Brian Phillips, Texas Public Policy Foundation

This week Cord interviewed Brian Phillips, the Vice President for Communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Cord & Brian discussed launching a policy tour of Texas, integrating polling into your organization, and how TPPF took on a recent property tax reform effort.

Policy Tour

Bringing political campaign experience to the policy world
How TPPF took its show on the road and toured Texas with policy experts.
Getting local or state press to cover events focused on policy
How TPPF chooses a venue, format, and subject for each of its policy tour stops
Inviting a state rep to these stops to increase audience engagement
Streaming events live
Limiting analysts to only three slides for their presentations
Critiquing presentations after the facts and continuously improving
How to plan a tour like this
Managing town-hall-style presentations
Money, manpower, and message
Offering an exclusive to local papers
Using polling to measure the effectiveness of the tour

Polling & Messaging

Writing poll questions that tell you something useful, rather than confirming your priors
Digging into polling cross tabs to find out where an issue is resonating or with what group of people
Integrating polling and messaging into your organization
Using Facebook for quick-and-dirty message testing
Selling policy experts on changing messaging by using data

Property Tax Reform Campaign

Policy issue campaigns are all about following the issue, reacting to news, and nuturing the messaging along the way
Phases: public education, creating activitists, mobilizing activitists
Polling helped to establish the "intensity" of this issue for voters
Polling also showed that any reform needed to result in lower taxes, not just slowed tax growth or a different arrangement
Creating a property tax calculator that would show voters their tax bill for the next 10 years
Crafting poll questions to get real data, not just virtue signaling
How releasing the results of a poll shifted the nature of the property tax reform plan
Getting started with polling by using it on an issue where you're simply stuck

Brian's book recommendation: Damage Control (Revised & Updated): The Essential Lessons of Crisis Management by Eric Dezenhall.

Brian shouts-out Illinois Policy Institutes's news-focused approach to policy and the Foundation for Government Accountability's communication's team as great examples of successes in marketing good public policy.

Brian also advocated trying new things, even if those things are only new to you. R&D can mean "rip-off and duplicate."

Parting wisdom: there's no such thing as "the general public." You must have an audience in mind with everything you write or create.

Please remember to rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, follow Tallest Tree Digital on Twitter, like our page on Facebook, and share this show with other public policy marketing and communications professionals like you.