How to Advocate

Hopefully you’ve figured out why you want to begin getting involved with developments in the profession. Now, the daunting task still sits before you: how?

It’s easy to drown under the volume of information out there in the world. The first priority that makes advocacy possible is turning the world of information into bite-sized chunks. That’s the million dollar question, though: how does anyone do that? With so many specialties, so many possible career paths for a pharmacist, and so many pieces of legislation that impact the profession, it’s what so many organizations - not just pharmacy groups - pay lobbyists and staff to do.

Informing Yourself
One of the easiest ways to narrow down your search on which issues to look at is to visit an organization's webpage, as linked on the "Why Advocate?" page. Different organizations across the nation provide information on the policies that they find relevant to their members. It’s not necessary to be a member of an organization to advocate, but their websites can serve as a useful starting point to find current issues and policies that will impact pharmacy.

If you’d prefer to inform yourself, the easiest way right now - beyond organizational advocacy newsletters - is Twitter. All the major news outlets, organizational leaders, legislators, and generally anyone with information will take to Twitter with their news. The easiest way to organize the onslaught of information from Twitter is by making your own list. A Twitter list is like a private news feed you can check at your whim to get updates, and it’s a great tool to stay in the know. This can take anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours to set up, depending on how many lists you want to create, and what information you want to gather. Outside of professional organization websites, Twitter is the way to go.

Acting On That Information
With the information at hand, how does one utilize it? There’s a couple different ways. In regards to legal advocacy, the surest way is to directly contact your legislator. You can find your House representative and Senate representative on your own using the linked simple online tools. Representatives listen to both the volume of outreach and the quality of that outreach. Most major pharmacy organizations will have simple online forms for you to fill out that will take care of all the hassle of writing the email and finding your representative for you - those are considered volume-based responses. Quality is when you take the time to write an email yourself, or edit that organizational form. If a representative (or, more likely, their staffer) sees a lot of noise for a topic, they’ll skip through form letters to find hand-written ones to see what the deal really is.

You can also take advantage of social media - primarily Twitter and Facebook - to tweet directly to your elected officials. Our legislative representatives are informed by an army of staffers who take advantage of many sources of information to filter it out - and a major source is the direct outreach approaches taken through social media. A trending topic is a visible topic: however, keep in mind this can’t replace direct contact through form letters or emails, as a representative will only really shift if their constituency is the one contacting them, and that's hard to determine through Twitter.

We hope you've learned from this primer on how to stay informed and advocate for pharmacy. No matter what our specialties are, there's a topic of interest out there