Last week I joined a group of our members on Capitol Hill, visiting senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle. We were there to make the case that fundamental biomedical research needs sustained support. Support for biomedical research is bipartisan, but the reasons behind that support are not uniform. Some offices care because the funding lands in their district and supports jobs there. Some care because a staffer or a family member has a personal history with a disease that research helped treat. Some care because they see the broader public benefit and want to be on the right side of it. The research is the same in every room. The reason it matters is different in each one.

That’s the work of advocacy, and I want to be precise about what we were doing. We weren’t lobbying on the Hill last week. Lobbying means asking for a specific vote on specific legislation. We were educating members and staff about why fundamental research matters at all, which gives us more room to work in and a harder job to do well, because we can’t lean on a single ask. We have to understand what each office already cares about and connect our case to it.

Doing that without losing the passion behind it is the harder skill. If we flatten our message into something generic enough to fit every office, we lose the thing that makes people listen in the first place. The members I traveled with didn’t do that. They spoke as scientists who love their research, and they let that show, while still shaping which part of the story they led with depending on who was in the room.

This also reminded me why story-collection matters so much in onboarding. I spent years as a science communicator, and I already know that people don’t act on data, they act on data attached to something they recognize. What the Hill reinforced is how early in a new organization I need to start gathering those stories deliberately, before I need them, rather than assuming I’ll pick them up along the way. My members walked into those offices with an argument they’d built over years. My job in this first year is to learn where those arguments come from well enough to help amplify the message.