look, let's contribute to this, make it happen, and then hire someone to do the work for us. That is what the large companies do. That is what the large trade groups do. They hire trained PR, government affairs and lobbying firms to work on their behalf to get through this mess. So you don't have to do it on your own.

You don't have to learn from scratch.

Oh my God, it's so complex. I can't figure it out. We're not expecting you to figure it out. And yes, it is complex.

And the other thing that's interesting is these seats that these people have, well in the House of Representatives, they're changing every two years. So you might be pretty close and all of a sudden your person retires or they lose their election, right? And then you're back at square one and you're trying to figure out, well, who do I go to next? If you had approached the committee and had a clear sense of that, you would've narrowed your scope down to the relevant people and then share it and begin to get people from other districts to support you. So this is what Robert Cialdini calls reciprocal altruism, where you help other people and they help you kind of, you know, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, but the intent is for you to begin to gain some support with more people and then be able to present to the law maker in a legal way and in a, in, in, excuse me, in an intelligent way and in a strategic way, much like again, the large companies are going to do. This is a big step and most people haven't even contemplated this or thought about it or understood how they can do it.

And there aren't a lot of platforms that do that. You get civics education of course, but you don't have the ability to build an effective ad hoc coalition and that in effect is the key to penetrating this model and making it work so that you can get your ideas, move them forward.

I think if you test this and test it at the local level, you'll find that if you have enough people who show up with you and support you and you have a clear agenda and know what you're doing and the ideas are positive for the community, chances are you're going to be in a much better place than if you simply ignore it and choose lots of alternate methods to make this work.

So I want to share that with you because I think it's a big piece that people miss and as I've talked to politicians and lobbyists and people who work in government, they understand this completely.

They get that and they just think, oh well everybody knows it, but my guess is that you don't know it and you have not been informed about it. And that's what we do here.

At iLobby we want you to get clear, educated, trained, have the tools that you need and then begin to build the networks and the relationships and then find a way to pull the funding together to make this work so that you can be successful and get something done.

This is John Thibault with iLobby. I hope this has been helpful and instructive. If you'd like to learn more, we have training materials that there'll be a link for below as well as a link to the website where if you have an idea and you decide that you want to move it forward, we welcome you to do that.

And best of luck. Thanks.