Advocacy organizations have a lot on their plates, and any tool that can save them time and energy while still producing high-quality work is a valuable addition to their toolkit. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s no surprise that many advocacy professionals are exploring new tools to help them with their work.
AI can be particularly useful for writing and editing advocacy content, improving email campaigns, and creating multimedia content. As AI technology continues to advance, advocacy organizations that embrace these tools will be able to work more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Whether you’re a seasoned advocacy professional or just starting out, AI tools have the potential to revolutionize the way you work and help you achieve your goals more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
That introduction was entirely written with the generative AI tool ChatGPT, with some light editing. Impressed? Read on to learn how generative artificial intelligence can help your advocacy efforts.
AI for Small Advocacy Teams
If you work in a small advocacy team (or if you alone are the team), having the budget or personnel needed to get it all done is often a luxury you can only dream of. With 58 percent of government affairs and advocacy professionals on teams of just 1-3 people, according to a recent FiscalNote industry report, the challenges small teams face are common to a large number of advocacy professionals.
AI tools are one of the ways you can expand your advocacy outreach without hiring additional staff. For example, video editors like Wisecut leverage AI and voice recognition to automatically edit your videos, add captions and take out pauses. This means you can get more done with a lean team, making AI a must-have for organizations operating on a tight budget.
”"Sometimes we hesitate to take the human factor out of things, but time is money."
William DevoeDirector of communications and advocacy, Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State
Create Advocacy Content with AI Tools
Some advocacy professionals are hesitant to employ AI tools to create content, but William Devoe, director of communications and advocacy at Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State, said they should be willing to let go of some creativity and control and allow AI to do its thing.
“Sometimes we hesitate to take the human factor out of things, but time is money,” he advised at a recent VoterVoice advocacy event. “See if you can automate some of that stuff and free up some of your time. I would encourage [you] to play around with ChatGPT and give it some prompts and see what it does for you.”
ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022, has many potential uses for your advocacy efforts. Generative AI tools can get you started with a press release, a template letter for advocates to send lawmakers, an email update, or an outline for a blog.
For example, Devoe recently gave ChatGPT some prompts and asked it to write a press release for an advocacy coalition. “It was amazing,” he said. “With only very minor edits, it would have been something we could have sent out.”
ChatGPT can also help create different versions of an advocacy message to send legislators since they can get tired of seeing an identical message many times. “Legislators catch on if they get the same five emails carbon copied,” said Rachel Coffman, president at Coffman Collaborative. “But with ChatGPT, you can ask it to rewrite the template in several different ways that you can send out to your advocates so you’re not constantly bombarding their inboxes with the same blanket template.”
ChatGPT isn’t the only AI tool that can help with writing: other popular options are Jasper, Anyword, and INK. These tools can help your content rank higher on search engines, create effective ad copy, and get predictive metrics and insights into how your content will perform with your target audience.
In addition to helping with written content, AI tools like DALL-E can generate realistic images and art from a written description. This can save your advocacy team the cost of purchasing images for use in campaigns and communications.
Optimize Advocacy Communications With AI Features
Another practical use for AI is to improve your emails to advocates and get them to take action. Since inboxes are flooded with hundreds of emails every day, it’s vital to use the subject lines and email text most likely to hold their attention.
An advocacy platform like VoterVoice offers built-in AI that uses open and click rate best practices to prompt suggestions to your email copy to get the best results. This makes it easier to compose effective emails by highlighting best practices and offering suggestions as you write. You also get data-driven suggestions on subject line and message length, phrases that trigger spam filters, and the number, type, and placement of links. You can even maximize your impact by ensuring you send messages at peak open and action times with VoterVoice’s email scheduling feature.
And when it comes to making sure your emails’ spelling and grammar is on point, Grammarly is a useful tool. As you write, Grammarly supplies suggestions to fix your spelling, improve grammar, and write more concisely.
AI as Your Personal Assistant at Work
In addition to helping directly with advocacy work, AI can help with a variety of other daily work tasks. From helping you draft a cover letter or resume to collating information on any topic, AI can act as a personal assistant to help you be more productive and effective in your job. One example is Reclaim, a smart calendar tool that helps you schedule your time. With Reclaim, you can auto-block time for tasks and routines, find the best time for one-on-one meetings, and add breaks and travel time around meetings.
Another valuable use of AI is the notetaking tools widely available. Coffman uses Notes by Dubber to transcribe meetings as they’re happening so she can pay full attention to the conversation rather than worrying about taking notes. Then, she puts the transcription into ChatGPT and asks it to summarize the meeting in bullet points for her review.
Pair AI With Your Advocacy Software Solution
The AI built into VoterVoice provides real-time suggestions to instantly improve your communications and campaign effectiveness. You can easily see which issues are firing up your advocates, then maximize email success using SmartCheck, an embedded tool that makes call-to-action recommendations based on the most up-to-date best practices. Plus, VoterVoice’s advocate ranking and issue tracking technology helps you understand which supporters are most active and which issues spur the most responses.
Leverage cutting-edge technology and fuel your advocacy efforts with VoterVoice, the only AI-driven advocacy platform on the market. VoterVoice uses AI and data science for ease of information, benchmarks, and suggestions. Thanks to that injection of AI, VoterVoice makes it easier to take action with pre-populated contact details, understand your campaign successes (and opportunities for improvement) with peer benchmarking, and drive engagement with AI-powered suggestions.
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