Wonk WeekDigital

Americans for the Arts runs federal advocacy out of DC, but the real work happens through a network Jay Dick has spent his career building. Fifty independent statewide arts advocacy organizations, thousands of local arts agencies, and a strict rule that AFTA never does state or local advocacy unless invited. Jay explains how he keeps that many independent groups pointed in the same direction without ever acting like their parent. He talks through why he ditched the giant 700 person fly-in for small, targeted 15 to 20 person trips planned just weeks out. If you manage a national network of independent state or local partners, this is the playbook.

Micron is in the middle of a 250 billion dollar push to build six new chip fabs in the United States, the first new memory fabs built here in 20 years. Jessica McBroom works policy for Micron and is watching her own team's AI use evolve in real time, from testing five or six different models to figure out how a bill might hit the business, to rolling out Claude Cowork company wide, to a straight up bonus goal tied to AI adoption. In this session, Jessica walks through how a company that makes AI chips is putting AI to work on its own government affairs team, what has worked, what didn't, and what her team is building next.

Coalitions look great on a slide and fall apart constantly in practice. This panel gets past the theory and into the mechanics. Eric Ellman, Amanda Koonjbeharry, and Christopher Garcia have each built coalitions from a different seat — trade association, local government, and inside companies like Uber — and they will walk through how to actually run one. Expect practical answers on how to bring in partners who are not obviously aligned with you but strengthen your position anyway, how to divide the work so egos do not sink the effort, how to tell early whether a member is pulling their weight, and when it is worth having the hard conversation about it instead of working around it. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of how to size up potential coalition partners, structure the work so it survives disagreement, and know when a coalition is worth building at all versus a time sink dressed up as strategy.

When a government shutdown wiped out the Capitol Hill event Rachel Sherman-Presser had spent months planning, an offhand joke about rescheduling it for Valentine's Day turned into something much bigger. Built around the Love Your Eyes campaign, Rachel took fewer than 100 advocates' personal messages about vision and eye health and turned them into 438 valentines, one hand-delivered to every House office. She layered those cards with a Capitol Hill vision screening and in-person meetings, and the result was Prevent Blindness's best-attended Hill screening to date, from a grassroots list far smaller than the reach it produced. Rachel walks through the trial and error behind it, what worked, what she'd change, and why the best advocacy idea is sometimes the weird one you're not quite sure will work.

Steve Roney has spent his career bringing AI into comms and public affairs work, most recently at a federal agency covering product safety. In this session Steve shares the practical AI applications that have actually moved the needle for his team: restructuring press releases so they get picked up and surfaced more easily, using AI for rapid response on breaking news, and finding the niche outlets and reporters who actually cover your specific issue. These are wins any comms team can put to use fast.

Most organizations run PAC and grassroots as two separate operations with two separate systems, even though the same people are often behind both. This session covers what happens when you combine them into a single action center instead. You will hear how PAC activity and grassroots activity actually feed each other, how engagement in one program becomes a signal for who to activate in the other, and how to build that connection instead of leaving each program to guess what the other is doing. We will also cover how to open a standalone action center to people who are not members at all, so anyone who cares about the issue can get involved, not just your existing base. Come ready to think through what a combined system could look like for your own organization.

When your team is smaller than your workload, you cannot do everything, so you have to get ruthless about what actually moves the needle. This session covers how to make that call. You will hear how to shift from mass action alerts to higher impact tactics like video story campaigns, how to use data to map where your advocate base is thin so budget requests come with proof instead of a gut feeling, and how to narrow your focus down to the one or two people who actually decide an issue instead of spreading your members thin across everyone. It also gets into the part nobody talks about enough: managing a small team well, figuring out who needs more attention and who needs to be left alone, and getting the most out of people without micromanaging them.

AI can prep you for a meeting. It cannot walk into the meeting and read the room for you. This session is built around that line and what sits on either side of it. You will hear how to use AI to distill long, dense research reports down to the points that actually matter before a Hill meeting, how to comb through old email threads to recall the small personal details that make a relationship feel real, like a donor's kid's name or a birthday you mentioned once years ago, and how to stop losing CRM data because nobody had time to type it in after a meeting. The point is not to hand off the relationship to a tool. It is to walk into every conversation better prepared and more present, because the busywork got handled and you can focus on the part only a person can do.

Audubon has about 20 policy staff tracking bills and lawmaker relationships across federal and state government, and getting all of that into something leadership can actually glance at and understand took real trial and error. This session covers how Audubon built dashboards inside Quorum to track top priority bills, see momentum on legislation, and monitor interactions across the whole policy team, plus how they layered in a map widget to show bill sponsors and target districts. Along the way, you will also get a look at one of the more memorable ways Audubon builds relationships on Capitol Hill: nonpartisan bird watching outings!

Jordan Wildermuth runs policy for Family Connects across federal, state, and local government as a team of one, tracking bills across 21 states with the help of a Quorum tracking board and daily digests, and increasingly leaning on AI to draft summaries for leadership and speed up research on things like white papers and comment letters. Joe Kolman built a legislation tracking dashboard from scratch for CSG West that now follows wildfire policy across 13 Western states, all without a big team behind him. In this session they get into how a small policy shop keeps eyes on legislation everywhere it needs to be, where AI actually saves real time versus where it just feels like it does, and how they decide what is worth their limited hours and what to let go. Jordan in particular gets into a hard lesson: learning to stop chasing every lead just because it might go somewhere, and building a real strategy instead of reacting to everything at once.

Jonathan Rufrano has spent his career trying to make Congress understand a technology most lawmakers assumed was only good for illicit finance. As a director at The Digital Chamber, he has watched that fight evolve from basic education and myth-busting in the early years to a real seat at the table, culminating in the Clarity Act moving through both chambers. In this session Jonathan walks through how a small, cause-driven team built that momentum: finding the handful of members willing to take a political risk on new technology, turning junior staffers hungry for a new policy portfolio into champions, and eventually flying a hundred member companies to the Hill at once to make the case in person. He also gets into who actually moves a skeptical office, and it is not always the biggest bank in the room. Sometimes it is the local credit union member down the street. Walk away with a real look at how to take something genuinely hard to explain and build the relationships and the language that finally get it heard.