Advocacy Strategies

Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. In addition to writing for The Washington Post, Dana provides political commentary for multiple TV outlets and has authored three books on politics. He just released his most recent book, The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party, where he analyzes Republican efforts to hold on to political power by any means necessary.

Lame duck session should not come as a surprise. After election season is over, it’s easy to just want to hole up, make sour dough bread, chicken soup and shut off your political brain for a while. But across the country, as well as in Congress, we are about to go into the legislative season and lame duck sessions.

If you work for a health advocacy group and are in search of advocacy strategies that apply to your specific industry, then you’ve come to the right place. In this blog we outline strategies that will help you maximize your impact, increase engagement, and move people to the polls on your behalf.

At The Campaign Workshop, we love issue advocacy campaigns. As consultants, we get to work on a wide variety of campaigns and with a wide variety of clients. While we could never pick a favorite, working with a group of passionate people to make a substantive change on an issue they care about is our jam. People working on advocacy campaigns are the experts in their issues and are a true resource when we are working hand in hand on crafting a campaign to reach a wider audience

There are so many different types of ads that it can feel overwhelming to choose which ones to use for your digital advocacy campaign. You can certainly use all of them, but there are some that are likely better suited to your campaign than others, depending on your goals.

Advocacy campaign testimonials have a unique ability to highlight the human impact of your issue. By recruiting community members who have been directly affected by your issue to share their stories, you can make the seemingly arbitrary stakes of policy decisions more tangible for people.

We often find that a digital advocacy campaign is expected to meet multiple organizational goals at once. Unfortunately, you can’t really have it all. So how do you choose an objective and what digital strategy is likely to achieve it?

When you are setting up your digital campaign budget for advocacy, how much should you spend on digital advertising? Per unit, digital advocacy advertising is comparatively cheap – while you may spend several hundred dollars (or more) per point on TV, your cost per thousand impressions (CPM) can be as little as a dollar or two for digital advertising. That means that digital advertising can be a fantastic way to reach out to supporters and promote your advocacy campaign when you’re working with limited dollars.

The art of crafting a well-integrated advocacy strategy is akin to making a great book-to-film adaptation. When you find out a book you love will be made into a movie, you hope the story, characters, and message won’t be lost in translation across mediums. A good adaptation will capture the theme and boil the plotline down to its most important elements—after all, few among us have time to catch a twelve-hour movie (though I personally would be on board with a marathon re-cut of The Shining).