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Involving Congregations in Advocacy Now (ICAN)
an ELCA guide to developing an advocacy ministry within your congregation
Resources
In this section:
 How
to Use Resources
Everywhere you look statistics are in our world. One out of four
children do this or, 75 percent of children do that. How do we look
at these numbers and issues and make sense of them? How do we
approach legislators and make an impact with good information?
Should you pass on bad information, it will be a long time before
you get called upon again or trusted by that legislator. So what is
good and bad information?
Bad Information
- based on anecdotes or guesses
- based on faulty statistics
- unclear and/ or sensationalized
- outdated information
- statistics without a source reference
- make unequal comparisons (apples to oranges)
Good Information
- states solid facts
- annotated statistics that can be understood
- up to date information (for most issues this is within a year)
- cites stories as personal and has solid grounding to develop a
position
- states clearly who is responsible for information
- uses few acronyms (whenever used, the whole name can easily be
found in the beginning)
- states specifically and clearly what you want the legislator
to do or what position you are taking
- uses statistics which correlate to each other (apples to
apples)
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