Building a national advocacy program
Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE) is one of the country’s most prominent patient advocacy groups. To better serve 32 million food allergy sufferers, FARE decided to make a major shift to focusing its advocacy efforts on federal, rather than state, issues.
This was a significant change of direction for advocates used to working at the state level. FARE turned to Relate Advocacy to help implement its new national program.
Relate created a national recruitment plan that helped FARE:
- Double the size of its advocate database in just seven months (net of churn) within targeted budget parameters.
- Double the open rate of its advocacy emails.
- Generate 80+ congressional co-sponsors for its first federal legislative priority bill.
- Recruit over 500 volunteers to participate in a nationwide campaign to schedule in-district meetings with members of Congress.
- Begin to identify advocate leaders who could organize food allergy advocates in their communities.
Learn more about how we did it.
Building support for more frequent tax changes
Property reappraisals often create communications challenges–especially when the time period between reappraisals is cut in half.
That’s why the Durham County Tax Administrator called on Relate Advocacy to build awareness and understanding of its 2019 property tax reappraisal process.
Residents immediately equate rising home values to rising tax bills, which is not necessarily the case. We responded by helping taxpayers build trust in the reappraisal process by focusing on the people in charge of it. We then had the credibility to explain why more frequent reappraisals were good for taxpayers.
The result was a reappraisal process that, despite its potential for controversy, produced the same level of questions and feedback as the county’s previous cycles.
Learn more about our communications strategy.
Solving three business challenges with one annual report
Eastpointe is a public behavioral health insurance provider dedicated to helping people who are enrolled in Medicaid or who cannot otherwise afford healthcare.
As Eastpointe’s strategic communications partner, Relate helps manage a range of business challenges.
As a manager of public funds, Eastpointe’s annual report is a legislatively-mandated communications vehicle for its stakeholders. With a major shift to a privatized Medicaid system on the horizon in 2018, Eastpointe needed an annual report that communicated its value to a much larger group of stakeholders.
Relate delivered just that.
The result: Executive leadership used the new report to guide conversations with all of its priority audiences, address its business challenges, and position the organization for growth.
Read more about how it all came together.
Helping an association reach a new audience of advocates
Professional associations are generally concerned with educating and mobilizing their own members. But Relate Advocacy helped the North Carolina REALTORS (NCR) engage a whole new audience — homeowners.
The issues for homeowners and REALTORS often overlap. That is why NCR created the North Carolina Homeowners Alliance.
The Alliance has recruited thousands of homeowners to contact elected officials on the issues that matter most. The Alliance is the most prominent organization in the state fighting to keep property insurance rates down.
This includes generating thousands of messages to the Commissioner of Insurance across multiple years of proposed insurance rate hikes. Time and again, the Homeowners Alliance defeats massive proposed increases.
Where Education and Workforce Meet
Education and workforce are two of the most important issues for the NC Chamber’s members.
Relate Advocacy co-founder Andrew Meehan has worked with the NC Chamber Foundation on education and workforce issues since 2014. Andrew initially led the Hire Standards coalition of business and education leaders to ensure that North Carolina’s math and English standards remained among the highest in the nation.
Andrew’s work with the Chamber grew to broader workforce and education initiatives. The latest effort has been to implement the innovative Talent Pipeline Management program. This program organizes employer collaboratives to directly connect demand for talent with the suppliers (education providers). As longtime leaders in education, workforce and economic development, Relate Advocacy’s co-founders are ideal partners in this task.
The results: The NC Chamber recruited and trained seventeen community leaders from across the state in Talent Pipeline Management. These leaders will bring an employer-led approach to workforce development during a critical time for North Carolina.