News
210 members hold 96 Hill meetings on Advocacy Day
Association executives met with congressional offices on postal rates and federal grant rules.
Two hundred ten members held 96 meetings with congressional offices at NANA's Advocacy Day in Washington on April 17. The Mid-Atlantic chapter hosted the day, as it does every year, drawing members from all six of NANA's chapters to the capital.
What members asked for
Members split into teams by state delegation and carried two messages into their meetings:
Support for postal rate relief for nonprofit mailers, a concern shared by organizations that rely on mail for renewal notices and member communications
Opposition to a proposed cap on indirect costs for federal grant recipients, which would affect any member organization that relies on federal grant funding for programs
Simone Radcliffe, NANA's director of public policy, said the format is deliberately simple. "We give members two asks, not ten. A staffer who hears the same two things from 96 different meetings remembers them. Ten asks and they remember none."
Preparing members for the Hill
NANA's policy team ran a training session the morning of Advocacy Day, walking first-time attendees through what to expect in a congressional office meeting, how to leave behind a one-page summary of the ask, and how to follow up afterward. Radcliffe said roughly a third of this year's attendees were on the Hill for the first time.
"The first meeting I ever had on the Hill, I thought the staffer was humoring me. By the third meeting that morning I realized she'd actually read the one-pager we left behind in the last office."
— first-time attendee, relayed by chapter staff
Where members came from
Attendees traveled from across the country, with the Mid-Atlantic chapter's home turf giving it the advantage of a short trip and the largest single delegation. Members from smaller chapters, including Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest, still made the trip in numbers larger than in past years, according to chapter staff who coordinated travel.
What happens next
NANA's policy team will follow up with each office that took a meeting over the coming weeks, tracking responses and flagging any office that signals support for either ask. Advocacy Day returns to Washington again next April, and Radcliffe said the team is already looking at whether next year's asks should stay the same or shift depending on where the postal-rate and grant-cap issues stand by then.
Why the chapter model matters here
Radcliffe credited the chapter structure with making Advocacy Day possible at this scale. Each chapter recruits its own delegation months in advance, and chapter staff handle logistics — travel, scheduling meetings with home-state offices, and matching first-time attendees with a more experienced member for their first meeting of the day. Without that groundwork, Radcliffe said, a single national team could not have booked 96 meetings in one day.
The policy team is also tracking which asks land best with which kinds of offices, comparing responses from members' delegations against the same offices' responses in past years, to refine next year's talking points before training begins again. Radcliffe said the team will publish a short debrief for chapter staff before recruitment for next year's delegation opens.