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.

These are bleak times for many of us committed to progressive social change and a vision of social justice that includes an end to poverty, full protection of civil rights for citizens and for immigrants, real power for working people, universal health care, and a sustainable environment. The ongoing economic hardship that has plagued our country for all of my twins’ young lives, and a much more constrained understanding of the social contract among policymakers in our state and federal governments, can lead to despair and retrenchment.

Or

We can focus on building long-term movements for social change, the kind that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, are our only hope for bringing about the world as we wish it anyway. What the almost three years since the 2008 elections have taught us, or perhaps reminded us, is that there are no shortcuts, and that we can never, ever, ever stop organizing.

And that’s why, for me, it’s the perfect time for this Foundation Review article outlining how foundations can (and should!) support movement building. It begins with the obvious acknowledgement that philanthropy does not a movement make, and that successful movements must, by definition, be driven by those animating them with their own passions and pains (so foundations have to relinquish control over the ultimate (and even many of the interim) goals, as well as the timeline).

But it analyzes powerful movements from history to define their core elements, and then suggests activities in which foundations can invest in order to infuse social movements with essential resources. My own study of the civil rights movement (I finally accomplished my goal of reading all of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) shows the many points when donations, from individuals and from philanthropic and religious institutions, facilitated the next steps that, combined, built one of the greatest movements for social justice our world has known. The article also illustrates the role that foundations can play in very long-term movement building with a brief history of the conservative movement and the foundations that decided in the 1960s to systematically invest in building capacity–investments that began to pay real dividends with the election of Ronald Reagan and, certainly, is very much in play still today.

Bringing these ideas to our progressive work requires some shifting on the part of foundations, to be sure, so that they see themselves as movement strategists, more than as funders, with a commitment to changing the terms of the debate so that, ultimately, the kinds of policies we support are seen as “natural”, because we’ve framed them that way. If progressive foundations are to build the kind of world they seek, they’ll need movements to create it. And those movements will happen much more surely if they can hire the people they need, purchase the media to communicate, and conduct activities in pursuit of their vision.

And that means, yes, multi-year grants and general operating support and transparent, mutual relationships with those receiving investments. It means not expecting grantees to demonstrate their unique “niche”, but encouraging collaboration and even “duplication”, as reflecting convergence of focus and enhanced overall capacity. This report uses the term “advocacy infrastructure” to talk about these long-term investments that cross organizational and issue boundaries.

But putting all of this on foundations is unwise and unfair. Community organizers, direct service practitioners engaged in social change, and all of us who care about building movements need to think beyond single-issue campaigns, too, and develop relationships with philanthropists so that we can help them to see the future through our same vision.

We need to have clear strategies related to each of the components of successful movement building: base-building, research and framing, strategic power assessment, organizational management, engagement and networking, and leadership and vision development. We can’t expect foundations to invest in these activities if we continue to zero in on tactics immediately and populate our grant applications with detailed descriptions of what we’ll do, with little attention to the who, and, most importantly, the why.

One of my favorite parts of this discussion was the inclusion of direct service providers as a key avenue to base building. That thinking builds on foundations’ existing relationships with social service agencies and could leverage those considerable resources for real power building. It’s also significant that their discussion of leadership development transcends the intense “academies” that are fairly popular with foundations (and, absolutely, potentially very impactful), because they have a pretty high initial “cost” of entry, and we need leadership capacity development at all levels of engagement.

Of course, my interest in advocacy evaluation made me hone in on the discussion of outcomes and assessment, especially because it’s very true that our nascent field of policy and advocacy evaluation misses many of the elements of movement building that would need to be included in a more comprehensive evaluation. There’s a table at the end with the stages of movement building, the five core elements, and benchmarks for each that I’ve printed out to refer to for my evaluation practice; it’s only a beginning, but it’s a good place to start. This piece is critical not only because it will add to the field of knowledge about what works and increase our understanding about social movements, but also because speaking philanthropic language about accountability and measures can help us to bridge these gaps.

As the authors say, “Foundations do not make history. They fund it.”

And then I’ll have even more books on my nightstand, to retrace the victories and the roles that activists and the philanthropists who invested in them played in creating the victories that we can’t imagine living without.

Here’s to a brighter future and the movements that will bring it.

We’ve got long-term work to do.

photo credit, Michael Lokner, via Flickr

A missing piece in the discussion of advocacy evaluation has been the voices of advocates themselves. Too busy changing the world to be included in the discussion about how we measure those change efforts, the conversation has been happening almost behind their/our backs, and I was really glad to see this report, spearheaded by the Atlantic Philanthropies and Annie E. Casey Foundation, two of the leading philanthropic voices on social change, and, it turns out, evaluation of the same.

The purpose of this report is to provide nonprofit advocates with a platform to discuss their experiences with advocacy evaluation and to open communication with evaluators and donors about how to improve the enterprise. It opens, though, with the results of a survey of more than 200 advocacy grantees of some of the leading foundations in advocacy, and those results are themselves instructive for forming a portrait of the status of nonprofit advocacy.

Not surprisingly, only 25% of respondents have ever evaluated their advocacy. Even fewer of those have had the assistance of an external evaluator (which is significant given the limited experience of many nonprofit types in doing systematic evaluation of any kind)–only 17% of the total sample. Of course, I also question how useful the exchange with the external evaluators has been for advocates; anyone who has participated in an independent evaluation knows that evaluators vary in their willingness to actively engage program leaders in the process and shape a product that will meet the agency’s needs.

Sixty percent of nonprofit advocates are working within organizations with budgets less than $1 million annually; fully half have budgets less than $500,000/year. More than half of respondents, furthermore, dedicate fewer than half of their resources to advocacy, with smaller organizations more likely to be ‘purely’ advocacy. Human services are the most common advocacy priority of the respondents, at 40%. Advocates are mostly engaged in state, local, and regional work; only 21% are substantially working on national advocacy. That’s interesting, I think, not surprising, given the logistical and political challenges of impacting Congress, but rather discouraging given the rich possibilities of effective congressional advocacy.

Advocates are overwhelmingly focused on legislative advocacy (56%). This appears to include a strong grassroots lobbying component, though, with 47% citing participation in community organizing also. Only 12% are working on judicial strategies and only 5% on administrative/regulatory advocacy. That echoes what I often hear from nonprofit leaders when we talk about advocacy; they tend to think legislative work first and foremost and are often surprised and even confused when I talk about other types of engagement as ‘advocacy’. One of the findings that most resonated with me was that, despite the preference for legislative advocacy, only 22% of advocates judged legislative work as the most effective strategy!

Important for me as I continue exploring my consulting work with nonprofit organizations was the statement that research and communications assistance are the capacities that advocates view as most lacking. That surprised me, because I would think that those tools would be easiest to find from other sources, and it has caused me to rethink somewhat what I need to be discussing with nonprofit leaders.

As far as actual advocacy evaluation, those advocates that have done it note that it has helped them to refine their strategies, make the case for more funding, and pursue staffing changes. They point to lack of resources for evaluation, obviously, as a barrier, but also the need for better interim goals and an attitude that sees evaluation as a capacity-building tool rather than a punitive audit.

As the report states, the field of advocacy evaluation was virtually nonexistent not even 10 years ago and is now developing rather dramatically. The authors conclude by calling for advocacy evaluation to help advocates better change the world. In the race towards justice, they say, we need to know when to sprint and when to save our strength, and good advocacy evaluation can help us reach the finish line.

And this is a problem. It’s a problem because not all advocacy and organizing is very worthwhile, and the really effective work needs to rise to the top, just as in any activity in which nonprofit organizations engage. And it’s a problem because many donors use (in my opinion) the rather nebulous nature of outcome tracking in social change as an excuse not to fund it, which means fewer resources for this really vital work. And it’s a problem because we can’t maximally learn from what others are doing well (and not) if we don’t have common terms, common benchmarks, and a common mechanism for sharing and, then, building on, that collective knowledge.

So I’ve been doing a lot of reading about assessment in advocacy and organizing; I’ve talked with folks at some of the foundations and consulting firms around the country that are most advanced in this, and I’ve reflected on my own experiences as an advocate participating in evaluations. I have found a couple of resources that I think are really worth sharing, and I hope that they, and my reflections shared here, will be helpful to you as you set out to not only do social change work (yay! yay!) but also to do it intentionally well, to be strategic about how to assess it, and to then freely disseminate your results with would-be disciples.

When I was on the strategy committee of the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we participated in a pretty intense evaluation of our organizing and advocacy with Innovation Network. Recently, when I was on their website, I was totally blown away by the depth and breadth of resources that they have available for free. They are outstanding: online tools for setting benchmarks and conducting evaluations, a regular newsletter on evaluating advocacy, literature on the emerging field of evaluation, and more. It’s awesome, and all you have to do is register (for free). Check it out.

I also read through almost 80 pages of a pretty comprehensive report by the California Endowment (it’s good, but I don’t expect anyone else to want to wade through it–I did link to them below, in case you are interested). There are some good resources at the back of each report, though, so you might want to check those out–some online tools (many of which are also linked at innonet) and some literature. Here are my thoughts in reading through it, and thinking a lot over the past several days about this dilemma and how advocates and donors can work through it together.

It was later, and I don’t remember a precise moment, that the role of foundation and big-donor funding in all of this began to make more sense to me. Now, as I spend a lot more time reading about social change strategies and how to invest in them, I’m learning more about how much we have to learn about taking this long (think decades) view of social change. Where grants for social services and even social justice organizing and advocacy tend to be deliverable-focused, many organizations on the Right can count on general support to underwrite their overall operations; where we have 1-3 years (if we’re lucky) to accomplish our grant goals, they can invest in young leaders and new thinkers and plan for where they want to be 15-20 years from now. And it makes a difference.

Even more alarming for those working with marginalized communities, the dollars available for progressive work in these areas are stretched much more thinly, among more organizations and even in areas beyond the most vulnerable. Funders among the far-Right are mainly giving only to those ideological causes, while more progressive-leaning donors may give not only to social justice organizing and advocacy but also to direct provision of services, parks and other public projects, the arts, and other causes. A recent study by the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy, whose work reflects a lot of the trends above, finds that only 33% of all foundation dollars given between 2004-2006 went to marginalized communities, even in the most expansive definition of that term.

I’ve said many, many times that philanthropy is not enough. As long as social change organizations and the constituents with whom they work are dependent on people with a lot of money to advance our causes, we’ll always be at a disadvantage, because there tends to be considerable distance between us and people with a lot of money. But if philanthropy can invest in social change work in a way that sustains a social movement to demand justice that far surpasses charity in scope and impact, then it can really change our world.

And so, to continue this thinking about the role that philanthropy can play in that process, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the materials on the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy website. A lot of their work relates to transparency and accountability in the fiscal operations of foundations, which, while I’m sure it is an extremely worthwhile cause, just doesn’t happen to be one of my passions. But they have also done significant work urging foundations to give more to marginalized communities, to include advocacy organizations in major federated giving drives, and to reform grantmaking practices so that progressive organizations have a more level playing field on which to compete with the ideological Right. They have a Grantmaking for Community Impact Project that aims to show, in language that foundations can understand, the tangible results of investing in community organizing, civic engagement, and advocacy in underrepresented (and under-funded) communities. They are working in different parts of the country in the hopes that donors around the nation will see something with which they can identify.

I have contacted them to gently suggest that they make more of their publications available for free; most (but not all) have a cost to download, and while they’re not too expensive, I would argue that we can’t expect to compete with hostile ideas when those ideas are heavily underwritten and so doled out for free (some would say even shoved down our throats) and we expect people to pay to look at ours. Alas. But, still, you might check it out, and, especially, talk about it with your foundation partners as a resource for connecting with others who are interested in how philanthropic dollars can have the greatest impact for justice in our society. If we can better harness those dollars, we just might change the subject.

And, yet, the kind of long-term, sustainable, unrestricted funding that nonprofit organizations need to build their capacity to take on these battles is declining, and lack of funding continues to be a shield behind which organizations not engaging in advocacy can hide, and a real limitation for those trying to make it work.

All of this has led to one of my current research interests of sorts–the role of donors to social service organizations in supporting those organizations’ social change work (particularly advocacy, but also community organizing and broader justice work). This document outlines the highlights from a report regarding “Social Justice Grantmaking”, the authors’ term for grants that target work for structural change. I have contacted the authors to see if the study will be updated, since the data were collected in 2005, and I am very interested to see what the current recession means for these foundations–both those that were funding social justice work then and those that were not–and their levels of giving and priorities.

Here are the findings that I found most notable: social justice grantmaking is only 11% of total foundation support; it has grown somewhat since the late 1990s but more slowly than overall increases in giving. The ‘big names’ represent the majority of social justice grantmaking: the top 25 foundations for this kind of grantmaking constituted only 13% of the sample of donors but gave 68% of the total dollars to social justice work. That’s huge; what it means, essentially, is that those nonprofits doing excellent work not on the radar screen of the Fords or Caseys or Rockefellers or Carnegies are going to be competing with others for only ~30% of the 11% of total grantmaking dollars. It’s still a lot of money, but it doesn’t stretch too far. By social justice ‘topic’, economic development tops the list, followed by health care access (I’d love to see how this has changed given the current political openings on health care reform), civil rights, education reform, housing, and human services. What that makes me wonder is how nonprofit organizations can frame their advocacy so that it hits those priority areas, given that, in many instances, we’re seeking the kind of wholesale societal changes that touch on multiple areas of inequity. Somewhat surprisingly, the Midwest is second in terms of its share of social justice dollars (24%, behind the unsurprising Northeast).

The end of the report has barriers cited by grantmakers to increasing their participation with this social change work: the magnitude of the problems (um, to me, that suggests a need for MORE investment in social justice grantmaking, no?), the short-term focus of most grants (a problem it seems that they could change, right?), lack of field coherence (e.g. we don’t all use the same language to talk about change, we don’t work together like we should, advocates still need to get our acts together), and lack of outcome measures (this is another one of my obsessions right now–I’ve read at least 6 advocacy evaluation reports a week for the last month–more on that to come soon).

But, I loathe anything that just lays out a problem without suggesting some way around, over, or through it, so I’ve sought out some resources to help nonprofit advocates get the social justice grant dollars that ARE available, as well as some really excellent individuals and organizations that are working hard to convince foundations of their moral obligation and obvious self-interest (um, solve the problems and you can do whatever you want with your money!) in investing in social change. One that I’m really stoked about is Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training. Some of their resources (like the seemingly-superb webinars–once my kids can sit still for 30 minutes, I’m totally there) cost, but others are free. I’m on their e-newsletter now, and they’ve got great stuff on how to survive the recession, how to plan good special events..it’s not all advocacy-focused, but it’s good.

And here’s the other one I want to share right now: Grantcraft. Now, if you follow that link, you might wonder why I’m sending you to a website clearly designed for grantmakers (since I doubt many of you are sitting on millions of dollars in endowments). But here’s the idea: first, think like a grantmaker in order to influence grantmakers. Read what they read, use their same language, understand their rationale for saying ‘yes’, so that you increase the likelihood that they’ll say it to you. Second, direct the donors with whom you have an existing relationship to resources like this if they’re currently reluctant to fund advocacy/social change work. They need to know that they won’t be alone, or breaking the law, or throwing money away. They need to connect with other grantmakers who, in fact, find social justice grantmaking the most rewarding and effective part of their portfolio. And then they need to open their pocketbooks, because we’ve got work to do.

Highlights:

One of the most provocative and, I think, fascinating sections is from the former Executive Director of the Public Welfare Foundation (with a long history of funding advocacy). He points to the liberals’ ‘obsession for neutral, unbiased research and action’ as a barrier to foundations’ vigorous support for advocacy, where, almost by definition, you have to take a strong value stance and, inevitably, make some people on ‘the other side’ angry. There’s a lot of truth to this; I find that my students, even, are often somewhat hesitant to really call out their opponents on a given policy issue, because social workers often try to see things from multiple points of view and find common ground, when what we need sometimes is a line drawn in the sand.

There is a lot more of value here, both for foundations that are considering contributing to advocacy and for nonprofit advocates who want some insights into donors’ minds or need some tools they can use to convince donors to step into advocacy. Check it out, and thanks, yet again, to the folks at Alliance for Justice. You guys rule.

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