Advocacy

From LUNARwiki

Hello,

I was reading over my husband's shoulder and feel that I can add something to the discussion. I have experience with advocacy and 501(c)3 organizations having, among other things, served as Legislative Director for a statewide organization with 140,000 members. Please forgive the length of this message as it is difficult to outline advocacy without going into some detail. Organizations such as NAR certainly can participate in the advocacy process in three different ways.

The first way is through education which has two parts. Your organization can educate lawmakers and regulatory agencies without much restriction as long as you educate to issues rather than specific pieces of legislation. This could include visits to explain the hobby, videos, general discussion on topics such as safety, etc. You can also educate your members on voting records of lawmakers and stances on issues of candidates. At least once or twice a year, you can compile voting records on your issues and publish it to your members and the public. You can also state what the organization wanted to happen to each issue. What gets you into trouble is if you take it a step further and state "vote for so-and-so because he votes for us". That takes the voting record out of the arena of education and into the forbidden territory of endorsing a candidate or a political person which in turn puts your 501(c)3 status at risk. The other method of education is to send out a questionnaire to candidates and compile their responses. Again, as long as you present the material as an education piece and ask everyone the same questions you should be okay.

The second method of advocacy is through lobbying which is generally defined as asking a lawmaker or a regulatory agency to take specific action on a specific piece of legislation, etc. A 501(c)3 organization can lobby as long as they do not exceed a threshold of financial and organizational resources. This is where it gets really complicated as the threshold is ill-defined unless an organization elects to take a "Section H" which gives more clearly defined limits. I don't know all of what you do as an organization but I doubt you even come close to meeting the threshold.

The third method is to collaborate with like organizations in furthering your legislative agenda and again, this can split into education or lobbying following the same general guidelines described above. This would be similar to things such as your current collaboration with Tripoli (although that is a legal collaboration rather than an advocacy collaboration) and you may also have other collaborative arrangements that I am not aware of.

Some 501(c)3 organizations want to do more such as endorse specific candidates in which case they generally form a separate organization such as a political action committee. I know of some charitable organizations that have three separate and distinct organizations, a foundation, an education arm and political action committee. Any individual can endorse a candidate without going through all that rigmarole however they should not do so using their position in the organization or using organization resources. In some climates, even mentioning a candidates name on a list serve such as this can bring the light of unwanted attention onto the organization. Congress reacted to lapses in the business arena, such as Enron, with greater controls (The Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and there are some indications that congress will turn its eyes toward the non-profit world.

Thank you for your patience and if you want to discuss advocacy off-line I can be reached at pattyweiser@ccser.com