Welcome, everyone, to this Chapter Leader exclusive IHS webinar, Effective Advocacy in 2025 and Beyond. I'm Peter Mihalik, IHS Health Policy and Advocacy Director. Presenting with me today is the wonderful Christine Seitz, the Manager of Government Affairs at IHS. Thank you so much for joining us. But first, Christine with some bookkeeping information. Great. Hello, everybody. Before we get started, I want to share a few housekeeping items. Note that we are recording today's webinar so it can be offered on demand for all Chapter Leaders through our e-learning portal. An email will be sent to all Chapter Leaders when the recording is available around next week. Closed captioning is also available and can be turned on using the Zoom toolbar as shown on the screen. The slides for today's presentation can also be downloaded on the webinar web page. Feel free to take a moment now to do so if you'd like to follow along. Today's webinar is a bit informal. At any time during today's presentation, please feel free to raise your virtual hand if you have any questions. We'll call on those with hands raised and you'll receive a prompt on screen to unmute yourself. Good afternoon or morning, wherever you're dialing in from. Thank you again for joining us today. We have a lot of information to cover. I hope that this is both informative and enjoyable for the 45 minutes to an hour that this will take up. Just for your information, this is going to be the first of a series of webinars related to advocacy continuing on into 2025. As Christine mentioned, this is going to be pretty informal. I hope that you feel free to ask any questions that you might have. Moving forward into the conversation that we can answer anything in real time and be ready to address any concerns or questions as we're moving forward. We have an agenda here today related to some of the things that you need to consider as you're putting together a fly-in or advocacy day at your local state capitol. We'll be working through how you should set up the timing, who should be participating, scheduling all your meetings, what you should be talking about, following up on all that, and then maintaining those relationships that you started to build during your fly-in. Let's get started. First of all, why is IHS doing this? As I came in in August and as I've come to learn over the past few months, IHS is really active at the state level. Christine has a lot of things going on and it's great. Where we found that we are engaging, we are successful. In order to continue having that long-term success, we want to encourage you as state chapter leaders to be planning events that continue to grow out that connection to state legislatures and elected officials. We want to make sure that everybody has the tools that they need and some of the basic parameters to set up some of these events. By offering this webinar today, we hope that we can start this conversation, understanding what's going on in the state, understanding that this is a broad framework, and there might be more specific questions that pop up, which, again, Christine and I are more than happy to help answer and help you plan these events. As far as providing that basic topics that you should be considering as you discuss and think about this, this is what this webinar is for. As you may have remembered, there was an election a few weeks ago, well, 10 days ago at this point. And now as the dust is settling at the federal and state level, people are beginning to look through the next cycle of action at the state houses and in Congress. So this is a great time to start planning these events. Obviously, state capitals are usually a little bit front-loaded towards the beginning of the year. So we wanted to get this information out in front of you with ample time for you to think about it and figure out exactly what might be helpful for you to be working on and how we could be helpful here at International HQ on getting these events off the ground. So as you can see on this slide, why this is important, we want to make sure that legislators know that hearing aid specialists have an important role in hearing health care. Where we've found that we've had some problems in our engagement is not usually because of anything necessarily sinister or people having a bad view about hearing aid specialists, but they're just not necessarily aware of sort of your place in the hearing health care ecosystem. I've talked about this at a number of chapter events already, at conference, making sure that we're being proactive, getting in front of problems, making sure that we're involved from the beginning of a legislative session, rather than trying to sort of unwind anything that's already been considered and determined, which can be problematic as far as extra effort, timing, resources and things like that. And things like that, that prevent us from being successful in the short term. And then, you know, providing additional long term opportunities for engagement, making sure that we're talking to those elected officials, making sure that we're continuing to build out those relationships so that we can continue to move the ball forward for hearing aid specialists, not just today, but also in the future. One thing I just wanted to address real quick before we kind of get into the meat and potatoes of this presentation is just that I'm not sure there's probably going to be a question or two about, you know, in-person events versus virtual events. And that's just one thing that you need to consider as we kind of move through this. There are pros and cons for both of those types of fly-ins or advocacy days, whatever you want to call it. But I think from my perspective, having an in-person event would definitely be preferable. I know that it usually takes, you know, more planning and more cost to the to the volunteers that are coming and participating and more difficulty kind of scheduling around everything just because you have to be physically present in a building and walking around and having those conversations. And quite frankly, having done both sort of in-person and virtual, obviously, virtual is, you know, quite easy. You can do it from your office or your house. You know, there's no need to figure out where to get lunch or anything like that. You just drop in on the meetings that you're assigned, have those conversations and then move on to the next thing. And while that is really convenient and really great, I think the virtual meeting kind of loses the gravity of what we're trying to achieve as far as introducing ourselves to elected officials and their staff and really kind of building out that connection and providing something that's a little bit more sort of memorable. So while I understand in a sort of a larger state with a large, you know, group, a large state chapter that might have a lot of people that want to participate, they might want to consider a virtual event. I would highly encourage, if possible, to do it in person just because of that sort of familiarity and in-person contact that having an in-person event kind of brings to that. Timing. So as they say, timing is everything. So we're going to talk about that for a little bit. I think the first two topics that we talk about are going to be kind of related together as far as pre-planning aspects of an advocacy day. And then we'll move into sort of the actual advocacy day itself with the narrative. And then we'll talk about a little bit, kind of like how to follow up with the rest of the of the topics today on the agenda. So first of all, and these are not necessarily in any kind of like order of importance, but I think this is kind of like how I, when putting together an advocacy day or fly in, tend to think about things. And obviously you have to do your own sort of internal calculus about how you want things to be going and what you plan to achieve, which might affect, you know, some of the outcomes and decisions that you make. But moving on real quickly, when to have an advocacy day. I've had a few horror stories related to this first bullet point here at the federal level where people did not properly plan about when chambers would be in session. They brought a bunch of people up to the hill and they were looking to meet, you know, the member of Congress and take pictures and talk about an issue. And we unfortunately had to tell them that they weren't there. They were back home in Pennsylvania where they just came from. And, you know, it's, you know, so sad that you kind of spent all this time and money to come to D.C. to talk about all this stuff to the person that is not there. And, you know, they had a fun trip anyway, but they didn't really sort of meet their goals. So it's really important to check the session dates for the state legislature. If their state legislature has two chambers, which is everybody but Nebraska, definitely take a look at when those dates overlap. They're not always the same. You might also if you want to include kind of a gubernatorial aspect to this, check when, you know, there's a calendar opening and that the governor is expected to be in the state capitol. If you can kind of do that advanced planning. One sort of example of doing or that we wanted to provide, obviously, Monday, March 1st is World Hearing Day. So if you want to plan an event around that, that might be a good time to do it with the caveat of make sure that. The first bullet point still holds. Again, if you want to do an advocacy day and talk to elected officials and their staffs, it's usually a good idea to have them actually present for doing so. Other dates of significant meaning to the chapter. If you have some sort of achievement or you want to go on the day that you were founded, or if you're kind of like looking to maximize the number of participants, which we'll kind of get into in the next couple of slides. But usually you can do something that's turnaround and plan something that's quicker if you have a smaller number of participants versus like if you wanted to bring a whole chapter of 100 hearing aid specialists to a state capitol that would require a little bit more planning on behalf of everybody, both the participants and the chapter leadership and doing all the scheduling and things like that. So that might need a bit more time and you might not be able to sort of pull that all together and sort of later in the year. And as I've said before, usually state legislative calendars are front loaded, meaning that they're most active between January and June, I would say. Right, Christine? So, you know, planning for something in November, October, later in the fall. There are certain states that do have activity in that. But I would say sort of as a rule of thumb, most of it wraps up by the middle of June or so and then they get back at it in the next year, in the next January once they kind of get through all their budgeting aspects and appropriations. So just something to be aware of as far as timing, making sure sort of all these different things align and that you can kind of maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the event that you're planning. Participants, who's going to be there? Hopefully you. Who should go? And this is this will tie in a little bit sort of into the narrative, but I would promote you to sort of select if you're not going to invite everybody, which is obviously a route to go. And quite frankly, kind of the easiest way to to make that selection. But if you're going to sort of limit it to a different sort of select crowd, you're going to want to pick active, engaging members of your chapter. You really want to talk, you know, have those conversations with elected officials, with people who are passionate about the industry, can really kind of dig into it a little bit and talk about it. We're going to talk about this a little bit more in another couple of slides, but really can tell a nice story about how you assist patients with care. One thing that you might want to consider is this sort of diversity of the people that you're inviting from a geographic standpoint. If like everybody on the leadership team is from a particular town and the rest of the state is uncovered, well, that might be a problem when you're looking to kind of build out some relationships in the state capital. So you might want to try to pick a few people that are outside of that location so that you have sort of a diverse group of state officials that you're looking to talking to. You might also want to highlight some other characteristics of your chapter and other diverse aspects, whether that's sort of the makeup of the chapter, you know, the education status of the chapter, what they do and different sort of or, you know, even, you know, who they're affiliated with as far as from a franchise perspective. So there's a whole bunch of things that you can consider. But and kind of overarching all of this is this like, how many people do you want there? Like I said, you know, it's a bit harder to sort of pre-plan for 100 people than it is for 10. It might be easier to kind of pull all of that together in a short amount of time if you're looking to get something done in January, depending upon, you know, and this is also going to be probably discussed a little bit further, just like what is going on in your state to talk about. So all this is interrelated and you'll kind of hear me kind of go back and forth between different slides. But it's really hard to kind of break this down into like discrete topics. So I did the best that we can. So if you have any questions, definitely feel free to ask. Scheduling, and this is related to the first few slides, because you're going to want to figure out who you want to talk to, and that might be dependent upon how many people you have. So you're going to want to reach out to committee leaders of jurisdiction, those committees that have the authority to mark up legislation related to hearing aid specialists. Christine will be able to help you and direct you if you have any kind of questions about that. Usually the committee jurisdiction is is prominently placed on the website, but it can be a little confusing depending upon sort of how into the language they get to as far as terms of art and things like that. You also want to talk to legislators where people that are participating live. So you want to be able to walk into an office or two or three or four and say, like, hey, I live in your district or I live in your Senate district or whatever sort of demarcation they have in your particular state and say, I'm a voter and I live here. And this is why these issues are important to me. So being able to kind of engage and have that connection back is really important to building out your narrative, to having those follow up conversations, being able to kind of tie that all together and say that you have a constituent in the office is actually going to be something that the elected officials are going to care about. However, not every elected official can make every meeting. They do have to vote on things. They have other kind of constraints. The demands on their time. So they can't meet with everybody all the time. And depending upon, you know, when your window is to meet, they're going to might might have you meet with staff. This happened all the time at the congressional level. We never really knew when votes would be scheduled for a certain time, but there's not really sort of an exact timing on any of that. So things would often be handed off to a staffer to kind of have those meetings, engage with the constituents that were there, and then pass that information along to the member or somebody up the chain. So it's really important not to be down about that. This is a pretty regular occurrence. You know, like I said, there's so many demands on their time. They can only be in one place. It's better to have somebody who's engaged than having, you know, a staffer who's engaged than having a member who's running down the halls trying to get somewhere else. So if you get scheduled with staff or you get moved off to staff, that is okay and perfectly fine and perfectly normal and not something to be upset about. As far as reaching out to those offices to work on scheduling, the sooner is better. Like I said, there's a lot of people, you know, demanding some time with the elected official. So once you kind of get those first two things figured out, who's going to go and when you want to do it, having some, you know, submitting a request for a meeting, either over the website that they have or dropping off an invitation or something like that, whatever is kind of the most effective thing. Probably I would say nine times out of ten, it's through the website. But, you know, there are some caveats to that. But the sooner the better so that who's ever doing the scheduling, whatever staff is putting together the schedule, has the best shot of either getting you on the calendar with the elected official or making sure that you can kind of move things around as things tend to pop up. So having some flexibility is important. Being able to kind of get the elected official on the calendar early in the time frame is important. And then we'll kind of get into the actual meat and potatoes of having meetings. Narrative. Super fun. The narrative is the story that you're going to tell that staffer or that elected official. We'll probably dig into narratives a little bit more in another webinar, but as far as kind of getting this off the ground is concerned, here's some important sort of aspects of that. Like I said, you're there to tell a story. For the most part, I would say most meetings are usually only between 20 to 30 minutes, sometimes less. I would say very, very rarely more. I've never heard of an extension of extra time unless the elected official was really into a particular topic. One thing that I just kind of want to highlight for folks that are participating in these types of fly-ins and advocacy days, my boss from Iowa when I worked on the Hill was a king of this tactic stalling, often talking to people about the local sports team or what's going on with the high school football sectionals or whatever. And that kind of like early get to know you type of chit chat is fine, but remember you only have 20 to 30 minutes. So I wouldn't be rude or anything like that until an elected official to like be quiet because we have to talk. But getting them from introductions to actual discussion of what you're there to talk about is kind of important. So don't be afraid to engage in that chit chat, but also don't be falling for that as they try to kind of wiggle out of having maybe some conversations that they either don't want to or want to be asked about things that they don't want to. So one thing that I always tend to highlight is having three to five talking points. You definitely do not want a laundry list of a bunch of stuff. If you're talking about anything more than five or six, you're getting off of the things that ought to be like priorities and into the things that are more likely wants or things that can be discussed at another time. You also don't want to just show up and have nothing to talk about. So that's why planning something around World Hearing Day, maybe putting together a resolution to support World Hearing Day or some other aspects of the calendar that deal with hearing health, hearing health month. That's September, right, Christine? I think so. So something like that or recognizing the chapter for something that is relatively easy to put together and usually doesn't draw a lot of controversy as far as, you know, an elected official supporting something like that, recognizing the chapter for existing for 20 years or 25 years, things like that. If you need to fill out a couple of issues. Also, you know, it's a great idea as you kind of start putting this together. If your state is particularly active on the legislative front to reach out to Christine and myself and we can kind of help you talk about those things that are really important to you. As far as, you know, potential legislation that we've heard about or legislation from a cycle or two a year ago that we need to kind of figure out what where that's going and what's happening. As you kind of put this stuff together, you might be hearing from us about things being adjourned into the next cycle. So we'll be watching things for reintroduction, reconsideration, and there'll be opportunities to sort of either ask for support for different things or vice versa, you know, oppose potential problematic pieces of legislation. So there's plenty of stuff to talk about. We'll help you come up with some if you need to. But and this actually ties back into the timing aspect. If there is a piece of legislation in your state that is really important and looks like it's moving, you might want to consider moving your time frame up a little bit more into the January, February time frame before things really kind of like hit the road as far as legislative activity for that particular year. So one thing that's always interesting is, you know, being able to be interesting and confident without being cocky, without fighting with any of the staff or elected official. You'll sometimes run into people that disagree with you, and that's okay. You don't have to take it personally. It's really important just to maintain sort of a positive, robustly friendly attitude and just being able to kind of talk about how awesome being a hearing aid specialist is and how valuable you are to your patients. It's not just about IHS or hearing instrument specialists. It's about the services that you provide and how that's impactful for your patients. And like I said, we can come out with additional talking points about sort of from a national standpoint or from a state-specific standpoint about sort of the value that you provide and where you are in relation with other industries in this space. But we can work on all that together. It will be lots of fun. Once you have a meeting, you're going to want to follow up. I know this is a lost art and people complain about my generation forgetting about this. So on behalf of all the millennials out there, I'm sorry. It's important to say thank you. Once you've, you know, taken somebody's time, usually a nice thank you note is something that you want to do. Whether that's a physical actual thank you note that is written out by the president or the attendees or, you know, an email that gets sent to the scheduler, that's really kind of like up to you and kind of what makes sense. But, you know, I wouldn't want to dwell on this too much, but I think it's important to kind of send those types of notes with all the follow-up materials, making sure that, you know, if there were any questions that you provide that information to staff or the official, making sure that you let them know that, you know, you appreciated their time. You'd be surprised at how often that kind of makes a difference. So why not just kind of have that, you know, in your pocket ready to go as part of the things that you're willing to do. Another thing that I think people kind of forget about, which is really important, is gathering feedback from the participants in a meeting. You're going to want to know, you know, which member said what, what staffer was friendly or not friendly, who said they wanted to co-sponsor, introduce something, who said that this is a terrible idea, and kind of figure out, you know, what the strategies are as far as, you know, potentially addressing some of those issues or, you know, building on those conversations and trying to get people to be supportive of some of our activities at the state level. So you're going to want to know, you know, who did what and how that went. Usually I recommend having some sort of, like, follow-up sheet at the federal level. We have a bunch of vendors who have apps that put all that together, but I don't think that necessarily is applicable to you guys as far as, like, budgetary aspects and things like that. But just having, you know, somebody with a notebook who can, you know, tally up what happened, provide some feedback, and make sure that if there's opportunities to, like, answer questions and things like that, that you take advantage of all that. And engaging with staff and other folks in the office. If they have an email, this serve has to be placed on that so that if any kind of activities related to hearing health pop up or you're interested in sort of hearing about what's going on in their offices. One thing that I always sort of recommend is take a picture at the office, either with the member or just outside with their placard on the door, letting people know that, hey, you're around. Tag the office on social media, let them know that you were there. And they'll often sort of retweet all that or add in some context about, like, how the conversation went from their perspective, if it was good. So, yeah. Now, the main point of all this is building relationships with elected officials. These are events that I hope, I think, Christine, if I'm right, George is the only one that consistently has done this in the past, correct? I'm not sure if they're the only, but they are one that keeps us posted on their event. Okay. So, like, you know, if George is the only one that I'm aware of, there are other opportunities to kind of build these relationships. And maybe we could have some of the folks at Georgia participate in some of the future webinars about how, you know, they do things. But the whole point of all this is to build those relationships, maintain those relationships, and really kind of, like, you know, start to promote and advocate some of the things that we're working on that are impactful for the membership and you, specifically. So, again, you're going to want to answer any questions from the staff or member. Offer to serve as a resource. It's really important that I would say that you be not necessarily as neutral as possible, but as nice as possible. No need to disparage anybody when talking. There are going to be opportunities to attend other events in the district or the state. If they're local and you're interested, I might behoove you to show up, particularly if a member sort of seemed inclined to support some of our initiatives. You might want to just kind of have that opportunity to sort of touch that point again. Oftentimes, they're looking for things to do. You might want to host a roundtable discussion in a district. Again, another event, have somebody speaking to a bunch of constituents. They're just looking to kind of capitalize on their time and make sure that they're touching as many people as possible, that are potential voters as possible. If the chapter is having an event or a conference, invite some of those elected officials. Again, if there's 100 voters in a room, they're going to probably at least give it some consideration about showing up. Not everybody can attend every event, but usually it's a good idea to at least send that invitation, even if you don't get it at the first bite. Maybe after you do a couple of these things and become more familiar with some of these members, they'll be willing to come to some of those events as far as like chapter level events. The other thing that you can do is donate money, which is a very sort of personal thing, I understand. But if you really feel like a particular leader has been effective and moving a lot of things forward on behalf of hearing specialists, if you think that they might be a future champion or a current champion, it's up to you, but I'm sure that they will take any amount of money for their reelection campaign that you can give them. So that's always an option. The other thing is, hopefully, once you get through a couple of these sort of fly-ins, it all becomes relatively, I don't want to say smooth sailing, but just kind of doing the same thing either year after year or cycle after cycle just becomes muscle memory. And then you have a sort of better idea about what's going on and how to do it. So before we kind of get to some questions, I do just kind of want to talk about a couple of things really briefly. I think, you know, chapter fly-ins, state fly-ins are a great way to get people involved. I know that we were kind of talking about like participants, but just having worked for a few organizations over the years, people are usually excited about them. It's a great way to get people motivated to talk about things. Oftentimes, people are really, really, you know, want to show off, you know, their practice, what they do, how they help people, you know, how rewarding their job is. So, you know, that's one thing that's really great. One thing that I also just kind of want to mention is that I know that this is kind of maybe like second nature for Christine and myself as far as like dealing with like elected officials and staff and stuff like that. People get a little starstruck sometimes. You know, just being a regular person going into, you know, a governor's office. They're just regular people. They're not anything special. They're just really, you know, they're there to be helpful. And the way you can communicate and deliver and show your passion for your profession is just going to sort of reign supreme. One other thing I just kind of also want to mention kind of going back to the scheduling is that there are, you know, when you figure out who your participants are, you're going to want to figure out how many people you want in a meeting. You want to have people there, like I said, that are passionate, but you don't want to overload an office with a bunch of people that aren't going to have time to talk. But a good rule of advice is at least always have two people there. Again, kind of going back to that starstruck aspect, usually if there's a bunch of staff and an elected official, that can be a little overwhelming. But if you have a friend or a colleague, it's a little less scary. So hopefully all of this is very helpful. Christine and I look forward to helping you get all these things off the ground at every place but Georgia. And, you know, this was just kind of like food for thought as you're trying to plan out some events. I think advocacy days are really effective as far as introducing folks to elected officials, to how awesome hearing aid specialists can be, and really sort of being able to be active on those issues in a preventive state. So I'm going to open it up for questions now. Let's see what's going on. If you guys have any questions, I'm sure other people have similar questions. So don't be shy. Hey, Peter, so I'm going to just kick it off with a question which I've received from communications from members like Jerry in the past when we've talked about this event. He wanted to know what the key steps in organizing in Advocacy Day. Well, I think I would encourage Jerry to just take a listen at what I just talked about for the last 40 minutes or so. But I think, like I was talking about, there's kind of a lot of simultaneous things happening at the same time. You're going to want to figure out when the timing is, who's going to be there, what you want to talk about, all that type of stuff. So I think that's really dependent upon how big of a flying you want. Like I said, if there's legislation active in that particular state, you might want to be there earlier in the year and later in the year. If there's not, maybe waiting a little bit more time, having a little bit more time and seeing if something bubbles up because you've heard of something happening in the background. So I think just kind of like going through the stages of the agenda that we kind of just laid out and being able to kind of think about how that all fits together, really will provide sort of that framework for getting an Advocacy Day off the ground. On behalf of Jerry, thank you. Anything else coming up in the chat box? No, I don't see any hands raised at the moment, but I have also some other questions that I've received from our members, just not on Advocacy Day, but just about meeting on a specific issue. But let's talk about what if during that Advocacy Day, a legislator isn't supportive of the cause and the ask? How do you handle that? I think, again, it's very important to maintain a positive and professional attitude. You're gonna run into people that just aren't supportive. They're not buying what you're selling for whatever reason. Maybe their aunt is an audiologist, hardcore through and through. Are there some other reason why they're not sort of favorable, or at least willing to have that discussion? I would give my best, continue to be positive and professional, go through the talking points, be willing to engage on any questions that they have, even if they're really negative, and then be able to provide that feedback to the organizers afterwards. And the thing is, too, is you don't necessarily know what the motivations are for a particular individual providing that pushback in the meeting. Sometimes members and staff like to be kind of like devil's advocates, and really kind of drill down on sort of opposing arguments and things like that. So there might be an actual potential support in the future. Some people just are skeptical about different things that they're just not aware of. So you don't really necessarily know kind of that either personal or professional motivations about why they might be being difficult. So I would just assume that it doesn't matter, and really trying to just do your best. It can be, I know how frustrating that can be if somebody is not willing to kind of engage in a good faith conversation, but it's incumbent on you as the person exercising your First Amendment rights to redress, to really kind of be professional in that regard and make sure that you're presenting the profession of hearing aid specialist as best as possible. Hopefully that helps. I saw something pop on the screen. Yeah, there's a question in the chat box. And this is from Sandy. And she says, hi, Peter. Do you recommend inviting individual legislators to the event via email or through a website? In the past, we have sent paper invites to all legislators prior to our being there. And I think we could possibly do better and have a better turnout. I would check their websites and use whatever medium they request you to request a meeting in. Some legislators have a fill-out form on their website that you type in all the information, tell them who's coming. Others will say email the scheduler at scheduling at somebody.com and they'll kind of process everything. Others are a little bit more old school and either want a paper invite or they want stuff faxed in. I believe most people are kind of turning into the either kind of like generic scheduling email or the online form, but it's really kind of dependent upon like the member himself or the elected official himself. I don't know, Christina, if you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I would just piggyback. If you don't get responses from the emails that you send in, feel free to pick up the phone and call either their capital office or their district office. One of them, potentially both, have schedulers that you could speak to and they can work and help you through the process. They might even be able to schedule it over the phone. I've seen that happen in the past. I think that's a great idea, but I would use that as like a follow-up to whatever their first choice of things is. So if it's like fill out the form and if you haven't heard anything in like a week or so, then call the scheduler and kind of see what's going on. But I would definitely not necessarily call the scheduler without having submitted that information so that they can at least look that stuff up while you're on the phone with them. Do you disagree, Christina? No, no, no, that's what I was implying, that if they don't respond to your emails, it's been a couple of days, weeks, or what have you, obviously feel free to pick up the phone call or send them follow-up emails. And then there was a follow-up question from Sandy, and she's curious to know if you think we should invite specifically the Blue Ribbon Committee. And thanks for your response. I'm assuming, Sandy, you're from Georgia and that Blue Ribbon Committee is the one that's been tasked with looking at the current list of licensees and there's been some very high-level chatter about eliminating some licensees and we've been kind of pulled into that. What do you think about reaching out to them? If I'm correct, Sandy, please correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, I don't think there's any issue in talking and supporting your profession and your job and the things that you are advocating for. I mean, I haven't had to deal with this Ribbon Committee specifically. I don't know if there's any kind of, I would just double-check and see if there's any kind of ethical obligations that they're not allowed to engage in any kind of that. I mean, I'm not, you know, advocacy efforts, but if there are elected officials or appointed officials that have a government job, then they should be able to hear from their constituents. So I don't personally see any issue with that unless there is some sort of other ethical obligation preventing them from engaging with you directly. Christine, are you aware of any of that? If there's a, you know, if you're appointed to this, are you not allowed to talk about? I'm not aware of that, no. I do know that the Blue Ribbon Commission has had several public hearings and we've had, who is on, I believe he's still on, Robert Shoemaker. I think he had to drop off, but Robert Shoemaker has attended and spoken on their behalf, but I'm not sure about the other issue. Yeah, so hopefully that was helpful, Sandy, but I think the more people you talk to, the better off your efforts are gonna be. And I wonder, Peter, if you wanna talk about, you know, some of the common challenges, organizations, or organizing an advocacy day and like how could they overcome them? I know that's a very general, broad question, but just for them to prepare for, you know, the what if. Um, I think the hardest issue, quite frankly, is the scheduling aspect of it, just because it really does, you know, if you're talking about, you know, 20 participants and, excuse me, they have two represent, or they have a representative and they have two state senators, just for an example. I know this is not necessarily always the case, or they might, you know, live in a district and work in a different district. So there might be two for sure, at least two representatives, maybe four state senators. You know, it can be hard to kind of get all of that into, you know, one day of meetings. You don't want to overload anybody with like 20 meetings, but at the same time, you want people to kind of like, if you're doing this, you want them to engage with, like I said, as many people as possible. So you're going to want to do a little bit of homework, probably on the scheduling side about maybe who you really want to talk to. You might want to focus on some of those, like some of those elected officials on the committee of jurisdiction. You might want to, you know, talk to people that you haven't talked to before. So if you've done this before and engaged some of these people and some of the new elected officials might be higher on your list just to kind of get to know them and educate them about the issues. So I would just, I think that's going to be like the hardest sort of pressure point is that can require, you know, a bunch of work and getting all that kind of like scheduled. As far as sort of like preparation, you know, talking and kind of getting everybody on board and prepped on the narrative and what you want to talk about. Usually what I've done is a couple of weeks out have kind of like a webinar like we're having now, a Zoom call to talk about kind of the talking points and what you want to discuss and what you want to get out of it and talk about, you know, sort of the follow-up aspects of the fill out the sheet and what kind of, you know, grab all the business cards types of things. And then usually a day or two before I recommend kind of like having an in-person or at least the morning of, you know, having breakfast together, putting out all of the talking points, making sure that everybody has them as they kind of start walking around and is knowledgeable about any kind of changes or what you really want to discuss as a priority and things like that. So that everybody's like prepped and ready to go. The other thing that I would highlight for people looking to plan some of these events is just like, there's just a certain level of chaos that you have to be comfortable with. Things get moved around, schedules get shifted, a member gets sick, staffer had to leave early. So you're just going to have to like kind of roll with the punches a little bit. Sometimes, you know, things change on your end. So you have to kind of be able to pivot. So it's just, I think just kind of having that flexibility and able to kind of respond to, you know, problems in real time is just key. And then being able to kind of really lock down a schedule that makes sense is also key. Right, and you talked about printing out talking points and what have you. What are your thoughts on currently? Do we still leave or create leave-behinds? I know a lot of people have mixed opinions about leave-behinds. I think kind of with the advent of email and the ability to kind of have electronic versions of data and flashy spreadsheets and information and infographics and all that type of stuff. I'm not, I know some people really kind of like cling to that paper copy. And so like, if that's you or your chapter, that's fine. I would recommend, you know, having a paper copy to give to every office, I guess. But I would definitely recommend having electronic materials that you can directly send to staff as a follow-up and include that with your thank you. I would not waste a lot of money printing out like a bunch of stuff, like maybe one or two sheets that, you know, that have information about your chapter and the things that you want to talk about, but definitely not. I would tend to err on less resources, more accessibility as far as being able to kind of respond to questions and push out electronic versions to the offices as quickly as possible. Okay. But that's just me. So really, if you really want to lug around like 18 copies of a piece of paper and leave them at the office, I just know from a staffing perspective, things that just kind of cluttered up my desk usually just ended up in the trashcan eventually if they weren't necessarily like a must-do priority like that moment. But the things that got emailed to me would get flagged and then sort of work their way through the system as I was able to kind of work on them. So, you know, and maybe that's something that you ask the staff when you're in your meeting if they prefer to have a leave behind or want to email to them. I would say probably 99 times out of a hundred, they would prefer the email, but there might be that old school person that really just wants a paper copy. So, okay. Well, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out this afternoon. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate you spending an hour with us this afternoon. Thank you for the wonderful questions, Jerry and Sandy, wherever you might be. And keep your eyes peeled for sort of the next round of these early in 2025 sometime.

advocacy

IHS

webinar

legislators

storytelling

Peter Mihalik

Christine Seitz

in-person meetings

e-learning