Kentucky Retired Teachers Association

Background:
The Kentucky Retired Teachers Association (KRTA) needed an advocacy campaign to defend against anticipated dramatic cuts to pensions and health insurance for retired teachers in Kentucky, among other things, beginning in late 2017.

Challenge:
The KRTA needed a way to educate and mobilize thousands of retired teachers, as well as generating new supporters, to defend their pensions from attacks by the alliance of a very reform-adamant Republican Governor (Bevin) and a Republican supermajority in the House and Senate. They also needed a way to mobilize new supporters and keep everyone informed as the complicated issue grew and evolved, especially when pressure was needed. Most of the KRTA members are elderly and not well-versed with technology and often use outdated technology. So any interfaces created needed to be ultra-simple and extremely accessible across all [even antiquated] browsers for all age groups and devices, but remain predominantly useful even for the younger generations that require quick operation and instant gratification.

However, we didn’t want a scorched policy. We needed to generate pressure and bring legislators to the table for useful discussions and collaboration with retired teachers.

Strategy:
It was clear to me that for this campaign to be successful we needed to create tools that allow retired teachers and other supporters in Kentucky to educate themselves, as well as others, and then drive them all to some useful action. After collaborating with KRTA’s employed lobbying team it was determined that direct communication from constituents, in the form of letters or phone calls, was the most useful action to sway the minds of state-level legislators. Using this, the entire campaign was built to drive people to send a letter via the website or, in certain cases, drive people to make phone calls with simple scripts.

I chose the organization name, “Teach Frankfort to Pay Their Debts” (shortened to Teach Frankfort in most cases) as a starting point for new branding a new website to be the advocacy face of the campaign and provide separation from normal member services. The name was used as a tool to distinctly re-frame conversations around our key messaging point, which was, “Frankfort had not paid their obligated amount to the pension funds repeatedly over the years, and that resulted in stunted growth. Frankfort did not pay their debts.” The simple underlying message with the new name was that everyone must pay their debts – a lesson we were all surely taught while in school.

Solution:
Bright colors were used, not for teachers, but to remind every non-teacher visitor of a simpler time in life when they were in gradeschool as children; a time when teachers were some of their first real authority figures aside from parents or relatives. The Teach Frankfort website was optimized as a tool to have visitors send letters to legislators, with a program embedded in an always-present popup so users would never have to leave the page they were on to immediately advocate for our cause, almost like obediently following the teacher’s instructions. All methods of communication were designed to maximize letter-sending or phone calls to legislators, or in other cases to simply educate and prime supporters for mobilization when needed.

The core strategy with the campaign was positioning teachers as extremely educated but underpaid authority figures, and then using plain-speak language to deliver explanations from a place of intellectual superiority – without sounding whiney or entitled – and while retaining the image of a frail but compassionate old teacher. To potential allies we wanted to be perceived as the adult in the room, calmly providing the truth.

Effects:
Since this campaign became active, no legislation which negatively impacts retired teachers has been successfully passed into law. Campaign remains active.

I developed and optimized this campaign to maximize advocacy response and it resulted in thousands of messages and calls. We have had several reports during strong advocacy pushes that the call center for Kentucky Legislative Hotline had essentially been shut down by the efforts of our members using the system we developed.

While other groups involved in the fight like the Kentucky Educators Association (KEA) have focused on sick-outs and dramatic in-person protests drawing disapproval and ire, our strategy resulted in a far more focused impact that was critically free of public embarrassment for legislators while still maintaining pressure. This more “reasonable” approach has increased our organization’s bargaining power with legislators on these important issues.

View the campaign website at TeachFrankfort.org

Examples from the campaign are at the top of this page.