Module 4 (10)
- Make your advocacy work participatory, involving partners, allies and supporters, to build interest and commitment.
- There are both advantages and disadvantages to working in a coalition/alliance. So only take this decision after careful analysis.
- If you form a coalition/alliance, create a small steering group of leaders to run it, ensuring that those chosen are deeply committed to the issue and the coalition/alliance itself.
- Give careful consideration to whether, and how to, involve grassroots groups.
- Take time to nurture and develop your supporters – ensuring that you educate them about your advocacy work and build them up to give their maximum commitment.
Carrying Supporters Along the Path to Social Change
From Awareness to Engagement
Involvement of Grassroots Groups
Carrying Supporters along the Path to Social Change
Supporters are important stakeholders of your organization, who should be consulted and kept informed about your organization’s work. They are also a key power base in terms of political credibility.
Proactively educating supporters about your advocacy asks can really pay dividends – not only in terms of personal change, but also in terms of aligning these important stakeholders to your organization’s advocacy aims. Whilst some will remain passive supporters, many can be nurtured and developed into allies and active supporters of your cause.
The aim is to educate and motivate your supporters, and to develop these until they participate (and give!) to their maximum potential. This is shown in diagrammatic form below:
The objective is to move your supporters as far up the pyramid as possible. This process often starts when they respond to calls for written representations. Then, if their efforts are fruitful, they begin to watch the campaign and can become enlisted as ‘agents’ who watch for associated events and media (and even use these to obtain media coverage for the issue). Then, as they become more involved in the campaign, they may be willing to take an active part in advocacy activities, where their involvement rises over time. Finally, they can become fully committed activists for the cause.
The below are useful principles to assist with this process:
- Encourage participation
- Facilitate participation
- Communicate and celebrate successes
- Communicate appreciation
- Build skills and involvement
From Awareness to Engagement
Awareness is not enough. Many people are already aware, but simply do not think the issue important enough to actively do something about it. To make a difference to people’s lives, you have to take people beyond ‘awareness’, to create a sense of urgency and need for change, and to help them to visualize a new future and empower them to play a part in the movement for change. In short, you need to engage them.
The seven-stage model for engagement is:
- Ignorance
- Knowledge
- Motivation
- Skills/Resources
- Optimism
- Facilitation
- Reinforcement
Understanding this model is essential to the development of an effective advocacy campaign.
Involvement of Grassroots Groups
You may decide to involve grassroots groups in your advocacy work. This can help to spread the advocacy campaign, and to develop their capacity in the process. There are various approaches to their involvement, and the following tool may help you to decide on the most appropriate.
|
Advocacy Tool Tool 20. Involvement of Grassroots Groups |
Managing a Coalition
Coalition Leadership
Managing a Coalition
Advocacy requires hard work and a long-term commitment. It is easy for people’s commitment and enthusiasm to wane. The synergy that comes from people working together productively on an important issue can sustain efforts, even through difficult times.
Coalitions exist to enable their members to co-operate and work together. They take time and energy to develop and maintain because they involve building relationships of trust with other people. Many advocates find this aspect of their work to be both the most challenging and the most rewarding.
Starting a coalition is the easy part… Maintaining and developing the coalition is more difficult! The following advocacy tool provides some useful advice on managing coalitions.
|
Advocacy Tool Tool 28. Managing Coalitions |
Coalition Leadership
Coalition leadership can be shared (e.g. through a rotating co-ordination committee or steering group).
It is the role of the coalition leadership to ensure that the above suggestions are brought into action, and to:
- Promote participatory planning and decision making
- Delegate tasks
- Spread responsibilities across all members to reduce workload and avoid burnout
- Share information readily
- Foster trust, openness and honesty among members
- Motivate and empower members
- Act as role models
- Ensure that coalition members practice cooperation, not competition
The following may assist members to practice cooperation, not competition:
- Share leadership functions within the group and use all member resources
- Encourage members to take responsibility for their individual roles whilst valuing their team identity
- Take an interest in each member’s achievements as well as those of the group
- Remain committed to keep group communication on schedule, while allowing any disagreements to be solved
- Promote constructive criticism and helpful feedback
- Remain open to change, innovation, and creative problem solving
- Foster a norm that calls for members to support and respect one another and remain realistic in their expectations of one another
It is also a function of the leadership to run meetings effectively and efficiently. Coalition meetings can be time-consuming and non-productive – particularly if the coalition contains a broad base of differing organizations and individuals. General principles of running effective meetings should be applied.
|
Advocacy Tool Tool 29. Effective Meetings |
Do not duplicate the work of another coalition. If there is already an appropriate coalition, then you should join this and explore ways in which your organization can add value to the work of current members. But if there is no existing coalition, then you could bring together a number of key allies to propose a new coalition covering the issue.
The main elements needed in the formation of a coalition are:
- A clear mission and purpose
- The involvement of committed individuals and organizations that share this mission
- Realistic objectives and tasks
- Agreed participatory management, or decision-making structure - A joint steering group may be useful from an early stage.
A steering group may be useful from an early stage. This could be a joint steering group - including your organization and other leading organizations supporting advocacy on the issue.
Mission and Purpose
The first meeting should work towards achieving a common sense of mission and purpose.
The mission and purpose of the coalition must be clearly stated, so that organizations that join will fully comprehend the nature of their commitment. Coalition members should openly acknowledge any differing self-interest, so as to recognize differences but promote trust and respect among the members.
A name will also have to be agreed, and a common ‘ask’ which each member agrees to respect.
The strategy should allow each group to contribute its unique approach, with different groups taking different angles and approaches. But it is important that groups work together on agreed priorities, rather than all functioning independently. Also, core messages – including the ‘ask’ – must remain consistent. It is vital that groups do not work against each other.
Member Skills and Resources Inventory
The steering group should ensure that the strengths of each partner in the coalition are used. This can be achieved by a skills and resources inventory, asking each potential member to assess their skills and resources, and to determine what they would be willing to contribute to the coalition.
Members will have different skills and approaches, and be able to achieve things in different ways. They will also have various resources (money, premises, vehicles, meeting facilities, equipment etc.). Different groups will also have different contacts. The comparative advantages of each group can be assessed, so these can be exploited, and duplication avoided.
The strategy should also allow each group to express and contribute its unique approach, with different groups taking different angles, perspectives and approaches (e.g. a NGO that works closely with government, such as a service delivery provider, can be responsible for documenting and highlighting ‘best practice’ examples; whereas a combative campaigning group can document and highlight failures – in a hard-hitting campaign). But it is important that groups work together on agreed priorities, rather than all functioning independently.
This process should lead to the identification of skill and resource gaps, and thus the need to mobilize funds and/or carry out capacity-building.
Establishing Roles and Responsibilities
Coalition tasks and responsibilities should be clearly defined and assignments equitably distributed on the basis of the members’ areas of expertise. At the heart of every successful coalition, there should be a small group of leaders who are deeply committed to both the issue, and to ensuring that the overall goals of the coalition take precedence over the narrow interest of individual member organizations. Regular meetings should allow opportunities for members to report on their progress.
Decision-Making and Communication Channels
The coalition’s structure and decision-making processes should also be agreed, since issues such as the level of contributions, involvement in decision-making, and leadership can sometimes cause dissent. More democratic methods, such as rotating leadership, can help although they may slow down decision-making and management.
Regular communication should be established. Make sure that all coalition members are updated regularly on what other members are doing, what needs to be done, and what progress has been made.
If the coalition is well organized in its early stages, unnecessary problems can be avoided. Everyone involved must understand and sign up to the coalition’s mission, structure, operating procedures, and tasks – as a bare minimum. A coalition’s power lies in its ability to present a united front.
Coalitions are invaluable in advocacy because they create structures for organizations and individuals to share ownership of common goals. Advocacy work can be strengthened considerably through the use of coalitions. However, there are both advantages and disadvantages to forming or joining a coalition.
Decisions on joining a coalition should only be taken after careful consideration following research and risk analysis. Decide whether working with the coalition is the best way to solve your problem, and whether your values and approaches can be shared.
Working with coalitions may have the following advantages:
|
Advantages:
|
Some of the disadvantages of forming or joining a coalition are given below:
|
Disadvantages:
Health Warning! All these problems can be overcome and are not reasons to not get more involved in coalitions - they just things to be wary of. |
Working Together
Principles of Partnership Advocacy
Models of Joint Working
Working Together
Effective advocacy is best done in conjunction with other organizations supporting the same aim, as this adds ‘greater voice’ to the issue, expanding and strengthening the advocacy campaign. It also helps to empower members and individuals. Joint working can frequently accomplish goals that the individual members could not accomplish alone.
Joint working can also strengthen the advocacy campaign in practical terms, as partners can bring various resources to the table, and the advocacy can more easily be spread geographically. It also gives the campaign greater political and popular support. However, it is important that joint working is given a practical focus, to avoid the common pitfall of endless talking-shops, with no real results.
Partnerships can involve a range of different organizations, including those outside the usual animal welfare community – as appropriate to the advocacy issue. Research and analysis will inform the choice of partners. These could, for example, include organizations as diverse as: development, environment or health NGOs; NGO networks; NGO training bodies; intergovernmental organizations; national and local governments; influential research institutes; veterinary bodies; consumer organizations etc.
Principles of Partnership Advocacy
There are some key principles and recommendations that apply specifically to advocacy work. These are summarized briefly below:
- Integration: Advocacy should not be seen as something separate to your organization’s program work. Advocacy should be integrated into all program work, including ‘service delivery’ work carried out for government. Every practical animal welfare problem should be analyzed in order to find sustainable policy solutions, and advocacy work introduced to achieve these. Advocacy should be introduced throughout your organization’s planning processes: strategic planning; program planning and review; and your budgeting processes.
- Joint planning/play to strengths: If possible, advocacy should be planned from an early stage with the partners. This would usefully include joint strategic planning and a joint steering group.
- Share visibility: The principle of conducting advocacy with partners implies that the visibility that accrues through the work will be shared. Any reports produced as part of the work should include the logo and contact details of each of the main author organizations. Similarly for any public events (conferences, press releases etc), consideration should be given to how each organization could be profiled or credited. Partnership guidelines should be prepared on the use of photos and video footage for publication and communication.
- Focus on capacity development: Each piece of advocacy should leave partners in a stronger position. Expertise in areas such as: advocacy, media, communications, policy, and organizational development should be utilized and shared throughout, and built upon. Where advocacy campaigns cover a number of countries or regions, local knowledge and risk analysis should be valued and shared.
Models of Joint Working
There are various models of formal collaboration on advocacy campaigns. There is also some confusion about names for these advocacy groupings (especially from country-to-country)!
We find it useful to distinguish three main models of joint working:
- Networks: primarily for information sharing
- Alliances: longer-term strategic partnerships
- Coalitions: usually formed for a single issue or campaign
Networks
Advocacy campaigns can be spread through various networks. It is worth remembering that:
- Internet networks are increasing in use and coverage
- Networks are universal and almost everyone belongs to one or more networks
- Networks may be personal or professional; formal or informal; temporary or ongoing. They may include family members, school friends, colleagues, members of the same religious institution, etc.
- Members of a network have at least one thing in common with other members of that network.
This makes them valuable systems for the spread of advocacy messages, and a useful pool for supporters.
Alliances
The work of animal welfare alliances should include the development of concerted advocacy campaigns, and capacity development for advocacy work. The Pan African Animal Welfare Alliance (PAAWA) has as a core mandate: ‘strengthening the work of its member animal welfare organizations across Africa in advocacy and education/awareness, through leadership development and capacity building, and providing a strong collective voice for animal welfare’.
Coalitions
A ‘coalition’ is the primary model of joint working for an advocacy campaign (and we have used the term here to mean any joint working for advocacy purposes). Coalition members contribute resources, expertise, and connections to an advocacy effort, and bring greater political and popular support.
Coalitions can come in different shapes and sizes including:
- Formal: Members formally join the coalition, pay dues, and are identified as coalition members on letterhead, coalition statements etc.
- Informal: There is no official membership, so members are constantly changing. With membership turnover, the issues and tactics of the coalition may also shift.
- Geographic: The coalition is based on a geographical area. It can be local, national, regional (global South and North) or international.
- Multi or Single Issue
- Permanent or Temporary
Different types of coalitions will attract different organizations
Advocacy can empower a wide variety of stakeholders and supporters to stand up and speak out for animal welfare, sure of their issue and their ability to contribute to change. Empowerment makes an advocacy campaign more powerful and, ultimately, brings sustainable change.
Make your advocacy work participatory: involving partners, allies and supporters. This will build interest and commitment, ensuring that these individuals and organization have a stake in its continued success.
Empowering advocacy should not only work to address advocacy issues, but also seek to make the structures and systems of decision-making more inclusive; ensuring genuine consultation and involvement with animal welfare interest groups.
Advocacy can strengthen animal welfare organizations and supporters through promoting social organization, forming new leaders, and building capacity. Participatory advocacy can also strengthen networks on the national, regional and international level, building a strong collective voice for the movement.
This requires working with animal welfare networks, organizations and supporters to encourage them to think differently about their power relationships; giving them the courage to confront and change political and societal issues affecting animal welfare.
Introduction
Empowering Advocacy
Joint Advocacy
Advantages and Disadvantages of Working in Coalitions
Forming a Coalition
Managing a Coalition
Supporters and Activists
Further Resources
Introduction
Working together with others can make an advocacy campaign more powerful and bring sustainable change. It can also empower those involved, and build their capacity and reputation.
This module explains different models of joint working; including networks, coalitions and alliances. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of working in coalitions/alliances, and provides advice on forming and managing these. Some best practice examples of animal welfare coalitions and alliances will be examined and analyzed. The module includes ways in which joint working can be effectively planned and developed in order to avoid common pitfalls and achieve successful and fruitful advocacy relationships.
It also looks at the involvement of supporters and activists, and how this can be effectively managed.
|
Learning objectives:
|