Principles of Advocacy: Developing a Plan for Advocacy
Learn how to properly plan for advocacy to avoid surprises that might make you look ineffective, clumsy, or incompetent, in order to increase your chances of success.
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WHAT'S A PLAN FOR ADVOCACY?
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WHEN SHOULD YOU CREATE A PLAN FOR ADVOCACY?
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MAKING YOUR PLANS
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PUTTING THE PLAN TOGETHER
WHAT'S A PLAN FOR ADVOCACY?
Other sections of the Community Tool Box have covered strategic planning. How should planning for advocacy be different?
The answer is that in many ways the process will be similar -- but it's even more important to do it thoroughly, and do it up front. That's because advocacy:
- Involves getting powerful individuals or organizations to make big changes that may not be in their short-term interest
- Often involves working in the public eye
- Often involves sticking out your neck, as you take a stand against a larger opponent
Planning will help you find out ahead of time where the major difficulties may lie, and to avoid surprises (including those surprises that might make you look ineffective, clumsy, or stupid).
In addition, as with any project, planning will help you to:
- Clarify your goals
- Clarify the steps that will take you to your goals
- Increase your chances of success
If you don't plan, you may waste valuable energy, miss some opportunities, perhaps even antagonize people you need to keep on your side.
WHEN SHOULD YOU CREATE A PLAN FOR ADVOCACY?
It's important to complete a plan before you start advocating, because, as you will find, each part of the plan can affect the others.
Normally, planning your goals comes first--but you may have to change those plans if you find, as you plan further, that the tactics you were hoping to use aren't legal, or won't work. When you plan everything together--and ongoing--you can both build support and make adjustments as you go.
Your goal might be to close down a refinery that had been guilty of dumping toxic chemicals in the community. You find, when you check into the list of possible allies, that the economic impact of closure would be devastating to the community. So you adjust your goal to one that would change safety practices in the refinery and permit closer community oversight.
If you had publicly stated your goal of closing the place, before talking with others or filling in the other steps of your plan, you could have antagonized many of those whose support you would need. These might include many people in the community who depended on the refinery financially. And it would have been hard to win them back, after publicly coming out against their interests.
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