Public campaigning as an advocacy tool

For instance, there are common misconceptions over the difference between grassroots activists and lobbyists: Lobbyists are a relatively small group of individuals that represent larger organizations or businesses.

In contrast to grassroots advocacy, direct lobbying occurs when a few members of an organization ask an elected official to vote a specific way on a piece of legislation. Grassroots activists run movements made up of citizens to indirectly lobby elected officials. Grassroots advocacy groups tend to emerge from groups of citizens that have concerns over certain policies.

Grassroots movements are rarely paid or backed by large corporations in the same way lobbyists are. How to Plan Your Advocacy Campaigns Grassroots advocacy campaigns require dedicated organizational practices to stay focused and find success. Craft Your Message Your message needs to be communicated to two audiences: your supporters and the elected officials you plan to reach out to.

Before writing your message, ask yourself the following questions: Is your message speaking to all of your stakeholders and advocates? What story is your advocacy campaign telling? How do your mission and business goals align? Your Leadership Team Your leadership team will consist of a few key individuals who will help coordinate your larger base of activists. Most advocacy organizations will assemble a team with the following roles: Lead organizer.

Your lead organizer will be responsible for overseeing the entire campaign, ensuring that your support base no matter how widespread remains cohesive and participates in strategically influencing policy. Communication specialist. Your communication and outreach specialists will help your campaign attract new supporters through email campaigns , social media, and traditional means.

These team members will also answer support questions and help keep your current members engaged. Some advocacy groups designate a special role for media and press outreach, but smaller groups may assign that responsibility to their communications team.

Volunteer supervisors. At in-person meetings, your supervisors will help orient supporters on proper conduct for your advocacy event and direct them about how and when to take action. Tech experts. Your advocacy software will help your lead organizer stay updated on every part of your campaign, assist your communications team in expanding your online network, and provide your volunteer supervisors with tools to organize and community with supporters on a large scale.

Your tech experts support all other roles on your team by ensuring your advocacy software stays in top working order. Your Supporter Base No matter the level your campaign is operating on, the larger your supporter base, the better. Fortunately, advocacy software can help your campaign team stay organized as you funnel supporters into action both on and offline: Online outreach.

Many of your potential supporters, especially younger individuals , tend to get most of their news online through email and social media. Use your advocacy software to launch comprehensive social media and email campaigns that use your mission statement to explain why your cause matters and how they can get involved. Remember that your website is also a tool that can help you attract supporters, especially if you include an action form on your homepage!

How do you want your supporter base to interact with elected officials? Orienting and training supporters on how to be professional, organized activists helps provide them with direction and will present your campaign as more unified and educated towards legislators. Continued engagement. Support can wane between campaigns, which causes organizations to spend time and resources re-recruiting for their next campaign that could be dedicated to advancing their cause.

Give your supporters a way to advocate for your cause online and during off periods. You can motivate them to stay committed by providing resources such as webinars, regular blog articles, and community message boards. Create an Action Plan Advocacy campaigns are often a marathon rather than a sprint, which means your organization will need to make careful choices about when and how you put your activists to work.

While your organization will have to iron out the details based on your current needs and operating capacity, here are a few best practices that will apply to most advocacy groups outlining their campaign: Establish a specific goal. In these instances, quickly determine what goals your campaign can conceivably accomplish with your current resources. Some of the most effective change happens at the local level.

Create a timeline. Many advocacy campaigns are dependent on when specific legislation comes to a vote. Plan activities that fit your goal and operating scale. Not every advocacy tactic works for every campaign. For many organizations, a compelling mix of in-person gatherings and digital advocacy can help create a comprehensive campaign that reaches various audiences.

Before planning any activity, set a measurable objective for it that connects to your overall goal. Use advocacy software to track your progress. Your advocacy software can store key data points and help your organization analyze each activity after its completion. Advocacy Campaign Examples and Success Stories Advocacy software plays a key role both off and online in advocacy campaigns.

To demonstrate how effective use of advocacy software can transform a campaign, here are three organizations who found success after investing in the right advocacy software platform for them: The James River Association As a growing, statewide advocacy organization, The James River Association JRA needed widespread support before approaching state legislators about the importance of keeping the James River clean.

ChamberRVA The Richmond region chamber of commerce, ChamberRVA , started with no organized online advocacy system, relying on traditional methods and sending individual emails to their members, encouraging them to get in touch with elected officials. Virginia College of Emergency Physicians Before investing in advocacy software, the Virginia College of Emergency Physicians VACEP had little time to devote to the policy changes they believed in and had spent years trying to overturn harmful legislation.

Power Your Campaign with Advocacy Software Advocacy campaigns of look quite different from those of Find the Features Your Advocacy Campaign Needs Different advocacy software providers focus on various aspects of advocacy software. As you evaluate software candidates, here is a checklist of features to look out for: Messaging tools. From reaching out to supporters to getting in contact with elected officials, advocacy campaigns run on automated messaging tools.

Look for advocacy software that not only provides your team with convenient messaging capabilities but also allows your supporters to send their messages as quickly as possible. Supporter segmentation. Do you want a close relationship? Suppose these people are limited by their own charters in the type of action they can get involved in? Suppose they might want to take over the direction of the whole campaign?

Suppose they are with your interests on some matters, and against you in others? Although it's possible to advocate without having an opponent for example, you may be working largely to overcome ignorance and inertia , most advocacy campaigns have a recognizable Goliath--or even several big and potentially mean kids on the block. Who are your opponents? Why are they putting up resistance?

And what can you do about it? Those questions should be answered together. There's not much point knowing the names of your opponents unless you also know why they are opposing you. Sometimes, this may not be for the most obvious reasons, so you'll need to know what's going on.

Starting with the cause for resistance is often more fruitful than starting with a list of people you expect to be bad guys: you may get some surprises.

For example, a big developer might turn out to support your drive for more low-cost housing, because he recognizes that the presence of homeless people in the neighborhood can deter rich people from buying his expensive houses. Similarly, people from whom you might expect support might turn out to oppose you. Perhaps a big agency that seems to share your goals is bent out of shape because you seem to be trespassing on their turf or accusing them of ineffectiveness in the past.

You can't take anything for granted. Once you have a plan, you'll know where you are going, and how to get there. That will give you confidence, and that confidence will give you clout. Armed with that, you may be able to approach certain groups or individuals whom you thought were opposed to you. Maybe they still are, but you may find that you can find help in unexpected quarters.

Now that your plan makes you more business-like, people may decide to cut a deal. Or, now that your position can be made clear to others as well as to yourselves, you may find that although a certain group still may oppose you on some issues, you are on the same side of others. Planning for advocacy is often a complex program because we have to deal with power and opposition. As you know by now, an advocate will usually have to overcome obstacles much greater than "mere" inertia, or lack of funds, which are often the main barriers where other types of community development projects are concerned.

In advocacy situations, there are likely to be well-prepared opponents waiting in the tall grass. And they will need to be out-planned. You will need to develop a plan based on your knowledge of who those opponents are; and knowledge of who can help you. Advocacy is exciting work. You get the pleasure of fighting the good fight, and sometimes, the thrill of victory. In order to have that, though, you need to get through all of the day-to-day details and specifics.

You'll need to keep an eye on the forest while working on the trees individually. By going through this chapter carefully, we think you will be better prepared to bring about the changes that matter to your community. It aims to build a community of grassroots psychologist advocates that can intervene to promote well-being in the communities in which they reside.

This online PDF provides theoretical and practical information for advocating and establishing a positive campaign. Advocacy Toolkit International Competition Network.

The purpose of this toolkit is twofold: 1 Share and disseminate alternative approaches to advocacy across competition agencies; and 2 Provide a useful, practical guide to competition agencies looking to amend or refresh their current approach. Altman, D. Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention. Palo Alto,CA. Article: Community Health Advocacy U. National Library of Medicine.

Loue, S. Community health advocacy. This article addresses six key questions about advocacy and highlights the foundational issues of advocating for community health.

Avner, M. The lobbying and advocacy handbook for nonprofit organizations: Shaping public policy at the state and local level. Amherst H. Wilder Foundation. This book offers a clear step-by-step guide to implementing a successful advocacy program at both the state and local levels. Bobo, K. Minneapolis, MN. Midwest Academy. This particular chapter discusses steps in the list of ten.

For example, the adoption of broadcasting policies that enable community-based organisations to establish their own radio or television services. For example, the impact and effectiveness of investment in public ICT access centres may be improved by advocacy efforts to adopt and mainstream good practice such as community participation in management or use of free and open source software.

There is much that has been written on advocacy and how to gain influence. Some of the basic tenets of the art of persuasion, found in political science and communication studies, appear also in early Greek and Chinese philosophy.

The latter is most starkly demonstrated by the slow response to climate change warnings. Much depends on the character, approach and credibility of those seeking change and the receptiveness of those they are seeking to persuade. Advocacy is inherently political and an understanding of political dynamics is at the heart of effective advocacy. Even the most clear-minded advocacy for pro-poor ICT policies can meet resistance for various reasons, including lack of political will, bureaucratic inertia, and counter arguments from well-resourced interest groups pursuing their own advocacy efforts.

Effective advocacy therefore requires research to map out the policy terrain, the principal actors, the political relations and the interests at stake. In the ICT policy field this terrain typically will include government departments, communications regulators, telecommunications service providers, media organisations, sector associations and growing numbers of civil society interest groups.

Careful planning and a strategic approach are therefore needed if results are to be achieved. Policy change rarely happens overnight and is often linked to broader change in the political environment. Effective advocacy requires long-term as well as short-term thinking, an understanding of the points of resistance and the means to gain traction, the readiness to form alliances, and the flexibility to seize windows of opportunity.

This overview describes some of the more commonly used advocacy techniques, from critical engagement such as policy monitoring and policy dialogue, through organised campaigns for policy change, to pathfinder and demonstrator projects that can inform and influence future policy making. It highlights the importance for people facing disadvantage to be able to assert their own needs and interests. It explains step by step how to devise an effective advocacy strategy for ICT policy reform.

It is accompanied by case examples and signposting to further tools and resources. Almost all effective policy-related advocacy efforts commence with observation and monitoring of the implementation and effectiveness of policies already in place. These might include, for example, commitments to ICT infrastructure roll-out, universal access policies, support for community-based ICT access centres, public interest broadcasting policies, or regulatory mechanisms to ensure fair pricing of services.

High profile ICT policy monitoring by civil society advocacy groups can, on its own, contribute to improved policy implementation and effectiveness by highlighting public policy targets and drawing public attention to under performance or to policy failure. Governments and public bodies, especially in democratic societies, are sensitive to critical reports, and more so when these are based on robust evidence and analysis, come from a credible source, and are widely published and disseminated.

Policy monitoring by civil society groups may be in the form of one-off investigation into a particular area of interest; it may consist of a baseline study, perhaps at the commencement of a new policy, and a follow-up study later to establish what results were achieved; or it may be a periodic monitoring report, such as an annual review.

Policy monitoring and public accountability are made easier where government departments and other public bodies, including regulatory organisations, maintain and publish data and reports in a timely fashion and undertake research and consultation to facilitate decision making in the public interest. Where this is not the case, where the information is poor or unreliable, or where independent data is needed, civil society organisations and coalitions may organise their own research and data gathering, or they may rely on third party sources such as commercial and academic research.

Right to information laws can help and, in countries where such laws are weak or absent, their adoption or improvement has itself been a key demand of civil society organisations, not only those working in the communication policy field.

In some cases investigative journalism may be needed to root out and expose policy failings. Impact may often be enhanced by involving citizens and civil society organisations in the process of policy monitoring and review and by gathering demand-side data using techniques such as citizen surveys, social audits and participatory policy review.

Such social accountability mechanisms [3] have gained increasing recognition as effective means of strengthening civic engagement in policy making and policy monitoring. Policy monitoring alone may prompt corrections to policy failure or lead to improved policy implementation, but most civil society groups concerned with ICT policy also carry their own ideas about what policies are desirable.

They are interested in gaining influence earlier in the policy-making process. At its most straightforward this involves engagement in policy dialogue with bureaucrats and politicians. Their priorities include not only a focus on existing ICT policies such as the Rural Communications Development Fund a levy applied to telecom providers to support areas that are underserved by markets but also engaging in policy development processes such as the review of the National ICT Policy.

WOUGNET participates actively in government-organised stakeholder consultations on ICT policy, it contributes its own studies and reports, and it responds to draft policy proposals. Civil society organisations like WOUGNET, whose field of interest is in the development of the use of ICTs, tend to focus their policy dialogue efforts on areas of policy making that are explicitly and primarily concerned with ICT policy: universal access arrangements, national e-strategies, etc.

This may seem an obvious strategy but, on its own, it can also have the drawback of limiting policy dialogue to a relatively narrow range of actors — especially those who already share a similar outlook or others perhaps more interested in ICT growth than in pro-poor development. Strategic engagement in policy dialogue on pro-poor ICT access can also be gained by taking, as a primary focus, areas of mainstream development policy — education, health, rural livelihoods, and so on — and contributing to more strategically framed development policy making such as the preparation of National Development Strategies.

It can also assist better understanding of the real world policy choices that politicians and their constituents face — cleaner water or faster connectivity, more clinics or more ICT access centres — and better articulation of the role of ICTs in poverty reduction. For effective pro-poor ICT policy dialogue, engagement on both fronts may be the most productive strategy: ensuring that ICT policy making is informed by a pro-poor perspective and strengthening that position by building support across government, especially those most engaged with poverty reduction and pro-poor development.

Its goal was to campaign for a national law facilitating the right to information. Its first step was to produce, with the Press Council of India, a draft right to information law. After years of public debate and the passage in several Indian states of right to information laws, the government of India passed the Freedom of Information Act The Act was weakly drafted, subject to widespread criticism and never brought into force.

Civil society campaigns for policy change rarely achieve rapid results. They require patience, tenacity, courage and conviction. There is no blueprint for success, but there are some common denominators to almost all successful advocacy campaigns. Good planning and organisation must combine with the ability to mobilise broad coalitions of public and political support towards a common goal.

Policy campaigning is goal-oriented advocacy in which civil society groups and coalitions aim to set the policy agenda rather than simply to monitor or respond to government policy making. It involves taking action and initiative.

It can be exciting and empowering for those involved, but it can also be hard work, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. Before adopting a campaigning orientation it is worth asking whether the goals could be better achieved by dialogue or quiet negotiation.

Campaigns for policy change draw on a wide range of tools and tactics, including public demonstrations, protests, letter writing, lobbying, use of media and the internet, and legal action.

Campaigning is often confrontational in nature. After all, a campaign would not be needed if the government or private company was receptive to the policies being advocated. Conversely, it is often the dynamic of conflict that gives a campaign momentum, spurring media attention and recruiting public support. Campaigns are often built in response to particular opportunities or threats arising in the context of the process of policy change. For example, the transition from analogue to digital distribution systems for television is moving ahead rapidly worldwide, with only limited time for civil society organisations to gain guarantees of access to the new channels.

In Uruguay, a law first drafted in by a coalition including community broadcasting activists, journalists and labour unions was adopted in , guaranteeing an equitable distribution of frequencies between private, public and civil society organisations.

The law has ensured that civil society groups have a legal entitlement to use part of the digital television spectrum. In Ecuador, the process of adopting a new constitution that began in under the presidency of Rafael Correa was seen as an opportunity by civil society groups engaged in media and ICT advocacy to challenge the existing political economy of the communications environment and to propose a new communication rights framework.

The new constitution adopted in included the explicit entitlement of all persons to universal access to information and communication technologies, together with a right to the creation of social media, including equal access to radio frequencies.

Some civil society advocacy organisations may have several campaigns running at the same time, each with distinct goals requiring different alliances and strategies.

International campaigning organisations, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, have tested their campaigning methods over many years. Some of the lessons learned are also relevant to ICT policy advocacy. As noted in the introduction to this toolkit, poor people face systemic barriers in their access to information and in their means to exercise their right to freedom of expression.

At the same time, it compromises the ability of disadvantaged people themselves to advocate for their own communication needs. This is a critical issue that demands the attention of any organisation engaged in pro-poor ICT advocacy. They are the primary stakeholders. Their lack of voice can be overcome in two distinct ways. The other is solidarity with the underprivileged on the part of other members of the society, whose interests and commitments are broadly linked, and who are often better placed to advance the cause of the disadvantaged by virtue of their own privileges e.

Rather they are run by well-educated middle-class professionals for whom pro-poor advocacy is a vocation. This is as much a reality in the ICT policy field as in other development sectors. Thus building the advocacy capacity of self-help groups of the disadvantaged and of community-based and working-class organisations is at least as important as doing advocacy for the poor. Effective pro-poor advocacy on access to ICTs must include strategies likely to lead to an increase in the voice and influence of the underprivileged sections of society in ICT and other policy making.

Such strategies can be effective in enabling people who are disadvantaged and marginalised to speak out directly on the issues that affect their lives and livelihoods.

The Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication BNNRC , [14] for example, is a national network that combines a programme of advocacy in ICT policy areas such as right to information, community broadcasting and e-governance, with practical support for rural knowledge centres and community radio stations.

The 5, women members of the Society are mostly Dalit, the lowest group in the Indian social hierarchy. The right-to-information movement in India drew, among other inspirations, on empowerment-based approaches to public accountability pioneered by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan MKSS in Rajasthan, including public hearings where accounts, including public expenditure records, were read aloud at independently organised village meetings and local people were invited to give testimony.

New ideas in policy are not always easy to communicate to those who influence or make decisions, particularly where they involve new or unfamiliar uses of ICTs. It may not be until an idea has been demonstrated in action that it is fully understood.

If success can be demonstrated in practice, it can have the dual impact of mobilising further demand and interest and of motivating policy makers to take decisions that encourage replication and scaling-up. Such initiatives can be resource intensive.