Hello, I'm Chris Roy, Business Development with Summit in Hutchison, Kansas. Coming on today to talk to you about attending a representative call as part of the Advocacy 101 curriculum. Currently, AAOE utilizes LobbyIt to help us with advocacy calls to the offices of representatives and senators. And here's a list of helpful considerations when joining these calls. Number one, research your issue. Take some time before the call to understand what you're going to be discussing. I know when I first joined the Advocacy Council a couple years ago, I joined my first call and kind of sat as a fly on the wall because I wasn't 100% certain on what was going to take place. I was also quite nervous about speaking about potential laws and things of that nature and different bills and things that were before the legislators. So hopefully, this course content will help you to understand the process better, understand how to flow through it, and just be natural with it. Second thing you want to do, identify your legislators, know who you're talking to. It's helpful to know if they sponsor, co-sponsor one of the bills that you want to talk about. Get that call scheduled. Like I said, currently, AAOE uses LobbyIt to schedule those calls and help host those and introduce the AAOE members to the staffers. Make sure you prepare your talking points by creating a list of concise points. Clearly articulate your position, why it's important, and any evidence that can support that. One of the biggest things that I've learned over these last couple years on the Advocacy Council is to personalize the message. Talk about why it matters to the people in your community that an action, a bill, law take place, why changes take place. Connect the dots so that when the staffers talking to their bosses, they can help illustrate what's going on. Know what you're asking for, be concise. Make sure you understand the legislative process. There's other content within the Advocacy 101 curriculum that's going to help walk you through that if you don't know anything about the legislative process. So I encourage you to do check that out. Also be respectful. You're going to be talking to people that you might not agree with politically. It doesn't matter. They're happy to talk to us. They're happy to talk to you. They're happy that someone wants to take the time to help them understand an issue better or maybe take a different perspective to an issue. So keep that in mind, but be respectful. I also like to have something in front of me when I'm on these calls so that I can better understand my notes so I can follow along and help show people what's going on and what we're talking about. So I'm going to share my screen here, and we're also going to share this in the notes section of this content for this video. Right here, I have my notes, what I just walked through with you all, and I also have some notes on different issues that AOE is tracking. Here's one on payment reform. I have notes on prior authorization reform, physician-owned hospital expansion, and it goes on from there. It's useful to be able to pull from these and give real-life stats to the staffers when you're talking to them. Finally, when we're finishing a call, it's good to get their contact information, and Joseph Matthews has prepared several one-pagers, if you will. I have one pulled up right here on physician-owned hospital expansion, talking about what it's calling for, why it's important, and being able to give that to the staffer so that they have something they can share with their boss. It also helps make the calls more engaging because they're able to interact with you and not just spend all their time trying to take notes. I hope this helps you out. I hope it gives you a little bit of confidence to jump on the horn and talk to your legislators, and thank you very much for taking the time to view this content.

advocacy calls

Advocacy 101 curriculum

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