Alyssa, meet Ben. Ben, meet Alyssa.
Hi Ben. In my view, it's not so much about effective opportunities in the usual sense, as just about understanding what's going on. In general, the longer your time horizons and the more difficult your goal is, the more the exploration/exploitation tradeoff tilts towards exploration and information gathering and meta-work. Since significant policy change is both difficult and a long-term project, specific lobbying projects should be chosen largely on the basis of their information value, instead of just being selected for direct benefit per dollar. (I haven't thought very hard about what specific projects have the highest information value, but the lowest hanging fruit is almost certainly just FOIAing the crap out of everything.)
Eg. to pick one example out of a hat, in the Bay Area it currently requires years of lobbying and paperwork to add a porch to your house. One reasonable policy goal for the Bay Area is to add a million or so units of new housing, but if one went about that in the default way in the current environment, it would be more-or-less impossible. But on the other hand, the Bay Area did add a ~million units of new housing between about 1950 and 1975. The obvious question is "what changed since then?", and the answer seems to be "nobody really knows"; our methods of tracking the memetic ecosystem and how it evolves over time in response to various pressures seem to resemble those of chemistry before Boyle.
In general I like Skype, but in this case the issues are complex enough that I'd prefer to email so as to have more time to think about things. Feel free to bug me if I ever don't get back to you quickly.
I should also probably say that politics is unfortunately an area where it's very easy to get distracted. Not just in the sense of cheering for the Red Tribe vs. cheering for the Blue Tribe (although that's obviously an issue too), but in the sense of what issues you think about at all. When you think about questions like "abortion: for or against?", it's not just that you have to avoid being biased by your tribe's position; there are various interest groups pushing the idea that the abortion debate is a really important issue, and by asking the question in the first place, you've handed a victory to these groups without even realizing it. Paul Graham's The Submarine (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) is an excellent essay that talks about this with respect to corporate interest groups, but there are also lots of non-corporate groups doing very similar things:
"PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda. (...)
A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients. For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper. (...)
Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all."