An All States Guide to Nonprofit Lobbying

I can’t believe how old I am!  I am here at AALS and yesterday I had a beer with a friend I haven’t seen in 40 years.  Damn, I am old.  There must be some kind of mistake or something, I am NOT supposed to be here.  I am so old that I remember when, as a young JAG officer, we used to get loads of “all-states” guides.  Soldiers, of course, come from all over the country bringing all their legal problems with them.  So in the age before computers — that’s how old I am — Army JAG law libraries comprised volumes and volumes of “all-states” guides.  The way it worked was that eggheads at the Army JAG School in  Charlottesville, Virginia would publish and update guides on different areas of law state by state.  Contract law, family law, lemon laws maybe, wills and trusts, that kind of stuff.  And then the guides would arrive in boxes at all the different Legal Assistance Offices around the country.  At Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, JAGs could provide advice to Sgt. Flintstone from Oregon about a family law matter arising from a marriage to Fred or William in Texas.  

But thanks to information technology we can all be experts in laws from all over the country and sometimes the world with just a click of the mouse.  Laws still need collating, though, and a group called Bolder Advocacy has done a great service by putting out guides to nonprofit lobbying in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.  First of all, I wasn’t quite aware that states routinely regulate nonprofit lobbying.  I thought that was done primarily by the Service and the Federal Election Commission.  But no!  I am both old and ignorant I guess.  Here is how Bolder Advocacy describes its guides:

Many groups are surprised how different state and local lobbying laws are from the IRS’s rules related to lobbying, and the kinds of activities that get captured by state and local lobbying rules.

Bolder Advocacy and the Democracy Capacity Project’s Practical Guidance – What Nonprofits Need to Know About Lobbying state law resource series is designed to help nonprofits determine if lobbying rules in their state might apply to their state or local work, and if they do, how best to navigate them.

Each Guide Includes:

• • Summary of lobbyist registration and reporting triggers in the state
  • Key critical takeaways for nonprofit organizations
  • FAQs – giving practical perspective on how to interact with the state rules
  • Case study for a hypothetical small student voting rights organization
  • List of helpful additional resources

Who are these Guides For?

• • Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations: Leaders and staff of nonprofit organizations that work on (or are thinking about working on) advocacy initiatives at the state or local level
  • Lawyers: Lawyers and compliance professionals interested in working with nonprofit advocacy organizations doing state and local level work
  • Funders: Funding organizations working to ensure strong organizational capacity and infrastructure for the groups they fund doing advocacy work at the state and local level

Here are the first few pages of the Florida edition and there are similar editions for all the other states and the District of Columbia.

We live in the age of George Jetson not Fred Flintstone.  I’m old enough to have met both of them, unfortunately.

darryll k. jones