The Art of Focus with Danielle Droitsch

In this episode of 'The Campaign Strategist,' host Pete Altman interviews Danielle Droitsch, an environmental advocate and executive coach. Danielle shares her journey into environmental advocacy, beginning with a college protest against Exxon. The conversation delves into campaign strategies, including power mapping and decision-maker analysis. Danielle emphasizes the importance of focused, strategic actions over broad mobilization efforts, using examples from her work on campaigns like the Keystone XL pipeline and various watershed and wilderness protection initiatives. She also discusses coalition management, the significance of engaging diverse groups, and the challenges of getting collective agreements on strategies. The episode concludes with Danielle reflecting on advice from mentors and the importance of maintaining relationships with decision makers.

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Transcript

Danielle Droitsch [00:00:00] So you have this like massive. Like complex system and there are many decision making points where are you going to intervene There was, I think, still a need to become discreet and focused about which decision makers and which leavers are you're going to push. Where are you going to focus? My guest today is Danielle Droitsch, a friend and colleague I've known for many years. Danielle has worked in both the U. S. and Canadian conservation communities for over three decades, including the International Boreal Conservation Campaign, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Bow River Keeper, and more.

She's founded two non profits focused on watershed protection and has helped philanthropic and conservation organizations with international campaigns for protection of major wilderness areas. In addition to her consulting work, she is an executive coach for leaders in the nonprofit community in both the U.

S. and Canada. I [00:01:00] wanted to talk to Danielle because she's got a terrific understanding of campaigns, she's worked on some complex ones with multiple decision makers and big coalitions, and because she's a delight to talk to. 

Peter Altman Danielle, welcome to the campaign strategist. I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you for making time.

Danielle Droitsch Yeah. I'm so happy.

Peter Altman Awesome. How did you get started in environmental advocacy work?

Danielle Droitsch back at, college I was a history major and I wasn't really particularly. Aware of the environmental issues and I was invited to a conference I went to the conference and I just sort of woke up, came back from the conference and we decided to protest exxon That was our big ask and so I I can't even remember what we were actually

Peter Altman What, What year was it?

Danielle Droitsch Oh, this is back in 1880s Nine or something

Peter Altman It would have to have been the Exxon Valdez, right?

Danielle Droitsch might have been.

Yeah, I wish I could go back because I'm still friends with all of the [00:02:00] same people we were in this group called earth. And Earth was the group that I became super deeply familiar, like that was my, those are my people and I'm still really good friends with them we got really involved in something protesting around that. thing that I remember the most about what we did back in college was we had those disposable plastic cups

Our dining hall and there was many thousands of them. Then people would often grab their, their plates and they would put like their, sorry, their trays and they put 10 cups on their tray for one meal.

I remember this because everybody would walk around with 10 cups filled with various different substances. And then they would throw it all. And so we at

Peter Altman Yeah.

Danielle Droitsch our mighty group, which still exists today, as far as I know decided to collect all of the cups from the dining hall from a week, which was unbelievable amount of waste.

And then we created sculptures, art sculptures from

Peter Altman Oh.

Danielle Droitsch And then we did, we put them on the, the [00:03:00] main, right? Anyway, so it's got this more main area. And then we tried to sell reusable mugs. And then we eventually were able to get the the university to get away from this practice But I remember like, I became very passionate about the disposable cups. It was everything I thought about and did. And that was the beginning. And then the rest is history.

Peter Altman you've run and participated in a whole bunch of different campaigns. Over the years. And this is a show where we dig into how do you go about figuring out what's your campaign is going to do? What are your strategies? But I want to start with a lot of people have different ways of defining what a campaign is.

And I just wanted to ask, what's your, Definition

Danielle Droitsch It's really about that discreet, like a very defined of change that is mobilized by, a group of people. And then I would add, the piece around, [00:04:00] Power mapping basically just, what often doesn't happen is we skip over this really essential piece. And I've been involved with so many campaigns and people are focusing on a change that haven't even figured out the change itself.

They have no idea what that change ought to be. know it generally, but they aren't like, they don't know if it's a policy change or a political change or a human behavior change or whatever it is. So that's problem number one. But if you overcome that. you still have to figure out the campaign actually has to define how are we going to get it done and you do it through a sort of power mapping exercise. 

Peter Altman that's the next big thing is so what is your process when you are starting a campaign or working with groups to figure out what are we going to do to get the outcome we want? What's your process? What are the major steps involved in doing that? You mentioned power mapping.

Danielle Droitsch Yeah. Even mapping, I before I've power mapping I think where I've noticed .

Falling apart of campaigns is [00:05:00] around not being discreet about that, that change and what needs to be changed. And sometimes There's different ways to create change. Like sometimes it's a corporate campaign and you change how the money flows or sometimes it's a government change. And of course we're in a now Trump 2. 0. Oh my Right now. And all the discussions around. Federal change we're gonna have to have a different conversation because you can try, but you'll probably fail. So what I often and I'm actually working with a couple of organizations now, just on this kind of stuff, which is just getting the right information on the table about problem and who can change the problem and in one particular campaign, There's actually a lot of people involved and there's a lot of people who have different ideas about what could change.

There could be a focus on the corporation. There could be a focus on the government. There's definitely a state. change that could be made versus a federal change. And so what often [00:06:00] happens is people are talking about the problem and there is, they slide right over the fact that you kind of need to make some decisions about where you're going to focus your time. 

And sometimes you need some time to work through it because there are different pathways available.

Peter Altman Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of times people know what they want and what they want it to look like, but figuring out what are the actual discrete mechanisms, there's always a lever or multiple levers somewhere that if you can figure out how you pull them, you are getting the change you, want. That can be one of the really challenging parts of campaign planning is to figure out what are those discrete actions that need to happen.

Danielle Droitsch the oil developments in Canada. there were a lot, they are, there still are a lot of decision makers that can affect how much of that can be unpacked.

I wasn't one of the decision makers to figure out what the strategy would be I came in later. So that had already been decided, but there were the many are [00:07:00] many decision makers. They're the government decision makers in Canada. There are the oil companies that extract the oil.

There are the companies that transport the oil. are the refineries at the very other end that are refining the oil. Finding this

Peter Altman Yeah,

Danielle Droitsch And then there are the consumers, right? And then there's the U. S. Government who is facilitating this whole purchase because it's like a trade relationship. So you have this like massive. Like complex system and there are many decision making points where are you going to intervene There was, I think, still a need to become discreet and focused about which decision makers and which leavers are you're going to push. Where are you going to focus? Because I'm sure you've been part of these campaigns to where you are like spinning your wheels. where people are just like coming up with 50 different actions and they're all going after different decision makers.

you know, you've really not moved the needle at all because [00:08:00] you weren't focused. You didn't get clear up front. So it may not be just one decision maker on one decision.

That's okay. More than one, but it's simply being really clear where you're going to focus your time I coach People in the environmental sector. I'm coaching, the campaigners and overwhelmed like they're like drowning in the work.

There are so these are people who are on the ground trying to fight these big behemoth things. And what we often notice is. The, total burnout, so we really want to work smarter, and

Peter Altman Yeah. So

Danielle Droitsch in my decades of doing this is to stop spinning wheels and focusing on everything focus, focus, focus, 

Peter Altman figure out what it is you want, what's the change? What's the decision that needs to be made? And then who's got control over that decision? Who can make the decision to give you what you want? And then how do you approach getting them to do it?

Danielle Droitsch The power and this is really where you might end up going back to your original decisions because I know I've been in a [00:09:00] few campaign rooms where you identify the pathway and then someone might have done some really good work to say, Yeah, you could totally do this, but you're gonna, you're gonna fail I've been on both sides of the equation where, I bring the starry eyed approach and people say, you're never going to get that done. I've also been at the other end where I'm pushing and I actually get the thing done that no one thought could be done. But so sometimes. can dream, but it's really just really important to evaluate. Can you move that decision maker forward and forward? Maybe you can't. Maybe it's just not worth all the work and energy it would take move when you could maybe pick a different, lever. and it ultimately comes down to things that we talk about every day. Politics. Or not always politics.

Sometimes it's a good thing. government decision maker and they're never going to go with this because they couldn't possibly [00:10:00] make that decision because they're so allied with the Republicans or whatever. the reason you want to do that detailed look is because sometimes, and certainly I've been involved with some corporate campaigns where they will say the corporation will never change. They'll never change their mind. But then if the consumers actually speak up enough or the

Peter Altman Yeah.

Danielle Droitsch that they serve their stakeholders change their mind, then you may actually be able to change a corporation's mind because of the big one is social license. They're losing social license because they don't look great ultimately what I've realized over the years is that sometimes you can really move the needle with these decision makers. If you have the right capacity. When I was able to work with NRDC, it was. because we have capacity to actually deliver campaigns that I'd never been able to deliver when I worked at the state level. so I think we have to really think about capacity. 

Peter Altman Yeah,

Danielle Droitsch the ability to build to throw what we need at this thing not just a couple of weeks or [00:11:00] a couple of months, but likely a couple of years, if not a decade. And then if the answer is yes, then yes, go and proceed. And you can maybe make, big things happen, but if you can't, then and many of the groups that I know I've worked with and you work with, don't have a lot of resources.

And so then you have to be become super, super smart about what you can do. And small groups can make big things happen. I've certainly done it in my career and it wasn't with the type of resources NRDC had, but it was with very smart planning.

Peter Altman So you identify a decision maker, you figure out what are the things that may motivate them with politicians, generally comes back to either a threat or a promise around their, them getting elected again And usually they don't want to offend key voter blocks.

So if you can mobilize key voter blocks and really get their voices through, you can have a lot of influence. But what about when it's. A ceo or or even [00:12:00] government aid like for the kxl campaign you had to work on Not just the white house and members of congress But you also had to advocate at epa and the state department and then there were canadian Agencies.

So how do you go about figuring out what's going to get the decisions you want out of those kinds of entities where it's not electoral? What you mentioned for corporations, essentially, if you can create a bigger threat that You know, by not doing what you're asking them, they're going to end up with bigger costs, presumably in the case, for example, if consumers stop buying their products at a protest, but maybe there's other forms.

do you figure out what's going to move these other kinds of decision makers?

Danielle Droitsch so I'm going to back into this talking about the t shirt problem

Peter Altman Totally. Okay. 

Danielle Droitsch and maybe some of your listeners will remember this kind of or maybe it was just me, but sometimes we have this big problem. We have all these [00:13:00] decision makers and somebody says, let's sell t shirts,

Peter Altman Yeah.

Danielle Droitsch sell t shirts, or it may not be that it might be, let's have a protest or it might be, let's start a social media campaign. And everybody's like, yeah. So I have, Here My House. Literally dozens of my campaign t shirts from all the years that I've been a campaigner because we had to make the t shirt was so crucial and somebody, got really excited and we focused on the design and which t shirt company this is the trap, right? The trap is we just need to like mobilize. We need to mobilize and I am a big believer in mobilization. Like I love going to my protests and showing up with my placard just like anyone else, a real pitfall. It's a pitfall of our sector.

Because we want to just get together and we think if we just make a noise and we make it loud enough, then people will hear us. Guess what? They are not. [00:14:00] That is a. As a tool in the toolbox and you put pick it up the most effective campaigns. I've been part of and people have seen the big protest from KXL, but I would say the big pick campaigns were the most important tools.

They were great. They're important. And I know Obama heard it, but I do not think those are the most important tools in the toolbox. So going now I'm backing in into the answering your question, which is campaign planning, like having the time to sit down and we skip over it. it's unbelievable how often we skip over sitting down and you may have to sit down again and again and map it out ideally on a whiteboard.

If you're on zoom, you can use, app tools or whatever. But the idea is to look at each and every one. So if we go to the Keystone campaign yeah, the white house was the target, but for a long period of time, the white house wasn't paying attention to this at all. It was not on their radar.

It wasn't important. And so really it was about who does the White House [00:15:00] listen to? We mapped that out. I mean, Yes, they did listen to the climate groups, but we had just stopped there, we would have lost, really had to think, who are they listening to? And so we mapped that out and included the agencies. Like the EPA and was different agencies that were providing input into that decision state department of energy. but then also there were constituencies and this is probably one of the biggest learnings I've had in the past, you know, sort of 10 or 15 years of my campaign career is the environmental sector, get away. Like just not always the environmental sector. So who cares about this issue there was unions that weren't with us, but unions that we were able to engage and that were able to join us with, so this sort of idea of diverse coalitions or indigenous peoples, like tribes were part of this.

And now, and then of course. Out in the states where Keystone would have been built, it would have been [00:16:00] the cowboys. The agricultural community where the pipeline was going to be built and was going to potentially ruin their water supply. So this idea of who are those people and how could they influence And when you do that power mapping, you do come up with a million possible choices, and that's the tough part. It's then you really get into the overwhelm of possibility. if you pick and choose ones that you think, okay, if we, put our attention on these 25 actions, should move the needle, whereas when we don't have that conversation, people just start throwing spaghetti at the wall and they do the protest and they buy the t shirts and they create tremendous amount, like they might have delivered hundreds of thousands of petitions, and they didn't do the hard work, Sometimes it's one conversation between two people that makes that difference. It doesn't have to be a behemoth number of people. It can [00:17:00] be literally one letter to another person that can make the thing happen that you need.

Peter Altman You mentioned petitions. that's my sort of version of the t shirts, which is a lot of times people, let's have a petition they can be useful, but every tool has a particular use and works in particular situations. Like you can't use a hammer to drive a screw into a wall. I mean, You can, but it's not going to come out the way you want.

And with petitions you know, if you start an environmental petition, And just circulate it out there, you'll get a whole bunch of signatories from California and Vermont and New York. But what if your target doesn't represent any of those particular states and they're not swing states, it's not going to have very much leverage.

So figuring out how to mobilize the voices that are going to matter. campaign for the clean power plan, one of the things that we had to do to give the Obama white house confidence with moving forward with this bold, never before used authority. Under the EPA was some assurance that it wouldn't cost them control of the Senate with the midterms coming [00:18:00] up.

And so we focused the comment drive, which is effectively basically petition gathering in key States where there were Senate races that they were worried about. so that we could show there is a ton of support for this issue in these places, you don't have to worry.

And that, that made a tremendous difference. What are they worried about? What's going to move them? What are they keeping an eye on with what you can do really makes a huge difference.

Danielle Droitsch brilliant because what you're getting at here is You're thinking about the decision maker. You're really

Peter Altman Yes.

Danielle Droitsch And I know that NRDC, I felt like we did a lot of that. We're like, and we also were able to talk to the decision makers and say what's your perspective? And it's something we want to do is talk to the decision maker.

Just listen. What are they concerned about? What is their, think about how often people don't even think to talk to the decision maker like all the time. It's really a, and I'm not saying, I would say that early in my career, I wouldn't have. have just spent all my time creating a whole bunch of energy,

Peter Altman Yep.

Danielle Droitsch having [00:19:00] had one conversation. And then later, when you finally talk to them, you're like, Oh my gosh, like they're totally concerned about this thing. I could have addressed that. So talk to the decision maker. Make him set up a meeting, whatever you have to do.

Peter Altman Yeah.

Danielle Droitsch I'm not saying you can meet the president of the United States, but you could certainly, try to get intelligence. it's brilliant to really think about how you're going to deploy something like a petition in order to have it speak to your decision maker.

Peter Altman you mentioned another thing and you've got, you've done a lot of coalition management and Big coalitions. And that's something I think is often a challenge as well in campaigns because coalitions, even when you all are on the same side and want the same thing, they can be very unruly Hopefully you can get them to agree on who the decision makers are.

How do you get them to agree on the strategies? How do you get them to agree on a communications framework and the narrative? talk a little bit about that from your experience, because you've had to do this kind of thing, both internally within a large organization of [00:20:00] basically shepherding, a lot of cats.

To go in the same direction and externally with big groups like during the KXL campaign. So what's that like and how do you find ways to do that effectively?

Danielle Droitsch if there was like a secret sauce for me, that's my, that's mine. Again, lawyer that. And I think that's one of the things that sort of became stronger in the personality space. Like it's really relationships, right? And so it is sort of where I feel like I'm strongest is that idea of bringing people together to work on a common purpose. And everybody sort of agrees in the problem. Usually when you're bringing people together, there's usually agreement around the problem. But then it just stops there, especially if you're building a diverse campaign, which you want. You want. a diverse group of people that are all together working, toward the same and the more diverse you get, the more diversity of opinion and perspective KXL was one of those, but I've also worked with Kemp coalitions. And I'll just, I'm going to [00:21:00] talk here in a second about the word coalition briefly, but that are international in nature in the sense of group of organizations and tribes and first nations and Academics at all were and still are trying to address the proliferation of mines the U.

S. and Canadian border. And that was and continues on. But when I was running that, that was also another example. number one is what is the nature of that agreement or between the groups? And so the word coalition to me, and I don't know if it would be for you, I'd really be curious is like a coalition is usually something very formal

Mm hmm. On to something And one of my first coalitions that I ran. it's a group now called the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. It wasn't that at the time it was called the Tennessee Valley Energy Reform Coalition, which is a total mouthful

And it was a coalition across seven states and my job out of college was to facilitate the [00:22:00] coalition which was fun.

But I remember like I was like being thrown into the Like really thrown into the fires, like here are all these organizations come together to figure out a way to reform the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was a very. pro nuclear and pro coal they weren't doing anything in the clean energy

Peter Altman Yep. 

Danielle Droitsch so that's a formalized coalition, because we had a statement, people signed on to it, and that we had one member per, for our board represented each person, and, but I will say that I don't see as many coalitions as I do just collaborations. And that might be because. It's the whole idea of signing a piece of paper and you know, you have to agree, everyone agree. I mean, I know there are coalitions out there and sometimes people are kicked out of coalitions because they can't agree or whatever. I think the model, at least from where I sit has been more collaborations where people come together they agree to collaborate, but they're not necessarily signing a document.

The pro of that is that it's more flexible. People can add in what they want to [00:23:00] contribute and they don't have to necessarily all sign some document that they may not agree to. That's the pro. The negative is that sometimes everybody's not remembering what they're fighting for at the same time, or there's a disagreement about strategy or. Some groups put in a ton of resources and others are not putting in resources and it

Peter Altman Yeah.

Danielle Droitsch personal view of this is that you absolutely need campaign. You need collab, you need people at the center are staffing that up. That their job is to staff the collaboration, the coalition, the coordination, whatever it looks like, if you don't, then things will fall apart because there always are tensions, whatever that tension may be about the beauty of bringing multiple groups together, and they don't have to always sit on the same calls. They don't have to necessarily always be on the same press releases or anything. Like to me, that's almost restrictive, but you need [00:24:00] someone, at least one person. Who is their entire job is to worry about all the members and building individual relationships with each one, knowing where everybody stands and how each one is appreciated, making sure that their input is woven in and considered. And if it's not included, why? Why did we not follow your ideas? And that's the role I've played on many campaigns over the years and it's taken, I've gone through I've failed more than I'd like to admit on this podcast on and coalition management. But once you get that down, then what happens is you unearth. This incredible of the, which is really the mobilization of people, but we often don't stuff that up because it's like, Oh, that's just this internal role. Let's just have the campaign, whatever, when you put people together in a group the research shows that groups make terrible decisions by and large groups make [00:25:00] terrible decisions. Which is not a surprise. so why don't we just somehow expect throwing a whole bunch of people into a room together and suddenly they're going to make a better decision.

And so now there's, there's a lot of people that come that have made their professional careers. I'm one of them around. How do you bring groups together to make good decisions? Because. we think, oh, if more people come into a room, it'd be a better decision.

What happens is they because of tensions, conflict behavioral styles, all sorts of things. What happens is that group decision. Is worse than if one person make that decision.

Peter Altman That's probably why a lot of campaigns are hierarchical there's always a balancing because, this is where there's so much art involved as well as sciences. And I have yet to achieve coalition management as good as I know, in theory, it could be, cause it's really hard.

It's really time consuming and Lots of shuttle diplomacy where you've got to always be going [00:26:00] back and forth. As you said, to know what's driving people, what are their capacities? What can they throw into the fight? What's causing them concern? Where are the tensions? How do you either solve them or skirt them?

you've really got my curiosity. What have you found about how do you make, how do you get groups to make good decisions? Is it just lots and lots of. Back and forth thing. Are there, or is there more to it

Danielle Droitsch I don't know if you would agree with this, but I feel like we tend us all together and now it's more on zoom chats than it is into a room we tend to throw ourselves into a room together and hope we figure it out in that room.

Peter Altman Yeah.

Danielle Droitsch And I feel like I've evolved my thinking about that.

Maybe because I've become a coach in the last sort of decade of my life, and I'm really interested in how humans have evolved. Tech and how they think and how they behave. I really spend a lot of time trying to understand people and I've just learned people think [00:27:00] and they're so different in how they think and how they do. And it's not just an extrovert introvert issue. In fact, I don't even really accept that sort of dichotomy because I think you can be an extrovert and introvert at the same time, but it's more that the way you can bring your best self to anything is really diverse and very different. and so we will tend in general, if we have meetings with a whole bunch of people in a room will tend to serve a certain type of audience.

Of person with a certain type of strengths, and that's fine. But what it means is we've left a whole bunch of talent on the table. my has been that it is fun to get into a campaign strategy session and have that ideation and sort of imagine. But when it comes down to things like choosing strategy and figuring out like, What are the tactics?

Sometimes it's actually partly to bring people together, [00:28:00] but partly to allow people to weigh in a different way. So I'll go back to that campaign that I worked on the international one on the proliferation of mines in the transboundary region between Canada and the U. S. Mostly focused on Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and Washington State. We had a lot of tribes that were involved in that, and the tribes understandably didn't want to show up to our campaign calls. They were very busy with their own stuff. So it was like, no, you don't need to make to our campaign calls. So my job was to either talk to them directly myself or have some of the people who really had the strong relationships talk to them. And of course they had incredible wisdom, like they had so many, first of all, they had incredible power to make change. And they also had really good ideas about what they were going to do. And they also were decision makers in the sense of not going to come to them and say, Hey, tribe, this is what you should [00:29:00] do. Add your voice to the campaign. We have this idea for you to run a petition, for example, like

Peter Altman Right.

Danielle Droitsch not going to how it's going to happen. So we needed to be able to tap into their ideas, their wisdom, their concerns in a way that would add value. And it required getting in a car and driving to where they lived and spending days with them. It also was about talking to elders in addition to, the electeds. Essentially, it was not about a big meeting. It was really about how do you harness the collective talent? And the reason to do that is not just because you have a better campaign plan, which you will. But then people really plug in.

What you don't want is half of your coalition or your collaboration to be engaged. And then the other half are listed as participating, but they're really

happens is you have like a couple of groups that are doing everything and then you have a bunch of groups are doing nothing.

I'm not saying there's an easy answer [00:30:00] because sometimes they're overwhelmed. the organization and you can't do anything about it. ultimately what we do know is that when you bring people's talents in and when you engage their talent they're going to engage more, they're just going to engage more.

So you got to figure out what is their talent? what are they good at? What do they want to do? And then plug them in that way. And then you have more engagement because they've been heard and they're deploying themselves in that way.

Peter Altman what are the things that's on any organization's mind in these kinds of settings is they're thinking about, or the individual representing the organization is thinking What's my boss going to say? About what I'm committing us to or what I'm proposing and what are my group's strengths?

What are we good at and where does that fit in with this? was just thinking as you were talking about you don't go to partners with prescribed tactics that you want them to do but Does it help to think about it in terms of talking to the organization about okay?

Look for the thing we want to have happen. These are the people that we need to influence. These are the decision makers You I want to talk to you about what capacity do you have to [00:31:00] help move that? I don't have like a concrete example in mind, but my instinct and experiences that opens you up to a variety of strategies and voices that otherwise you might never even have thought of before, because you're giving that group, then they're thinking about what are all of our relationships?

Who are the leaders that we work with strewn throughout them? Like you might just find at a church, some of the church leaders siblings to the elected officials in that area, or, whatever their biggest customer, whatever, some kind of relationship that you might not otherwise discover that.

You're triggering those groups to think about instead of just saying here, check this box there.

Danielle Droitsch Yeah, and you do need to have that open conversation. You have to have space for

Peter Altman Yeah

Danielle Droitsch group to be able to, first of all, get on the same page. We are, this is the decision we're focused on going back to the beginning of the conversation. We've had here are the decision makers and then what could you do?

Because I fall prey to this as much as anyone [00:32:00] else. We just fall back into the same patterns of the toolbox that we go to as a campaigner. And sometimes we do that because we don't know what else to do, right? It's like the petition or the protest the sign on letter.

The famous sign on letter. I think about all the sign on letters. I can't imagine. I get literally like dozens and dozens of sign on letters and spending hours and hours trying to get the words just

Peter Altman Right, 

Danielle Droitsch and then knowing that no one's going to read the letter, so we, those are good.

We want to do those. But We often aren't creative because you just hit on what I think is one of the most important things that we forget is that the decision makers are human beings, and they have these other relationships. And I know you have experiences or examples, and I do, too, where it really was a conversation that actually changed the trajectory.

It wasn't the big protest that actually changed it. It was those helped those created good energy.

Peter Altman Exactly,

Danielle Droitsch But the change of a decision to go in a different direction, which is usually what we want to do in [00:33:00] our lives, is we want to change the direction of a decision somebody had a conversation with someone else, or there was a series of conversations, and I've heard about these, like people have reported to me, oh, Governor such and so talked to Governor such and so, and he's going to do something different. like, holy crap, how did that happen? But we often don't get into that kind of detail because because we think it's too small. We

Peter Altman right

Danielle Droitsch Oh, I'm only going to talk to this one person, I now know after many years to treat every single opportunity to influence a decision maker, whether it's an individual, a friend, a family member Or even something different, like a like a different constituency that they listen to, even generating one letter from the one constituency they actually listen to, and that might take you 50 hours to get that letter, and it might be still okay, Because that letter is going to have, it's going to be worth its weight in gold, you have to do the analysis, but I feel like over the years I've really pulled back from the big loud [00:34:00] campaigns to something that's quieter and can make things change So, 

Peter Altman strikes. That's a great place to wind down on. what is some advice you got from a mentor or colleague that Influenced you and that you want to share

Danielle Droitsch I think it goes back to something. I have a lot of mentors, but I'll mention my NRDC mentors Liz Bear Brown and Susan Casey Lefkowitz, who both really were extraordinary influences in my life still are. the most important thing is their focus. They just were so laser focused. And always bring us back. And I would probably be somewhere in the room to say, let's do this thing. And they were like, let's focus. And I think it really made the difference and they trained me well.

Peter Altman the discipline of asking does that align with what we're trying to do? And does that contribute to the person we're trying to move? Yeah. I have the same struggle. And then is there something that, you know, now that you wish you'd known a lot sooner?

Danielle Droitsch Well, I would say people, it's not to ignore the people that, [00:35:00] can make a difference. And if I could say something like right now, there's, we're completely. Can't believe that we're facing Trump 2. 0 right now. And yet I know I live in Utah. I live in a very red state and I have people I've, I'm friends with who are voters I like them.

They're really nice people. I don't understand why they voted the way they did, and we just really have to be careful about, leaving behind people that We can't work with. It's a tricky one. It's really hard. But people do share values and for clean water, clean air, healthy communities, and they don't write them off.

Peter Altman That's great. That's a great note to end on. And one, as we look ahead to the next few years. So Danielle, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It's been terrific and lots of fun.

Danielle Droitsch Thank you so much. Pete.

Thanks for tuning into the campaign strategist where we dive into the art and science of advocacy. The podcast is produced by [00:36:00] Prismatic Strategies to share wisdom and insights from leaders in the field. I'm your host, Pete Altman. Music was written by Andrea Perry and Pete Altman, and this is edited by Abby Altman.

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