Tag Archives: evaluation

Assessing where you sit–the question of network centrality

Posted on March 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

One of the challenges in evaluating advocacy is really just a variation on a universal bane of researchers: the contamination by extraneous variables.

In advocacy, after all, there are so many different things that can impact the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of an initiative, only some of which are remotely within the control of the entity being evaluated. Evaluators, then, are hesitant to ascribe too much of a given victory or defeat to the actions wielded by the organization/advocate, because, in so doing, they could be inadvertently inflating or deflating the true impact of the effort.

One of the most promising approaches to getting around the pesky reality that advocacy can’t happen in an isolated lab is the idea of network centrality.

Network centrality means measuring advocates, rather than the discrete advocacy effort–essentially looking at one angle of the adaptive capacity question. It requires determining the reputation of an advocate or organization within the network of allies and targets it needs to influence–today or over time–if it is to prevail in an advocacy campaign. It’s not necessarily easier to collect these assessments than measures of controlled cause-and-effect, and it’s as relatively subjective as most everything in the social sciences, but it’s tremendously valuable in predicting how one will be able to move within the advocacy context. It’s designed to work in real life and real time.

And you can use it to sort of self-assess, too.

Have you ever tabulated the policymaker targets with whom you have a close relationship–the ones that routinely ask you for information and turn to you for policy guidance? What about those who may not approach you, but who are very receptive when you initiate the exchange? What about looking at your coalition relationships–with which organizations are you in relationship, and how often do others look to you to lead an advocacy effort? How many entities within your community are aware of your policy priorities? How many would report that you are a trusted source on policy issues? How many visit your website to check out action alerts? How frequently do media contacts rely on you?

Have you asked?

Understanding how we move within the orbit that is our advocacy network, where we sit, and how others see us can give us valuable insights into how we can maneuver effectively within our context. It can reveal why we feel marginalized in some debates, point out where we need to invest more relational energy, and guide us towards new tactics to build our reputation with key stakeholders.

It’s not egotistical to want the power we need to get the changes we want for the people we serve. It’s not self-serving to spend time analyzing how we connect to those with whom we need to have influence, so that we can figure out how to better wield that influence in pursuit of justice.

It’s not about trying to make ourselves the sun.

It’s about making sure that we are in a position to shine.

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In search of adaptive capacity

Posted on March 12, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Advocacy evaluation has been both an academic and an applied pursuit of mine for the past three years or so now.

I’ve learned a lot about how to build accountability and shared learning into advocacy campaigns, how to measure the comparative impact of different approaches, and, most importantly, what to address in order to improve the effectiveness of a given advocacy organization.

I’ve learned a lot about what doesn’t predict advocacy success, too: sheer organizational size or budget, ‘inside’ connections to decision-makers, expertise in a given issue area, even the number of grassroots activists.

All those things matter, certainly.

But what seems to matter more than anything, and what captures, in a way, the effect of knowing how to bring those elements and others together into a cohesive and potent whole, is adaptive capacity.

It’s an idea borrowed from systems theory, and I’m certainly not the first one to connect it to the task of advocacy evaluation.

It’s one of those beautiful theories that makes intuitive, as well as empirical, sense.

Wouldn’t we expect that, in the advocacy realm, those organizations that can adapt to a continually changing environment would see the greatest success, especially over time?

The challenge, then, for nonprofits engaging in advocacy (and, we assume, wanting to win!) is to figure out what adaptive capacity looks like, for them, and how to build it. Otherwise, you get organizations that build the same kind of campaign, or deploy the same kinds of messages, or use the very same tactics, no matter the context, which yields victories (not surprisingly) only when the actions are well-suited to the demands of the situation. When they’re not, well…that “successful” advocacy organization can find itself losing, a lot.

It means understanding how to really diagnose the political context–not just who’s in power, but who has influence over them, and where there are openings and how to leverage your assets to push through them. It means fully reflecting on the victories and failures of each advocacy effort, so that you can learn from one experience to figure out what it means for the next. It means compensating for the areas where your capacity is less than you would hope, by optimally wielding the capacity you do possess. It means building your skills, and knowledge, and relationships–not so that you can “master” advocacy, as though it was a one-time achievement–but so that you can increase your versatility and pivot to different strategies as the situation demands.

This understanding, as fairly evident as it appears at this point in the development of the field, presents a different nuance to the pursuit of advocacy capacity. Now, we know that what we should be working towards isn’t just a bigger organization or better connections or a stronger base…it’s the elements that are particularly essential in this specific environment, and maybe the one that we think is headed for us next. That might require going after any one of those assets, or all of them, or something else entirely. And it will definitely demand that we know when to pull out which tools, and in what combination, and that we never stop scanning around ourselves to see how what we’re doing might not fit with what is needed.

Adaptive capacity:

A fancy way of saying “able to win again and again and again and again.”

Doesn’t that sound good?

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Execution Matters: Evaluation and Getting Advocacy Right

Posted on December 8, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In this final post on The Future of Nonprofits, I want to focus on a key point from early in the book, about how many (perhaps most) nonprofit organizations and their leaders are far better at coming up with creative approaches to solving problems (and accomplishing their core missions) than executing those ideas consistently and effectively.

It’s not meant to be a total bash on nonprofits and their employees; really, given how under-resourced most nonprofits are (related to our pathological aversion to investing in “overhead”–those important functions that, in fact, enable our programs and services to succeed) and how much of our working hours we spend trying to sort of keep our heads above water and look effective (whether or not we really know what “effective” would look like in our specific context), it’s not surprising that we seldom have the chance to step back and think about the kinds of processes and structures within our organizations (and our own workdays) that would raise our execution ability to a standard of excellence.

Instead, we’re always trying to do more with less (except when we’re admittedly doing less with our less, and busy making excuses for that). We stop doing some of what we should be doing, and close ourselves off to the possibilities of what we could be doing, in ways that mean, somewhat paradoxically, that we have to keep coming up with new inventions to increase our creativity, in order to compensate for how poorly we’re managing to pull off what it is that we do.

Exhausted yet?

In the advocacy context specifically, I see this when we develop campaigns that drift towards a new gimmick, or rely excessively on a particular technology, as though those are the tricks that will deliver the outcome we seek. We’re continually trying to one-up ourselves in terms of a slogan or a media event or a high-profile endorser, when what we should really focus on is hiring really good organizers, or investing in our relationships with our constituents, or personally connecting with every target policymaker (or all of the above). Or, we jump from issue to issue, diluting our potency and confusing our targets, lulling ourselves with the truth that “there are so many important causes out there.”

The Future of Nonprofits has a chart that shows how we can increase our aggregate impact either by raising our execution ability, even rather modestly, or by dramatically expanding our pool of creative ideas. There’s arguably a need for both. Given limited resources, though, it’s much more efficient to focus on marginally improving our delivery, especially because it can ripple into other areas of our organizational functioning, in terms of relationships built and skills enhanced.

And, so, what would it take to improve our execution in the advocacy arena?

First, we have to rigorously evaluate what it is that we’re doing: what isn’t working, and what is, and what really tips the balance. We have to identify our organizational and individual advocacy capacities, build up the areas where we are weakest, and develop benchmarks for what we should be delivering. We need to fully investigate where our own efforts have fallen short before assuming that our advocacy failures are to be blamed on adverse political or economic conditions. We need transparency and accountability for what our campaigns set out to do, just as we do in the fundraising and direct services arenas.

And we need organizational cultures committed not just to innovation, and not just to advocacy, but to excellence, and to intellectual honesty about how well we’re executing our most core programmatic functions, too.

A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about advocacy evaluation when a Board member for one of the organizations for which I do consulting (we were volunteering at the same event, and I’m never without reading material) looked over my shoulder. She shook her head at the article’s premise that the field of advocac evaluation is far behind that of traditional programmatic assessment, and I think that her critique is largely valid: too often, our obvious good works, in the nonprofit sector, excuse the fact that they’re not always done well.

In advocacy as in the rest of our endeavors, that’s an oversight we cannot afford.

In the new year, we may find that we don’t need to continually come up with as many new strategies or “innovative” approaches, if we are consistently doing what we do very, very well. And implementing evaluation systems that allow us–no, require us–to know when that is the case.

We won’t have to take as many shots, in other words, if we can hit them when we need to.

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Evaluating Advocacy, de nuevo

Posted on September 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

It’s “update” week at Classroom to Capitol.

As I read through previous posts for my summer maternity break hiatus, I found a few that I really wanted to revisit, rather than repost. This is the last of the three that I have chosen for this week, with new thoughts and, of course, new questions.

One of my academic interests over the past couple of years has related to questions of how we evaluate advocacy efforts: How do we know advocacy “success”, short of absolute policy change, so that we can build on it? How can we assess organizational capacity for advocacy (to have a better sense of who will succeed, and also to know where to invest)? What kinds of interim goals should form part of an advocacy strategy, and what kinds of benchmark measures should mark our progress?

Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to apply my study and training in this area to practice through work with the Sunflower Foundation and its advocacy initiatives. It’s tremendously rewarding to be able to not only help individual advocates and nonprofit organizations seeking to develop an advocacy voice figure out how they’ll gauge their work, but also to be part of this evolving field and to work alongside a funder investing so much energy in contributing to good practice around these questions, too.

I love it.

More recently, my work with the Sunflower Foundation has allowed me to contribute to some of the Alliance for Justice’s conversations about how they evaluate advocacy, both on the front end (in terms of organizational capacity) and as advocates and their donors seek to determine the relative impact of different advocacy strategies. I’m very excited about AFJ’s revised advocacy capacity tool, which will be available online soon, and particularly about their approach to this work, which is aimed at getting as many organizations as possible to evaluate their own capacity (in a variety of areas; it’s a pretty thorough look at the inputs that we believe position an organization to succeed in advocacy) in order to build the field of knowledge about what makes a difference in ultimate advocacy success.

In Kansas, our hope is to eventually be able to help a given nonprofit organization know where it sits, on some of these capacity measures, compared to an aggregate of its peers, and also to develop strategies that are at least likely to lead to enhanced capacity in those same areas, so that we can build a strong cadre of advocate organizations across the geography and in different fields.

Refining these measures, and these tools, is important not just because we want to know what works in advocacy (so that we can get better and better and win more and more often), but also because being able to demonstrate how our theory of change is leading to tangible results should push more funders to feel comfortable supporting advocacy (or, at least, to expose that their real fears are taking a stand on controversial issues, and we need to know that, too!). We’ve come quite far in the past few years, such that advocates are no longer left to flounder to come up with benchmarks, and no longer grasping for what might make sense for measurement. It’s tremendously exciting, for the academic side of me, but especially for the promise that these tools hold in making our advocacy more robust, more acclaimed, and, ultimately, more integrated into what nonprofit organizations do all day.

And it’s great to be part of it.

If your organization is interested in advocacy evaluation and/or assessing your organizational capacity for advocacy, we should talk! I’d love to connect you to resources and (full disclosure!) include you in some of our field-building efforts, too. Because once we know what works, we just have to gather the courage to go after the money to do it.

And, then, we’re unstoppable.

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Evaluating Advocacy: Of jumping hoops and learning loops

Posted on December 9, 2010 by | Leave a comment

photo credit, 2007 Powwow, Smithsonian Institution via Flickr Creative Commons

If you haven’t commented yet this week, this post is your last chance! (Except, of course, that you can go back to post on one of the other two!). Tomorrow, I’ll announce the winner of the free copy of The Networked Nonprofit!

There is a lot of content in the book about how organizations can, and should, approach social media as a sort of experiment, building in mechanisms that will help them to learn quickly, and well, from what they’re trying, so that they can modify it as needed. They stress a real intentionality in this approach, an emphasis, from the very beginning, on defining what it is that we hope to accomplish, and the measures that we’ll use to help us get there. They also create space, though, for different organizations (or even different campaigns within the same organization) to define “success” differently, and they caution against reducing social media to a mere numbers game.

As I wrap up a contract evaluating an advocacy initiative for a foundation here in Kansas, and continue my reading, speaking, and contemplating about how to evaluate advocacy, and why such evaluation is so important, there is a lot from the evaluation discussion in The Networked Nonprofit that I believe applies to this endeavor of advocacy evaluation, too.

Foremost is the idea that evaluation should be actionable, that is, evaluation should give practitioners real information that they can really use, and be imminently valuable to them as a real-time check on what they’re trying. Having such information not only improves practitioners’ ability to change what’s not working, but also serves to increase organizations’ willingness to take risks (like trying advocacy or social media), because there’s comfort in knowing that we’ll be able to tell what’s working and what’s not.

They call this “learning loops”, and the way that they talk about it will sound very appealing, I believe, to anyone who has participated in the “other” kind of evaluation–that which is designed by a third party to meet a donor’s, not the constituents’ or the practitioners’, needs for information, that which produces a bound report years after anyone stopped caring (or even remembering) what is being evaluated, and that which uses criteria that don’t remotely resemble ‘success’ according to the perspectives of those really doing the work.

The details on learning loops, below, come from Kanter’s work, but this is my conceptualization of how the idea applies to advocacy evaluation, and how it differs from “traditional” evaluation.

  • Learning loops emphasize planning for evaluation from the beginning, involving stakeholders in defining success and choosing measures, rather than tacking an evaluation study on at the end.
  • Learning loops provide real-time information, so that it can be applied to change course mid-stream. Organizations take a few hours every month to ask themselves questions about what’s working and what’s not, and they adjust workplans and even strategic goals to account for what they’re learning.
  • Practitioners collect the data that feed the learning loops, and they help to interpret them. They measure engagement (who’s connecting with our work, and what are they saying about that connection?), return on investment (the traction that they’re getting from specific tactics, and which ones deserve more attention), and social change (what is actually getting better about the problems that concern us).
  • Participants engage in a process of reflection as a part of the learning loop; the priority is on really learning something from the evaluation endeavor, and there’s a recognition that we learn best when we have a chance to process with others.
  • Learning loops use low-cost, relatively low-risk experiments, to test assumptions and begin the process of organizational change, as a prelude to lasting social change, rather than waiting until the end of an expensive and lengthy activity to see if it worked.

    There is still a lot that’s hard about evaluating advocacy, and there are still a lot of variables that impinge on our ability to measure precisely the impact of our interventions.

    Still, this kind of advocacy evaluation, woven seamlessly into the practice of advocacy itself, holds tremendous promise for overcoming our collective resistant to the idea and, therefore, beginning to build a body of knowledge that will help us get better at doing advocacy evaluation.

    And it starts with changing how we think about evaluation, not as a hoop through which some funder says we must jump, but instead as a part of the process of social change, and one that gives us another tool through which to improve our work.

    If you’ve been a participant in either approach to evaluation, especially evaluating advocacy or social media efforts, how were those experiences? How might you implement learning loops in your organization, specifically in your advocacy? How does this change how you think about evaluation?

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    What does civic engagement look like, really?

    Posted on October 21, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    photo credit, Library of Congress, via Flickr Commons


    Social workers, especially us “macro” types, use a lot of pretty fuzzy language sometimes. What does “empowerment” really mean after all? How do we know effective advocacy when we see it?

    And what, really, is “civic engagement”, and how in the world do we measure that?

    Answering this question is important not just because it’s never a good idea to spend energy talking about something without really having any idea what we’re actually talking about, but also because defining and measuring and evaluating our civic engagement work is about accountability and integrity, which, after all, are some of the goals towards which our civic engagement work is focused in the first place.

    We know that civic engagement is far more than getting people registered to vote, or even than getting them to the polls. I remember a course that I took from Ernesto Cortes, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, in graduate school, and how he talked about how reducing civic engagement, and the exercise of our citizenship, to voting alone, really makes it essentially another aspect of consumerism–choosing between this or that preformulated option, which, of course, isn’t very engaging at all.

    But the other stuff, beyond voting, is even harder to measure and truly conceptualize: what does it look like to be authentically involved in the governance of one’s own community, or one’s own life, and how do we begin to track and evaluate that engagement on a broad scale?

    The folks at the Building Movement Project (I know, I know–I’m a bit obsessed) have a new paper, Evidence of Change, which discusses evaluating civic engagement efforts and, I believe, offers, if not a roadmap, at least some sparks of guidance for organizations trying to be clear about their goals in this client empowerment work and, ultimately, demonstrate its tangible value.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because I really believe that there are particular opportunities for advancement of advocacy and civic engagement as legitimate activities, and, really, core strategies, of social service nonprofit organizations, but we’ll never solidify a place for them if we can’t figure out how to assess and communicate about what we’re doing, and why it matters.

    Some of the new insights for me from this, most recent, discussion:

  • We can’t measure civic engagement by looking only at the individuals (for example, our clients) involved; truly meaningful civic engagement should be transformative not just for those people, but also for the “host” organization’s capacity for social change, and for the society and institutional structures their engagement is aimed at changing.
  • Rigorously evaluating civic engagement work requires, for many nonprofit social service organizations, TWO significant culture shifts–first towards this kind of empowerment work as a core part of the agency’s operations, and second towards seeing formal evaluation as integral to the organization’s mission. No wonder it’s so hard, and so rare.
  • Just as we’re still in the process of developing new models of social service organizations that integrate advocacy and civic engagement in their direct service work, so, too, do we need to develop new models of evaluation, able to meet the demands of these kinds of nonlinear change processes. And we need the space, within academia and especially philanthropy, for these new evaluation methods to gain legitimacy.

    So getting out the vote among our clients and allies is obviously important. And being able to quantify the electoral impact of our work, and how it changes conversations about the issues we care about, is important in garnering the resources we’ll need to support its continuation. Absolutely.

    But we want more for those we have the honor to serve than a choice between candidate A and candidate B. We want them to be more than consumers–we see them and know them as stakeholders, capable of helping to build the kind of society we want for all of us.

    And that takes the kind of civic engagement that moves mountains.

    So we’d better be ready to measure how far they’ve come.

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    Confessions of a Nonprofit Consultant

    Posted on September 27, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    I’m just about one year after having commenced my nonprofit consulting work in earnest, and I can sincerely say that I feel…ambivalent about it.

    Especially in this economy, I’m asked pretty frequently by students about my consulting work, and the kinds of opportunities it provides. I tell them pretty unequivocably that it’s not where I’d recommend starting a career; both because the connections that I have make it feasible for me to build a job out of it, and because I really needed the legitimacy and structure that an organizational home offers, at one point.

    But, for me, at this point in my life, it makes a tremendous amount of sense: I get to work with organizations I care about, contribute to research and policy on a variety of causes, and have the flexibility to be a more hands-on parent during the day.

    But, to me, my consulting work, and whether or not it’s “working” has to be about a lot more than me, and my scheduling preferences. And, so, I guess as an exercise for me as much as anything, I’ve been thinking about what I like about it, in terms of my interactions with organizations, and what prompts some of those more complex emotions.

    First, the completely excellent:

  • 1. I’m relatively unbound by resource limitations and pragmatic organizational constraints. I get to make the suggestions and offer the critiques that I find most compelling, without having to always worry first whether they’re totally feasible.
  • 2. I build organizational capacity. My favorite work is doing training, providing materials, answering questions–building up the staff, Board members, and volunteers who work directly with clients and the social problems that plague us, and increasing their ability to make a difference in their communities.
  • 3. I have space in my life and legal and political latitude to be overtly political, when it’s necessary–I represent only myself, on a daily basis, and not always a 501(c)3 organization.
  • 4. I can tailor my work to an organization’s actual needs, in every way from how I communicate with staff to how much I charge to how much power and control they retain over the process.

    And, what I’m still grappling with:

  • 1. I seldom get to see things through to any sort of real implementation or follow up. There’s obviously never ‘completion’ in any social change work, but a lot of my consulting involves drafting recommendations, putting new processes in place, creating templates…without much knowledge of the degree to which those tools will really be used to effect change at the organization.
  • 2. That same freedom, to be divorced from resource and practical constraints, can mean that my recommendations seem, well, divorced from reality. A best practice is only a best practice, after all, if it can really be practiced, and I know that I sometimes set standards that don’t make sense in the daily lives of agency personnel.
  • 3. I have some real ambivalence about how my work promotes the idea of unmooring workers from an organizational context; given how critical I am of the increasing shift of risk to employees, and away from institutions, I’m very aware of how I’m contributing to this very trend. In some cases, this is less problematic, because I know that the work I’m performing wouldn’t be done at all if not for me, but, in others, I wonder if I’m not making it possible for organizations to avoid hiring regular, full-time staff for some of these functions.
  • 4. And, finally, I’m very cognizant of needing to always keep my work focused on building up the organization, rather than ever seeming like someone who swoops in, provides “expert” advice, and then leaves. That’s critical not just because of how we know change becomes institutionalized within an organization, but also because of my fundamental belief in empowerment.

    I’d love to hear from other nonprofit consultants (and it’s certainly a growing industry!) about how you balance these tensions, and what you see as the most rewarding and most challenging parts of this work. And, nonprofit leaders who have worked with consultants, what do you look for in a consultant? What contributions do consultants make to your organization that truly enrich your work, and how do they fall short of this goal?

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    “Creative destruction” and nonprofit consolidation

    Posted on June 1, 2010 by | 4 Comments

    photo credit, dhnieman, via flickr

    Let’s start summer right, folks!

    This week, I’m doing three posts related to concepts in Robert Egger’s book, Begging for Change. He has become one of my very favorite writers, speakers, and thinkers on topics related to nonprofit organizations and social change work, and I find myself continually challenged by his perspectives, going through an entire pack of sticky notes to mark pages I want to remember. If you haven’t read the book, you should, but, first, do me a favor and read the posts this week and share your thoughts about how I’ve connected his ideas (from 2004) to today’s not-for-profit landscape. And, you know, you can enjoy the sunshine, too.

    Almost every semester, I am struck by the inclusion in at least several students’ career goals of something related to “start my own nonprofit organization”. This semester, I had students express interest in starting adoption agencies and drug treatment programs and mentoring projects for at-risk youth. I also receive relatively regular inquiries from former students exploring starting their own nonprofits. Myself, I honestly don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body; I’d never want to start my own organization, and I have even turned down a few promotions because I’d have to spend more time paying attention to payroll and less time generally agitating.

    But it would certainly appear that the desire to be one’s own boss, combined with passion about the social problems we face, leads at least many within the social services sphere to dream of setting up their own shop. Now, you know that I don’t believe that duplication of effort is, necessarily, an evil. All things being equal, two excellent organizations working on the same social challenge should mean that, together (or apart, but headed towards the same goal), they reach victory more quickly than one would alone. And I like to win.

    But Egger’s book, and my conversations with my students, and some discussion in the blogosphere (see, in particular, Lucy Bernholz’s awesome post on peer-reviewed nonprofits) and the traditional media have me thinking about what it would take to really change the game in terms of the ‘marketplace’ for nonprofit organizations. I mean, why does it often seem easier to start a nonprofit than a for-profit business, when, most of the time, our goals are much more ambitious (making success, therefore, seem more elusive)? Why are there nonprofit organizations still in business long after they ceased to really meet a compelling social need? Why do our current organizations often fail to capture the imagination of bright and talented graduates, pushing them to envision charting their own path instead (especially when we have a near-crisis in executive leadership in the sector)? Why is the recent uptick in nonprofit mergers seen as a sign of doom, when for-profit mergers are often hailed?

    Egger calls for “creative destruction”, hence the title of this post–the consolidation or collapse of the most ineffective and wasteful organizations. He acknowledges that such a recommendation creates more questions than it answers: where would one draw this line? How do we define success? Without good benchmarks or a good roadmap to outcomes, how can we measure waste? How can we promote social enterprises that bring more social value to the for-profit sector, and are there places and ways in which such an approach is inappropriate? Questions that he doesn’t ask, but which must be addressed, include how to balance between consolidation and the sustenance of ‘niche’ organizations that effectively serve small, particular constituencies; and how long organizations should have to try innovative (but failing) approaches to entrenched problems. Should all nonprofit organizations be held to the same standards, once we can figure out what these standards should be? Or should they be more locally defined, taking into account differences in contexts and inputs? What are the responsibilities of donors, who give for all kinds of ‘illogical’ reasons, to stop supporting organizations that are failing in their missions?

    I read Egger’s discussion of creative destruction with a different lens, I expect, than that through which it was written: that was 2004 and this is 2010, and some even excellent nonprofit organizations are collapsing because of the dramatic dropoff in foundation and corporate giving, in particular. But, also, perhaps because I just finished my class on macro systems, I thought back to a lecture early in the semester when we talked about the role of stress in social systems, and how stress can provide the impetus for real transformation, as systems struggle to adapt to new and harsher realities.

    And that’s where I conclude this post, with questions, a little bit of despair, and some hope thrown in. I’d greatly appreciate others’ thoughts as I muddle through this–where do we go from here? Since we don’t have a ‘market’, per se, how do we make these decisions in a way that respects our shared values as a social service sector? How do we understand and communicate the stakes involved in perpetuating the status quo? And how do we use the current economic climate as the “crisis” that could best prod us in the right direction?

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    Evaluating Advocacy–the Organizational Capacity Question

    Posted on April 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    I really, really wish that I would have read this guide about 8 years ago (in my defense, it was published in January of this year). It’s interesting–while it’s really designed for “advocacy organizations”– those that primarily (or exclusively) conduct advocacy campaigns–I really think it’s even more valuable for nonprofit organizations that are layering advocacy onto social service work, as I did in my work with El Centro, Inc.

    The premise of this guide is that, while the new attention to evaluating advocacy campaigns is absolutely critical, a neglected area of study relates to organizations and their organizational capacity to support social change work. Too often, we nonprofit advocates, if we’re thinking capacity-building at all (rather than just “must get 500 people to this rally”, “must get Representative XYZ to vote no”, “must prepare leader ABC for press conference”), we think programmatic skill development: I want more media relations skills or I need help with Internet grassroots mobilization strategies. Research shows, however, that we need to pay attention to organizational structure and systems and the ways in which they support successful advocacy, or don’t.

    And I know from my own practice that this is key.

    I found myself nodding at the computer screen several times while reading this. The authors focus a lot on leadership (one of four areas of organizational capacity they identify: leadership, adaptive, management, and technical), and it’s undeniably the most critical link. Working for years in an organization with a primary emphasis on services and this tangential, although mostly sincere, interest in advocacy, I can testify to the importance of committed Board leadership, unity among stakeholders, organizational culture of advocacy, long-term goal orientation, and stakeholder engagement.

    These are the pieces that, I think, most trip up our nonprofit social services as they seek to integrate advocacy. When the leadership hasn’t really bought in, when they expect social change on a grant timeline, when they’re hiding the potential for controversy from Board members, when the organizational culture discourages risk, when there’s great distance between leadership and constituents…then advocacy will be avoided or, if pursued, siloed and marginalized and sporadically forgotten.

    This suggests, and my own practice wisdom confirms, the importance of really assessing our organization’s leadership and its “appetite” for advocacy before embarking on a social change agenda within our nonprofit organizations. And that’s the most valuable piece of this document for me. It has a “readiness to implement advocacy” checklist that I think all nonprofit organizations should look at, and it asks really important questions (as yet unanswered) about what “high-performing” advocacy organizations look like.

    The final two pieces that prompted a lot of thinking from me about my advocacy journeys within nonprofit organizations were the importance of building time for reflections and the primacy of human resource concerns. As far as the former, I always built reflection time with my grassroots leaders into our work, but I rarely had a chance to reflect with the leaders of our organization about where our advocacy was going and how we should adjust. And I think El Centro, Inc. really did pretty well in terms of organizational capacity for advocacy–it had a diversified resource base, donor flexibility, a strategic approach to alliances, many of the elements emphasized here–which makes this almost total lack of shared reflection notable.

    And for the latter, well, the authors make the point that, because advocacy depends on relationships, keeping the people who have these relationships on board and committed to the advocacy work is key to long-term success. Which is, I know, where I come in. I’m not honestly sure that there was anything that El Centro, Inc. could have done to keep me there, in full-time advocacy. The pull of my kids is very, very strong. But I know that if the organization had implemented some of the redundancies advocated here, in order to shift human resources to meet campaign AND personal needs–if, for example, I had had a real maternity leave, or been able to reduce my hours, or had more staff support–then I might have found a way to make it work. I’d be lying if I said that I don’t still think, just about every day, of what I could (should?) be doing in the movement, and reading like this makes me ponder those questions more profoundly.

    I believe completely that our nonprofit social service organizations hold much of the future of progressive advocacy. You know that by now, right? But this report helped me to see the importance of not putting that proverbial cart before the horse and of, instead, making sure that we have the pieces in place, that our organizations are ramped up and ready for advocacy success, and that we’re building the kind of capacity that yields a real force for change.

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