Association Advocacy in the Age of AI: How to Keep it Real
By Jennifer Mitchell, CAE
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is transforming how associations work. A growing number of associations are using AI for content creation, workflow automation, and data analysis – especially in membership recruitment and retention scenarios and managing day-to-day tasks. But what about advocacy?
From predictive analytics to automated messaging, AI offers powerful tools for policy analysis, legislative tracking, and engagement of member advocates that associations of any size or budget can leverage. The speed and convenience of AI-powered advocacy open a world of new possibilities, but there’s a catch. If your advocacy campaign sounds like a machine, you risk losing the thing that matters most – trust. The danger attached to today’s broad proliferation of new AI tools is the potential loss of authenticity and credibility that can tank even a well-orchestrated advocacy initiative.
In the age of AI, how can associations keep it real in their advocacy efforts?
Before looking at the ways AI can help an association advocate, there’s an important caveat to address. The adage “garbage in/garbage out” has new significance in today’s AIpowered world. The key to obtaining useful, timesaving, and relevant data from any generative AI tool is successful engineering of your prompt (the directive). How you ask an AI assistant for help matters, and the more detailed instructions you provide up front, the better your results will be.
- Specify the source material.
- Spell out any assumptions you want the tool to consider.
- Define the role of the AI tool in responding to your prompt.
- Provide examples of the type of output you are seeking.
- Revise the prompt multiple times, if needed, to fine-tune the results.
For advocacy purposes, asking an AI tool, “What does this bill do?” will generate a lower quality response than a prompt that elaborates like this one: “Help me understand how this bill, if passed, will impact the existing law found in [a specific statute] that requires [a specific mandate] by [a specific group of people]. Assume I am a member of [a specific audience] and that I know very little about this legislation. Respond using language written at a seventh-grade level. Show me where I can find additional information.”
With quality prompts, AI can synthesize complex documents into more digestible summaries, which can translate dense legislation an association is tracking into simple fact sheets for members. AI can be used to compare multiple versions of a bill to highlight differences and help you quickly identify changes or areas of concern. Looking for a discussion of a particular topic in a lengthy hearing transcript? Save time by letting AI point you to the right spot.
AI tools can be especially helpful in drafting calls to action and templates for grassroots messaging campaigns. Turn insider jargon into plain language that will resonate with members and legislators. Recreate existing text into different formats optimized for social media, email, or video. Add attention-grabbing graphics or brainstorm catchphrases and hashtags with AI assistance.
There are paid platforms many associations use to facilitate and track their grassroots advocacy efforts. Increasingly, vendors are updating those platforms to integrate AI capabilities that can enhance message creation, trend analysis, and performance benchmarking. Even without specialized advocacy software, AI tools can be used to tweak messages and identify which members of an association are most likely to respond to a call to action.
Smarter targeting is one of the best attributes of AI for advocacy applications, both on the front end with your association’s members and on the back end with the officials you hope to influence. With predictive analytics, AI can assign engagement scores to your members based on their past activities, such as attending events or clicking through a previous call-to-action email. From there, you can segment your outreach with progressive requests for different sets of members. A single-click poll response may help you activate a less engaged member while you simultaneously ask your most involved member advocates to place a personal phone call to a legislator. Similarly, AI tools can pinpoint the target legislators you need to influence on the opposite end. Knowing the difference between a vulnerable swing voter on a committee and a lawmaker who’s already on your side can save you a lot of valuable time and effort.
Channel optimization is another way to put the power of AI behind your calls to action. Which of your members are more likely to respond to a text message than an email? That intelligence can make an enormous difference during a timesensitive influence campaign.
Use AI tracking tools to measure the performance of your grassroots advocacy campaigns in real time. Find out which of your targeted legislators need more or less outreach. Determine whether your campaign is performing better or worse in certain parts of the state or if there are significant gaps in responses by different demographic segments. If a call to action isn’t resonating with your audience, make revisions and try again.
AI can be helpful for coalition building, too. Imagine mining publicly available witness lists and testimony transcripts during a legislative session to find like-minded individuals and organizations who support your association’s position on a high-priority bill. With AI tools to evaluate their websites, press releases, and publications, you can quickly hone in on the best entities to approach prospective partnerships.
Even for associations that don’t invest in specialized digital advocacy software, there are plenty of free and low-cost AI tools that can make advocacy work easier, and new tools are hitting the market every day. Start small by experimenting with a handful of free tools, testing out the same prompts on multiple platforms, and comparing the results you get. Be wary of the limitations of free AI tools, however, and never enter personally identifiable information or upload proprietary or sensitive content to a public-facing AI tool. Paid subscriptions to AI services often provide an added layer of security, but it’s still important to have guardrails in place to prevent unwanted disclosures.
How does an association harness AI’s benefits for advocacy without losing the human touch?
ASAE Chief Information & Performance Excellence Officer Reggie Henry, CAE, was interviewed on the “AI for the C-suite” podcast in October 20241 about ASAE’s integration of AI tools. Henry’s advice for association professionals approaching AI was to “humanize this technology.” AI can make advocacy efficient but also impersonal. That’s why the human touch matters more than ever.
Legislators today are receiving an influx of AI-generated communications. When every email from your membership contains the same rote message, it dilutes the effectiveness of your campaign. Storytelling and personalization are the antidotes to the AI “slop” showing up in too many places. Lawmakers want to hear real stories from real constituents. Encourage your members to personalize their messages based on their own lived experience. Look for local angles that can be emphasized. More importantly, train your members to build actual human connections with their elected officials. An authentic voice from a known human being with a genuine stake in a decision will carry more weight than repetitive, generic messaging by the masses.
Relationship building is the heart of advocacy, and relationships require credibility, trust, and authenticity. AI can help you streamline your advocacy work by automating routine tasks, teasing out relevant data, and fine-tuning your targets, but don’t lose sight of the importance of the human element.
Jennifer Mitchell, CAE, is Associate Executive Director for Member Services at the Association of Texas Professional Educators (ATPE), where she has worked since 2004. She was previously Director of Communications and Public Affairs for the Louisiana Dental Association. Jennifer’s diverse background includes lobbying, campaign consulting, legal research and writing, media spokesperson work, and serving on several nonprofit boards. She holds a degree from LSU and is a Fellow of the LSU Academy
