CARP Looks Back on Another Successful Year with Second Annual Advocacy Report

At this year’s Annual General Meeting Susan Eng, CARP VP of Advocacy presented members with a copy of CARP’s Second Annual Advocacy Report.

The theme of this year’s report was traction. In engineering design, traction is what keeps an object from slipping when propelled forward. It also happens to be the key to moving ahead on an advocacy agenda, without it, a lot of slogging gets us nowhere.

With this theme in mind, this year’s report tells you how we gained traction and momentum in the media, in the corridors of power and how your participation has helped us every step of the way.

The Annual Report details our resources and how we put them to use as well as some of the successes we have had this year. This year the readership of CARP Action Online has grown from 50, 000 subscribers to roughly 70, 000 subscribers and participation in our polls has increased dramatically. To learn more about CARP polls, please read our AGM poll report. Read more

CARP Action Online has become a very cost effective and useful tool for our advocacy and has been behind one this year’s greatest successes: enhanced member engagement.

One example of successful collective action was the callout we sent out in June 2009 urging members to email their MPs to support the special Parliamentary Motion on retirement security. Over 6,000 members sent messages to their MPs via CARP E-voice in two business days. It has come to the point that government and other stakeholders actively seek to access our members using this very effective communications vehicle. Over the past year we have worked hard to make our issues the subject of national and local headlines and to become the definitive go-to source for information on the advocacy issues that affect older Canadians. We have received saturation media coverage and been approached to comment on an ever increasing spectrum of issues. A testament to our success was our ability to land one of our lead proposals on the cover of the Financial Post with the headline “CARP Backs Universal Pension Plan”.

We’ve also increased our physical presence in the Corridors of Power through a series of Committee Presentations on Parliament Hill and our work with local chapter executives to visit, meet and present our issues at the Provincial and Municipal levels. For a more detailed picture of what CARP’s Advocacy has achieved this year and where we hope to take things next year, please read our Second Annual Advocacy Report. Read more

Keywords: advocacy