Show Your Work: Using Data to Make Your Policy Case

Tommy Zei: Here's a question I want you to sit with for a second. When you walk into a meeting with a legislator or a regulator, what are you bringing with you? Are you bringing your talking points, your organization's position, a general sense of the issue, or are you bringing data? Because there is a real difference between telling an official what you think and showing them what you know. And today we're talking about how to do the second. Welcome back to Policy Wins. I'm Tommy Zai, an onboarding consultant here at Quorum. Today we're talking about impact reports, specifically how to build them, what to put in them, and how to use them to actually influence the people you're meeting with. This episode is for anyone who has ever walked out of a government meeting thinking, I wish I had had that number ready. That's a fixable problem. Let's fix it together. To start with, I want to be bring up a fundamental point. If you want your statements to carry weight, you need data to back them up. That doesn't mean you need a 40-page white paper or a research team. It means you need to know the data you have, how to present it clearly, and whom you're presenting it to. Those three things are the whole game. Think about it from the officials' perspective. They're hearing from a lot of people. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a position. What cuts through is specificity. When you can say our organization employs 1,200 people in your district and we've added 200 jobs in the last two years, that lands differently than we're an important employer in the area. The data makes the abstract concrete. And concrete is what gets remembered. There are two major categories of data you want to be pulling from. And most organizations already have access to both. They're just not always thinking about them as policy tools. The first is your own organizational data. This is the stuff that comes from your operations, and it's often more powerful than people realize. Think about the number of locations or stores you have in a given state. Think about your total employee count, and more importantly, whether you can break that down by district. Job growth data is especially compelling. If you've added jobs in someone's district in the last few years, that's a story worth telling. Tax revenue paid by your organization should be considered as well. You can talk about your grassroots advocate count by region, particularly if those advocates are active on your campaigns. If you've had success in neighboring states or districts, that's data as well. Sometimes the most effective thing you can say is: this worked in the three states we have already passed this policy in. Here's what it could mean for your district. The second category is district level demographic and economic data. This is data about the people and the economy in an official's specific district or state. Not general national figures, but numbers that are relevant to them and their constituents. How many people in this district work in your industry? What's the economic footprint of your sector in this region? Are there demographic trends that connect to the policy you're advocating for? The more local and specific this data is, the more useful it is. An official who represents a district with a large number of small business owners is going to respond differently to business impact data than one representing a heavily unionized manufacturing region. Know the district before you walk in the door. Having the data though is only half the equation. The other half is presenting it in a way that actually moves people. And this is where a lot of organizations leave value on the table. The first rule is know your audience. Some officials want to dive into the details. They'll read that full brief and ask follow-up questions, want to know your methodology and more. Others want three bullet points and a number they can repeat. Neither is wrong. Your job is to know which one you're walking into. The second rule is don't bury the lead. Put your most important data point right at the top, every time. The executive summary should contain the thing you want them to remember, not necessarily the context setting. That can come after. The headline has to land first. The third rule is let visualizations do the work when you can. This could be a bar graph showing job growth over five years that communicates your point faster than a paragraph describing the same trend. A heat map of where your employees live in a state makes a geographic argument instantly. Visuals are not decoration, they're compression. They let you say more in less time. And the fourth rule: the one-pager is your best friend. A well-designed one-page summary serves triple duty. It's a leave behind for an in-person meeting. It's an infographic you can share on social media or with your advocates. And it's a set of talking points your advocates can use when they're the ones making content. One document, three different uses. The last thing I want to address is timing. Most teams think about reports reactively. They pull when together when there's a big meeting coming up or a hearing that requires their testimony. That works, but it creates unnecessary scramble at the last minute. The better approach is to keep a living document that you update regularly. something you can pull from any time, not build from scratch every time. As your organization's employment numbers change, update that document. As you rack up wins in specific states, add them. As your grassroots list grows, note the district level breakdown. When you do that, you're not scrambling before a meeting. You're reaching into a system that's already prepared for you. The data is ready, the story is already drafted, you're just customizing it for the room you're gonna walk into. Here's what I want you to walk away with today. You probably already have the data you need to make a compelling case. The question is whether you've organized it, localized it, and packaged it in a way that actually works in the room with a decision maker. Know your organizational data. Know your district level data. Lead with the headline. Keep a one-pager handy. And match the depth of your presentation to the person in front of you. That's the difference between showing up and showing up prepared. If this episode gave you something to work with, share it with a colleague who's heading into a busy advocacy season. This is exactly the kind of preparation that pays off when the meeting matters. Next time, we're talking about. Growing and energizing your grassroots advocacy base. How to build an advocate network that actually stays engaged, not just one that shows up for the first campaign and then disappears. I'm Tommy Zai. Thanks for listening to Policy Wins.