Advocacy
– systematic planning
- Analyse the policy environment: there will be existing
policies and other groups advocating other policies – how do your
ideas fit into the bigger picture?
- Analyse your audience:
Identify all stakeholders (internal and
external). Who will be affected? Define ‘decision makers’ and
‘influencers’ – who are your allies and adversaries?
- Analyse your organisation:
Given the aims and mission of
your organisation figure out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities
and Threats of developing advocacy work on a particular issue. Do
you have the necessary resources?
Involve stakeholders in identifying the
issues, clarifying the vision and planning the strategy.
Set your objectives: Identify and research the issue you will be
working on. Set smart objectives for the short, medium and long term.
Identify and analyse your target audience: Work out who can
make the changes you want. How do they make decisions? Who do they listen
to?
Define your message: Decide what information you need. Do you need
more research to prove your case to the target? Put it into words.
Identify media: Which media will be most useful in getting to your
target? What 'spin' do you need to put on your story to get it in the
media?
Build alliances if appropriate so that you can call on more
resources and support.
. List the external and internal events
and opportunities you could link your advocacy strategy to.
Make a sequenced list of activities. Find an appropriate
mix of 'tools' for your audience: direct lobbying, public campaign, media
etc. Make sure that you have activities to cover all your objectives.
Decide who will do what by when and at what cost: build in plenty
of checkpoints along the way so that you can alter course if things
are not going according to the original plan
have a series of checkpoints in your plan so
that you can measure how you are getting on and reflect on changes in
the overall situation. Be open to new ideas and events and stay
flexible.
Evaluate: once you have achieved success (or failure) make a
thorough analysis of what you did that was more or less effective and
useful. Learn from this and do it better next time. Share the lessons with
others.
|