I started my career in association management as a staff lobbyist for the Iowa Medical Society. Why you ask? Well, to paraphrase my father, “You’re not well suited to useful work; maybe try lobbying.”
Well, in honor of the midterms and elections far and wide, perhaps we should spend a moment on government advocacy.
For most of my career, association advocacy rested on one very dependable assumption: government is slow. Regardless of which party held power, policy moved through committees, comment periods, and precedent at a pace a well-run government relations program could anticipate.
You built relationships over years. You tracked bills over sessions. You learned to golf. You practiced holding a plate and a glass simultaneously at a reception. You had time to educate members before a change ever reached them.
Association Laboratory’s newest research suggests that many associations have not fully grasped what a changing government affairs environment means for how they fund, govern, and run their advocacy programs.
Growing member frustration with government advocacy now shows up in our client research. Reduced willingness to engage in advocacy. Increased demands for successful outcomes, not descriptions of activity.
It’s not about improving; it’s about reimagining the advocacy business model’s role and structure.
Washington changed speed
“Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” — James Lane Allen.
Unfortunately, many associations are following the advice of Casey Stengel.
“All right, everyone line up alphabetically according to your height.” — Casey Stengel
To complete the trifecta, I think many associations are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and hoping for the best.
Consider Exhibit A, the Trump Administration. It operates differently than its predecessors. It relies heavily on executive action. It pursues a broad agenda on many fronts at once, and it changes direction often.
Example in Practice
This is what this looks like in practice. My lovely bride, Martha, is responsible for updating CEOs, CFOs, and senior risk officers at large banks on our beloved administration’s changing actions. This is her second most important job, after working hard to deliver client value so she can fund her husband’s many varied, mostly irresponsible hobbies.
Every Friday evening (about the time I’m back from shooting sporting clays), she approves her team’s effort, and off it goes, providing useful interpretation of the administration’s actions.
Saturday mornings, after a quick check of the news, often begin with MOTHER F****R. This is what happens when the Trump Administration changes policy or people overnight, making her and her team’s well-thought-out analysis mostly useless.
Whatever your view of their agenda, the operating reality for association leaders is the same: decisions that once took a legislative session now take days.
In addition, political leaders of both parties will learn from this, and these same strategies will soon be commonly practiced regardless of the administration and in state governments throughout the United States.
No good deed goes unpunished, that sort of thing.
Most association advocacy infrastructure, from the annual legislative agenda to the spring fly-in to the coalition sign-on letter, was designed for a world of precedent and deliberation. It wasn’t designed for the current and emerging reality facing associations that rely on government affairs to deliver member value.
In Association Laboratory’s Looking Forward® Impact 2026 study:
- 57% say political and regulatory uncertainty is reducing their members’ ability to forecast and plan, up from 36% in 2021.
- 53% cite reduced government spending, investment, or reimbursement as a factor affecting members.
- 47% point to inconsistent policy goals between governmental bodies.
All of this is landing on top of an unpredictable economy.
A SIMPLE RISK TEST
The more you or your members rely on the federal or state government, whether for funding, reimbursement, contracts, or regulatory stability, the more likely you are to be affected.
It’s the structure, stupid.
Here is what struck me most in our Looking Forward® Challenges 2026 data. For years, one of the bigger barriers to advocacy success was simply informing members about policy changes. Associations have largely solved that problem. The barriers now are more fundamental:
- Aligning advocacy with member needs rose from 23% in 2021 to 32% in 2026, the largest gain of any advocacy barrier we track. If you don’t represent your members, they won’t like what you do.
- Sustaining member financial support for advocacy climbed to 34%, up from 23% in 2024. If members don’t like what you do, they give you less money.
- Making the association’s voice heard among competing groups (39%) and identifying the best way to influence government policy (34%) remain near the top of the list. Out of all the (checks Internet) a billion quadrillion advocacy entities and voices, how are you distinct?
Nothing in this data is specific to the Trump Administration. These are structural issues, not partisan issues.
Put plainly, members are asking two questions: Is the advocacy agenda about me? Are my dues buying anything?
When 81% of association leaders say economic pressure is the top issue facing their members, every discretionary dollar gets scrutinized.
To a squeezed member, advocacy is discretionary. Particularly when you can’t demonstrate outcomes, only activity.
Don’t be fooled by the headline number.
In the interest of honesty, I should point out something that, dare I say, complicates this story. Nuance, thy name is Dean.
The share of association executives who say they are “concerned” about their advocacy strategy actually fell to 30% in 2026. Advocacy remains the third-ranked strategic concern, behind membership and essentially tied with face-to-face meetings, but it is well below the 45% we saw in 2022.
This is not good news.
Concern about advocacy has swung between 18% and 45% over five years. It rises and falls with the news cycle. Urgency is not the same thing as importance.
Meanwhile, structural barriers in funding and member mandates kept climbing even as concern eased.
Painting the porch while the foundation crumbles.
Our Looking Forward® Solutions 2026 study shows associations responding sensibly to tight capacity.
Educating members on advocacy efforts and successes is the top-ranked advocacy strategy at 71%, the highest level in the six-year series. Identifying micro-opportunities for member involvement, such as quick-response alerts and single-issue campaigns, has grown in every wave, from 25% in 2021 to 39% today.
Both are rational responses to members who want proof of value and have less time to give.
Two other trends worry me. Creating or participating in advocacy coalitions fell from 56% in 2024 to 36% in 2026. Investment in policy thought leadership, meaning original research and white papers, sits at 20%, down from 30% in 2021.
You can’t build credible, effective government affairs programs without investing in friends and credible knowledge.
Think about the environment those decisions are being made in. The number of voices competing for a policymaker’s attention keeps growing while the number of policymakers stays roughly constant.
Thirty-five percent of association leaders now worry about inaccurate public representations of their members’ industry or profession, and 51% cite declining trust in experts.
Americans’ trust in the mass media hit a record low in Gallup’s most recent reading. In that environment, coalitions and credible, original research are among the few tools that help your association cut through the noise.
There is one more ominous sign.
Employer travel restrictions are now cited by 62% of associations as a barrier to face-to-face meetings, up from 34% in 2024. We usually treat that as a meetings problem. But the same employers are deciding whether your volunteer leaders get the time and travel budget for Hill visits and state capitol days.
Last Call from My Seat at the Bar
I’ve been a lobbyist, and I don’t remember telling my volunteer leaders too many times that we weren’t doing an awesome job. A couple of years ago, I followed the traditional “State of Congress” presentation by the staff and a contract lobbyist at an association where they insisted everything was fine. The new chair is our “friend”; all is good.
Of course, your lobbyist will tell you that. Your lobbying firm will tell you that in BOLD ALL CAPS and charge you $750 an hour for the privilege.
The associations that come out of this period stronger will not necessarily be the ones with the largest government relations budgets. They will be the ones that stopped running an advocacy model built for a government that no longer exists.
The old model asked, “How do we tell members what we did?” The new one asks, “Are we working on what members need, fast enough to matter, in a way we can demonstrate, and they are willing to pay for?”
Without rethinking the assumptions behind how you define, organize for, and implement a reimagined government affairs advocacy business model, I fear many associations will end up organizing their efforts alphabetically by height.
Good luck with that.
Just some thoughts from my seat at the bar.