Adapting to a Virtual World

By Jarrod Grasso

It’s an odd thing to say that the New Jersey Realtors® Government Affairs Department and I haven’t been in the Statehouse since early March. Just like our businesses and personal lives, we had to adapt to change. Lobbying is as much of an art as it is a science; it’s about relationships, conversations, communicating positions and platforms. Transferring that to a virtual world has certainly been difficult, as I’m sure you all know.

We have adapted just as so many of you have and those adaptations have truly led to some exciting developments. Take, for example, our annual Hill Visits that are usually held during the Midyear Meetings in Washington, D.C. We use that time to have members and staff meet and talk with our federal elected officials or their offices and make sure our industry issues are top of mind. To lose those meetings would be a loss for us, the Members of Congress, and our entire membership base. Once we received word Midyear Meetings were moved to a virtual platform, we opted to do the same with our hill visits. So, in a matter of weeks we worked to shift our in-person meetings to Zoom meetings.

While we missed touring around our nation’s capital and the face-to-face interaction, the positive to come out of it was that we were able to open the meetings up to a much larger number of members. With in-person meetings we are often limited by the office space accommodations of the Members of Congress. Virtually, we had no such limitations, allowing our meetings to be more accessible to the members and constituents—we met with almost all of our federal elected officials.

Lobbying, in general, has been a game of adaptation and in the past several months we’ve relied heavily on the decadeslong relationships we, as an association, have cultivated with our state and national representatives, key decision makers, and policy experts. Those relationships have helped disseminate critical, time-sensitive information to members when misinformation was running rampant.

While we’re grateful for the opportunity to continue talking with legislators and decisions makers, a Zoom meeting just isn’t the same, and we look forward to returning to the statehouse, hopefully sometime soon.

We thank you for your continued support as we work to ensure the reopening of economy is driven by our industry and our incredible New Jersey Realtors® .