Issue Advocacy

Creating an Engaging Advocacy Video that Showcases Your Issue

Print Ads for Advocacy Campaigns - Do They Still Work? 

Your Issue Advocacy Campaign Startup Guide

Issue advocacy campaigns start with the best of intentions. We begin with a coalition who cares about your issue and want to make a real difference. But without a bit of campaign know-how, you will fall off track.  Here are ten common, advocacy campaign mistakes along with tips on how to avoid these errors.

Advocacy Strategies: Lame Duck Sessions Can Help Achieve Advocacy Goals

How Do You Define Advocacy?

As state legislatures across the country get ready for their sessions, it is time to plan for the next session and use your set of advocacy tools. 

Check out more information on our Advocacy Training here.

Defining What is Advocacy: 

Kevin Simowitz on Advocacy Storytelling:

Kevin Simowitz is the National Field Director at Caring Across Generations and an expert on advocacy storytelling. He has worked on political and grassroots organizing campaign across the country. Kevin was nice enough to answer six question about advocacy storytelling.  Here are his thoughts on using advocacy to get your story out.

Texting for Advocacy: Nonprofits Engaged in Issue Advocacy Should Be Using SMS

Are you texting for advocacy yet? If you’re a nonprofit working in the advocacy arena, you should be thinking about incorporating SMS (or texting) into your issue advocacy communications program. If you are looking for texting tools for advocacy check out our list of 100 campaign tools. Texts are, in many ways, a very personal way of communicating – a quick way to touch base with friends, family, colleagues, etc. But as people increasingly depend on mobile phones they turn to SMS as a way to communicate (as of 2010 – four whole years ago – data use outpaced actual phone use for Americans with cell phones), it’s important to adapt and incorporate text into your advocacy work.  Meet people where they are, as it were.  Here are 3 reasons to consider texting for advocacy if you haven’t explored this particular medium already:

Legislative Advocacy 101, It's Time to Take a Stand

Legislative Advocacy 101: Legislative Advocacy is important because there comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to take a stand. While this moment is always more dramatic in the movies, it’s possible that you’ve come to this realization regarding a particular policy or issue in your locality. And if you’ve decided that you want to make a change in policy and advocate for your issue in your local legislature, it’s time for a little Legislative Advocacy 101. While the list below is far from comprehensive, it’s a general outline of the process to help get you started with legislative advocacy.

Using Google Tools For Advocacy and Political Research

As the dominant search company in the world, Google has the potential to change traditional, political, and advocacy research. As phone surveys become more and more challenging, using digital polling and testing will become more commonplace. But are Google tools going to replace polling and focus groups in the short term? Not likely. The need for smaller polls and statewide samples, and the understanding and knowledge that comes with a good political pollster, still make traditional polling and focus groups attractive in political and advocacy campaign research. But Google’s digital tool set is impressive and it does allow you some interesting options.

Member Public Affairs Strategies to Remember

Member public affairs strategies can be an amazing way to move your issue forward. Membership organizations should have a head start when it comes to public affairs strategies, but that head start is often complicated. Membership organizations tend to have bureaucratic structures that make it difficult to work nimbly, especially when it comes to public affairs. Because of this, some member organizations have avoided using member-based public affairs strategies and they are missing out. 

Here are some ways to use your membership to enhance public affairs strategies by turning them into member public affairs strategies.

Membership Storytelling