Issue Advocacy Best Practices

Running an effective advocacy campaign demands more than just passion and good intentions. It takes skill, strategy, planning, and a whole lot of hard work. 

So, how do you cut through the noise, build support for your cause, and create real, lasting change? The following will give you some of the essential tips for running a winning advocacy campaign and building a roadmap for success.

Is Your campaign message ready for 2022?  You may be wondering how to stay on message in the new year in order to meet your goals. The new year will bring with it plenty of forums, debates, and other public speaking events that will serve as opportunities to share your campaign message with diverse audiences.

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

No matter the size of your nonprofit, advocacy campaign testing should be a key component of everything you do digitally. Testing allows you to find out which tactic, message, strategy, etc., is the most effective in accomplishing your goal. Instead of relying on a hunch of what the best thing to do is—which we are often wrong about—tests allow us to find what really works.

Get ready, I’m about to crack advocacy budgets wide open (pun intended, and it won’t be the last). I know you’re on the edge of your seats, but this is really no chicken and the egg conundrum I’m about to solve for you. When you’re looking to develop an advocacy program, your budget should always come first. This may seem counterintuitive when you begin talking to consultants (like you’re tipping your hand and about to get taken for a ride), but it’s really important for a few reasons:

Our third installment of our picks for innovative nonprofit marketing campaigns is here to inspire  your creativity. This time, we have chosen four creative advertising campaigns that incorporate direct mail, video, and print advertising to convey important messages.

Two things off the bat to consider are costs and timing. First, die-cuts add costs, so it's not something to suggest on every campaign. Second is the time factor, die-cuts do add time to the production of the piece, so this needs to be worked into the schedule. If you have the budget and time for producing a die-cut piece, then the issues become production related.

In part one of this series we talked about the characteristics of a good printer for political direct mail printing and how to find them. This week we’re going to talk about schedules and paper.