“Winning Connections brought us the experience and expertise we needed to capture the voice of consumers, which made the critical difference in persuading legislators to change course on an important issue to our member companies."
—Andrew C. Fish, Senior Vice President, Legal & Government Affairs
A bill that would have required prescriptions for over the counter allergy and cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine was quietly making its way through the California State Legislature. The bill had limited public exposure, but strong backing among special interest groups with a lot of pull in Sacramento. The bill would have made needed medicines much more expensive for consumers and decreased sales tax revenue at a time when California was facing a budget crisis. The drug manufacturers were proposing as an alternative to fund an electronic sales tracking system to prevent illegal sales of pseudoephedrine from going into methamphetamine labs.
Winning Connections worked with the Consumer Healthcare Products Association to oppose the bill. We created a strategically targeted list of voters who were most likely to care about the issue, and also likely willing to make a phone call to defeat the bill. Then we developed a messaging strategy that maximized the capabilities of the phone medium to recruit people to make calls to their State Senator and Assembly Member in opposition to the bill. We focused our recruitment calls in key legislative districts to maximize their impact.
In the face of strong support for a prescription mandate by law enforcement, our patch-through calls from constituents helped stop the prescription bill from passing out of the Assembly Public Safety Committee and killed the legislation.