Top 5 Tips for Being a Grasstops Organizing Rockstar
AYELET HINES

Back in the day, grasstops organizing referred to “Astroturf” lobbying, or fake grassroots lobbying performed by citizens and community leaders who had been bought off by well-funded corporate interests, named after the rootless, fake grass laid down in football stadiums and front porches throughout Washington, DC. Plenty of corporations that don’t act in the best interest of the public still have very active fake “citizen-based” campaigns.

But you can kick some serious campaign ass if you know how to plan and execute a successful grasstops strategy by covering these five bases...

Drinker Biddle & Reath cultivates the ‘grass tops’ over grass roots
By Catherine Ho November 18, 2012
Annette Iacono, vice president of a small clinical laboratory in Brookhaven, Pa., joked to lobbyist Erin Will Morton, “Have you reached puberty yet?”

Iacono and Morton, a health care lobbyist at Drinker Biddle & Reath, were role-playing what might happen the next day when Iacono headed to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers about cuts in Medicare payments to labs that could hurt her business. Iacono was making light of a common misstep — being dismissive of youthful-looking congressional staffers — and the exchange was part of a training session Morton and fellow lobbyist Julie Scott Allen put on last week for 40 managers of small and mid-size laboratories on how to meet with elected officials.

The 90-minute crash course is part of a multi-pronged advocacy campaign Morton and Allen designed for the National Independent Laboratory Association, a trade group that represents small clinical labs. It is centered around the idea that lawmakers may respond better to voters and their personal stories than they might to a paid lobbyist.

Drinker Biddle, whose 20-member lobby shop specializes in health care, has long offered such training to clients, for years holding similar sessions for several hundred people at a time before they were to meet with Congress members. But Drinker Biddle’s smaller, targeted training with NILA is part of the firm’s push to fine-tune this approach by zeroing in on a subset of constituents from specific states and districts whose interests align with those of the lawmakers they’re meeting with. Iacona, for example, runs the Pennsylvania-based Brookside Clinical Laboratory — which serves patients in Delaware — so the firm helped set up meetings between Iacona and representatives from both states.

“It used to be the focus was bringing in 100 to 500 people from across the country, doing a big training, then blitzing the Hill,” said Ilisa Halpern Paul, who chairs the lobby group at Drinker Biddle. “We still do that ... However, we’ve added hand-picking advocates from a particular set of districts or states and doing a very tailored, more intensive training with them.”

Grass roots gives way to ‘grass tops’