For the past 20 years, associations have relied on emailed action alerts and shoe-leather Hill visits to get their advocacy messages across. Now, smartphone apps and social media tools are finding their place in associations' advocacy toolkits. Association leaders and government relations professionals need to know the best applications (apps) that will organize your Hill days, locate your state and federal representatives, and get you noticed on Twitter.

Social GR

Pushing out similar advocacy messages using multiple platforms—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, among others—helps foster engagement with your members. Social media interaction creates a personal connection and lets you share information that empowers your members to act.

Social media interaction creates a personal connection and lets you share information that empowers your members to act.

You can manage your social platforms using Sprout Social or Hootsuite, which allow you to schedule and track engagement with social media posts across multiple channels. Using these tools, you can post two or three advocacy messages per day using a mix of your in-house content and relevant content from other sources.

Another tool, Tailwind, helps manage scheduling and provides analytics from the image-heavy platforms Pinterest and Instagram. The visual aspect of these platforms allows subscribers to see the "who" behind your association's brand and get to know its personality. Instagram is used by 53 percent of millennials, so it can provide a boost to your engagement of young professionals in your advocacy initiatives.

For maximum impact in your social media outreach, use these tactics:

• Use images or video whenever possible.
• Monitor posts for discussions or questions that need a timely response.
• To engage different constituencies within your membership, create recurring content to post regularly, such as "Research Tuesdays" and "Throwback Thursdays."
• Make sure your social media team is constantly on the hunt for posts that showcase humor, emotions, and the human side of what your members do.

Many associations use social media to drive members to the resources they offer. You can do the same to link members to your advocacy resources, such as Engage, a flexible grassroots platform for mobilizing advocates, and Knowlegis, a robust contact database for congressional legislators and their staff. Both products are provided by CQ Roll Call and optimized for use on mobile devices. A relatively new player in the digital advocacy business is Quorum, which allows subscribers to track legislation, identify lawmakers who are influential on specific issues, and communicate with members of Congress and their staff.

Hill Day Apps

Now that you have engaged your members, educated them on the issues, and connected with them on social media, it is time to mobilize them for action. But how? There are apps for that as well. Two examples:

• A Hill day app produced by the Beekeeper Group, LLC, lets you connect your members to your "take action" web page, show the schedule for the day, provide a mobile congressional directory and talking points for meetings, connect your event with your social media platforms, and share messages and videos.
• Advocacy Associates' AdvocacyDay app shows your advocates their real-time schedules for the day and provides biographical information, mapping, customized talking points, surveys, and more. Push notifications update participants on meeting changes, and the messaging feature helps ensure that your advocates stay coordinated and motivated throughout the day.

Not sure where to start? Hootsuite has a good social media audit tool for planning marketing campaigns that can easily be adapted for promoting your association's policy agenda. It includes tools to help guide the uninitiated through the best social media practices.

The author would like to acknowledge Kellie Rowden-Racette, social media manager at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; Stefanie Reeves, CAE, executive director of the Maryland Psychological Association; and Stephanie Vance, advocacy guru at Advocacy Associates, who contributed heavily to this article.