Lessons of Lobbying

As they become more overt about pressuring Washington, nonprofit groups are learning the tricks of the trade.

By Fawn Johnson - 1/5/2012

Dabbling in politics: Nonprofits.

Nonprofit groups logged unexpected legislative successes in 2011, a year marked by intense budget-cutting efforts and government-shutdown threats. Child advocates helped enact a law that will give in-home child-welfare programs easier access to foster-care funds. Money remains in the federal budget for community-service programs such as AmeriCorps, even though House Republicans wanted to nix it. Rural “set-asides” are in a pending education bill at the request of rural school groups.

These victories illustrate the fruits of some nonprofits’ transition to overt congressional lobbying. A more traditional nonprofit approach dictates that groups “educate” lawmakers but not lobby them. “It’s a cultural shift,” said Tom Sheridan, president of the Sheridan Group, a consulting firm. “We need to start talking about voting records. For the more sophisticated [campaigns], we need to start PACs.”

Sheridan functions as a missionary of sorts, preaching to nonprofits about the benefits of getting political. He says that a lot of nonprofits have “very bad legal advice about what they’re allowed to do.” They often classify themselves as tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations that cannot lobby. But there is no prohibition against nonprofits creating sister 501(c)(4) groups, which can lobby for “social welfare” legislation and still maintain tax exemptions.

For example, D.C. Central Kitchen founder Robert Egger set up a PAC last month called CForward, a 501(c)(4) with the express purpose of supporting candidates who “champion the economic contributions of the nonprofit sector.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted, “CForward stands out in a field that has traditionally eschewed partisan politics on behalf of the nonprofit world as a whole.”

Nonprofit groups’ reluctance to dabble in politics can often be traced to the foundations that support them. Foundations like to fund research, which nonprofits are very good at and which can add to an organization’s prestige, but they often are skittish about lobbying and making campaign contributions—two activities that can create enemies.

However, the 2011 budget-slashing environment, with Republicans proposing to eliminate everything from community-service to education grants, prompted the nonprofit community to employ new lobbying tactics to save critical line items. They had to adapt because some of their reliable bulwarks had disappeared. Gone were their powerful Washington champions, such as the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and former President Clinton, who had functioned as immovable roadblocks to any cuts. Gone were the days when earmarks were a standard practice, which made it easier to quietly reel in a million dollars here or there for a school project or homeless shelter.

Last year was a crisis moment for groups that consistently flout tea party dogma by extolling the virtues of government safety nets. In the end, the nonprofit community rallied enough support to claim victory on a number of battlefronts. (The “war” is far from won, executives caution.) They also learned some lessons that will form the backbone of future lobbying.

• Galvanize the locals.Education and community-service grants were salvaged because of dogged protests from local groups that benefit from them. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., who chairs the biggest domestic-spending panel on the House Appropriations Committee, caught hell from his constituents for supporting cuts that would have eliminated funding for a popular senior-care program. “I cannot sit silently by and watch these cost-effective programs be destroyed just so it can be politics as usual in Washington,” wrote a Republican senior-care volunteer in the Montana newspaper Missoulian. Rehberg eventually voted for the final funding package that kept the program alive.

• Whisper, don’t scream.Keeping a proposed change low-key enables the lawmakers writing it (and, importantly, their staffers) to shepherd it through Congress without meddling from outsiders. To wit, the child-welfare bill moved without a hitch during the most contentious and least productive congressional year in recent memory. The bill raised no red flags, and it cost no money. It passed on a voice vote in the Senate and on the noncontroversial “suspension” calendar in the House, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage. When President Obama signed the bill, its description took up one sentence in a White House release that included three other new laws.

“Child welfare doesn’t get a lot of pomp and circumstance, and I think it actually did help,” said Nicole Truhe, government-relations and public-policy manager for Youth Villages, which proposed the waivers that allow federal funds to be used for foster-care alternatives. Youth Villages offers intensive in-home counseling to families whose children would otherwise go to foster homes. Truhe is the first in the organization to act as a national lobbyist. About two years ago, she said, Youth Villages decided to venture into congressional politics after its offices around the country were “hitting the same roadblocks in states” on how to use federal child-welfare funds.

• “It’s a sure thing.”Politicians typically won’t go out on a limb for legislation unless they see it as a solid bet. Youth Villages won champions for its foster-care waivers because it could show lawmakers 20 years of data demonstrating an 80 percent success rate in keeping kids out of juvenile detention and foster homes. Even better, it showed that in-home services cost one-third as much as traditional foster care.

• No whining, please.Lawmakers don’t want to hear about bureaucratic headaches unless they are looking to kill a program. The rural education group Save the Children helped keep funding alive for several Education Department programs by reminding members that imperfect grants are better than no grants. “We say, ‘We’re out there in the field, and I’m telling you, this program is working. Please continue funding it. You maybe need to reform it a little bit, but it’s really making a difference,’ ” said Andrew Hysell, the group’s associate vice president for policy and advocacy.

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