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National Parks Action Fund
How migrating to an interactive scorecard helped get the attention of Congressional Representatives and generate over 130K Facebook engagements.
The National Park Action Fund (Action Fund) works to ensure national parks are a priority for elected leaders. The nonprofit’s fundamental goal is to protect, restore, and fund the National Park System. It does this by informing the public about threats facing national parks, educating Congressional members about proposals to help parks, and influencing their positions to forward those proposals.
The Problem
In 2016, the Action Fund released its first Congressional Scorecard to assess members of the 114th Congress on key votes concerning park funding, park conservation and preservation, climate change, and wildlife protection. The Scorecard was shared in the usual PDF format that many organizations use.
While it looked nice, it didn't get much interactive attention. The Action Fund realized that a more robust design and functionality were needed to engage constituents and sway members of Congress.
The Solution
The Action Fund partnered with us to upgrade its 2020 Scorecard for the 116th Congress, as well as create a running scorecard for outside of election years. Revive helped the Action Fund find a more effective alternative to a PDF format by using BillTrack50 Scorecards, which are interactive displays that are easy to create, customize, and share.
The vast functionality of the BillTrack50 Scorecards allowed Revive to create a more visually appealing and engaging 2020 Scorecard for the Action Fund. With Revive and BillTrack50, a new running scorecard was also launched — the Congressional Vote Tracker. Constituents can now see how elected leaders are voting on park issues throughout the congressional session.
The Action Fund shared the scorecard on both Facebook and Twitter through paid advertisements during the 2020 election session. For additional impact, the nonprofit also sends vote recommendations to members of Congress and stresses that the Action Fund may score the vote for its scorecard.
Results
The results were significant and show how we Impact Legislation.® In addition to the quantitative data showing an increase in support from Congress, the Action Fund saw many members of Congress mentioning their grades (usually the good ones) through social media posts.
Furthermore, the new interactive scorecard allowed the Action Fund and citizens to hold members of Congress accountable for their votes. Constituents could easily look up their own representatives and see how they voted. Those same constituents would have this information when voting in the 2020 election.
Fast forward to today, the Action Fund continues to post about the running scorecard tracker on social media to keep constituents informed and influence Congressional leaders.
“The plugin integrates beautifully with our WordPress site. It is easy to look up votes, specify our position, and generate the scores.
The team at Revive was very responsive to our specific needs when creating our scorecard. They are constantly very responsive and on top of all of our requests. We greatly enjoy working with them and their great service!”
National Parks Action Fund
Notable Online Shares
The Action Fund’s Scorecard has been shared on Facebook over 130,000 times, including elected leaders like Sen. Bob Menendez, New Jersey; Rep. Al Lawson, Jr., Florida; Rep. John Sarbanes, Maryland; and Sen. Jacky Rosen, Nevada.
The Scorecard was also featured on Congresswoman Joyce Beatty’s website at beatty.house.gov, Representative Al Lawson Jr’s website at lawson.house.gov, as well as press releases and other media.
Award Nomination
Natalie Levine and Bev Stanton were nominated for a 2021 Women in Government Relations (WGR) Excellence in Advocacy Award due to their work on the Action Fund’s scorecard. The nomination was in the Federal Issue Campaign category, which describes “An effort wherein the advocate(s) successfully impacted the outcome of a federal legislative or regulatory problem or opportunity on behalf of their cause, issue, client, organization or coalition.”