Tag Archives: nonprofit organizations

Nonprofits as Environmental Stewards

Posted on April 22, 2013 by | Leave a comment

earthday

It’s Earth Day.

It’s an event that didn’t really even exist, to celebrate a movement that barely did, when I was young.

And my kids have been talking about it for a month in school.

Because it’s a different world, in terms of our understanding of the urgency of environmental stewardship–conservation, preservation, defense.

And nonprofits need to be part of it.

To be certain, I am not the first to point this out. There are entire organizations dedicated to helping nonprofits reduce their environmental footprint. There’s a pretty awesome guide to taking concrete steps towards more sustainable practices, while living your mission.

But I spend a lot of time in a lot of different nonprofit organizations, especially those actively trying to achieve broader-scale social change, and it’s clear that we still have a lot of room to grow.

I totally count myself among the guilty:

  • Bought thousands of American flags, for a good visual for rallies, all shipped from China? Check.
  • Made hundreds of posters on non-recycled posterboard, most of which didn’t get recycled later? Check.
  • Drove 100 miles roundtrip every single day, usually by myself, to lobby in our state capitol? Check.
  • Printed more hundreds of thousands of flyers than I ever want to remember (and postcards, and petitions), for all variety of different issues? Check.
  • Bought supplies at the place with the best price and non-odious labor practices, without checking their sustainability policies at all? Check.

And we rationalize it, don’t we? Because our causes are so important, and our budgets are so strained, and our time seems more precious than fossil fuels. So we tell ourselves that any shortcut we can take is worth it, or we even stop seeing the environmental costs as part of the campaign analysis.

But we can do better than that.

Our children deserve it, and our would-be allies and advocates will come to demand it.

The advent of more developed technology makes effective mobilization without a heavy environmental cost more feasible. We can ‘be’ places that we are not, and we can make our voices echo, without burning up a lot of trees or oil.

We just have to figure it in, the way that we slice issues and map targets and plan tactics. On Earth Day, and every day, so that our victories can last forever, but our footprints will not.

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Leadership for Change: What difference does ‘young’ make?

Posted on April 18, 2013 by | Leave a comment

I guess that I’m still ‘young’ in the nonprofit leadership realm, but I certainly feel my aging acutely, given that I spend so much time with my students and with truly young activists in social justice struggles.

While I feel that I straddle, somewhat, the young professional and older generations, I am fascinated by the contributions and the perspectives of Millennial leaders and their peers who fall just outside that generation. So are the folks at Building Movement, which recently released a report on younger leaders in social justice movements and the challenges they face in building sustainable, thriving organizations with capacity for large-scale social change.

My questions, in reading the findings from these interviews, are the extent to which young leaders approach these challenges any differently than others, as well as what generational shifts in nonprofit executive power might mean for the future of the sector, and our causes.

The highlights from the interview summaries:

  • Leading social change organizations into the future requires inspiring visions for large-scale change; new methods for organizing (including seeing technology as a means to connect with people, instead of being distracted by its ‘shininess’); working across ideological, sectoral, and other boundaries; and commitment to building scale and pursuing collective impact.
  • Job satisfaction is high, which bodes well for long-term staying power and for the ability of these leaders to recruit others to their causes. We can never make social change work as appealing as it should be if the image other aspiring leaders have of us is as overworked martyrs, sacrificing our happiness on an altar of ‘good deeds’. These leaders seem to get that, and they express a joy of purpose that should inspire imitation. This doesn’t mean that they don’t feel strained, though, and I was discouraged by the concerns expressed by young leaders hoping to parent in the near future. We need to build in ways to help these leaders balance competing demands–so that they don’t compete so much–as an investment in their longevity and health, as well as in their strategic abilities.
  • For some of these young leaders, transformational leadership–using their organizations and their positions to change society–seems to come much more easily than the more mundane obligations to run actual organizations. I think a lot of this stems from inadequate preparation to run programs and supervise staff (the latter being the greatest challenge mentioned), and from insufficient infrastructure to mentor and develop the other layers of staff that organizations need to thrive. Maybe it’s because I have begun to see the world through a consulting lens, but I do think that there are opportunities here to use technical assistance and capacity development to support nonprofit leaders through the work of culture change and mentoring and skill building.
  • Foundations and donors play a huge role in equipping organizations to meet future challenges, both in terms of the amount of funding needed (we have to change our expectations about how many staff are needed to administer well-functioning organizations) but also in the structure of funding flows. We need multi-year general support, attention to base-building, and investment in broad and sweeping visions. We need funding partners, in every sense of that word.
  • There are young leaders of color currently making huge contributions to social change work, despite the way that lack of diversity is often bemoaned by those in positions of power within movements. The challenge is not to bring more diverse representation to these organizations, then, but to build ladders of leadership development for the next ‘tier’ of leaders of color, to stop placing disproportionate demands on leaders to represent their communities (advisory boards, anyone?), and to provide the necessary resources to help these leaders succeed.
  • Young leaders don’t often see themselves staying with a given organization for long, so organizations have to get much more comfortable with executive transition. None of these leaders saw themselves moving out of social justice work, and many envision that they will stay in executive roles, but this generation is not wedded to an organization, so social change groups have to build identities that transcend individuals.

If you are a young leader in a social change organization, how do you reflect on your experiences? How do you feel that you approach your work differently than your peers from other generations? Than young executives in other sectors?

What will it take to support your social transformation work, now and in the future?

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Voluntary Transparency, and what it could teach us about advocacy

Posted on April 9, 2013 by | 2 Comments

Another fantastic post from the always-terrific Beth Kanter, about whom many great things are said on the Internet every day, and they’re still an understatement.

This one is about what it could mean for the nonprofit sector if the data from 990s (those reports that the backroom folks at your nonprofit prepare, all about your organization’s finances and governance) were really available, publicly, in a usable format.

I think it’s a fabulous idea, and I’m totally for it. In addition to the exciting potential benefits described in the post, I also think that having such data discussed openly in a public forum (as well as the fact that it would be public, period) would help the nonprofit sector in our advocacy as a sector, too: instead of relying on anecdote to defend ourselves when elected officials argue that we are wasteful or unaccountable, we could use actual, representative, nearly real-time, sector-wide datasets to demonstrate our fiscal acumen, just as our impact should speak to our true accountability.

The post suggests that a dataset seeded with nonprofits’ 990 information could:

  • Enable analysis of sector-wide issues such as “economic downturn on nonprofits”
  • Facilitate discussion of the “relationship between public and private dollars in providing social services”
  • Add to insights about different types of nonprofits (the post mentions 501(c)4 lobbying organizations
  • “Enable more people and organizations to analyze, visualize, and mash up the data, creating a large public community that is interested in the nonprofit sector and can collaborate to find ways to improve it.”

Since the push to get the IRS to release these data publicly will take awhile, and since my reading of A Voice for Nonprofits (which included interviews and data culled from nonprofits that voluntary released them) is pretty fresh in my mind, I am thinking about what it could do for our nonprofit sector if we just went ahead and started a culture change to bring the same kind of disclosure voluntarily that Beth’s post argues for requiring.

I’m not talking about the kind of coerced and cumbersome ‘accounting’ some states are considering requiring of nonprofit organizations.

I don’t even mean the trends, noted at least by me, of more nonprofits including their strategic plans and annual reports (and sometimes even their 990s) on their websites.

I mean, what if organizations were really open, with each other, with their donors, with their clients, about the kinds of advocacy in which they engage (at least after the fact, since total transparency is sometimes not strategic)? So that we could learn, from each others’ experiences, about what works, and what doesn’t; about how much advocacy is needed to ‘tip’ issues (a sort of dosing effect); about how organizations’ advocacy practices change as their organizational profiles change; and about how advocacy differs within sub-sectors of nonprofits (in a sort of sector-wide extension of the kind of research included in A Voice for Nonprofits)?

And what if, by sharing in that way, we could also gain the corollary benefit of just normalizing the advocacy experience, so that nonprofits see how common it really is (because I’ve truly never met any nonprofit leader who regularly passes up a chance to try to convince a powerful person of how important and impactful their work is)?

What does your organization share, and with whom, about how and when and why you advocate? What would it take you to share more? And what would it mean for you if others reciprocated?

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Advocacy Evaluation and Being ‘Data-Informed’

Posted on April 4, 2013 by | Leave a comment

I wrote a post not too long ago about ‘data-driven cultures’. And then I read Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, and, in just a chapter, Beth Kanter and her co-author changed, somewhat, how I talk about the role of data in nonprofit organizations.

Social services aren’t ever going to be totally ‘data-driven’. There are a lot of factors that impact our decisions and our programming.

And that’s how it should be.

Rather than trying to make social workers slaves to spreadsheets, or pretending that we can make rational every factor that influences our operations, we need to become data-informed organizations, embracing both the power of data and its limits.

As Kanter advises, we need to spend a lot more time thinking about the data we collect than we do collecting it. As I see in the advocacy evaluation collaborative of which I’m a part, we need to find ways to unobtrusively gather data–weaving that into the work as much as possible–so that we have time to sit around and talk about what this means (which, in some cases, is how we ‘analyze’).

We need to resist the temptation to dump data on someone’s desk, thinking that our work is done when the report is published. I ask my clients, from the very beginning, what it is that they hope to learn from a given evaluation effort, what questions we need to ask to figure that out, and with whom they need to share the answers they glean. We plan for usefulness from the start.

It makes me think about an organization I have worked with over the past 18 months or so, which has a Quality Improvement Department–staffed with just a few full-time employees, whose job it is to cull through the organization’s data, looking for patterns and making sense of what they see, and also to systematically share information with others within the organization, so that, together, they can ask the most important question:

“So what?”

But this distinction between being data-driven and data-informed has special importance in advocacy, I think. We’re always exhorted, in advocacy, to have ‘hard facts’, as though the stories we share about policy impact are somehow too soft and squishy to be meaningful.

But the best nonprofit advocates already know that the most powerful advocacy comes from weaving data and narrative, from analyzing numbers to answer hard questions, and from relying on all kinds of knowledge to inform our decisions.

In advocacy, we know that being ‘data-driven’ can lead to outcomes that don’t work for individuals who don’t fit a typical pattern. We know that data don’t change hearts and minds, and that developing power requires creating spaces for people’s voices.

We know that we must be data-informed.

And driven by a vision.

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Root causes and urgent fires: Building an Advocacy Agenda

Posted on April 2, 2013 by | Leave a comment

One of the most important, and most time-consuming, parts of my advocacy technical assistance with nonprofit social service organizations is to help them craft their advocacy agendas.

This isn’t just about making a list of changes we’d like to see in the world.

It’s not about checking ‘advocacy agenda’ off, so that the organization is recognized for advocating.

It’s about building an agenda that focuses the organization’s collective resources–people, knowledge, expertise, relationships–on those policy issues that are determined to be most central to the mission, most impactful for those they serve, and most ‘ripe’ for change.

Done correctly, an advocacy agenda can increase buy-in from constituents, who appreciate the chance to shape the organization’s priorities, bring along allies who look to the organization for signals about the policies that warrant attention, and complement direct services, by fostering changes in the conditions that create and perpetuate need.

Especially in a climate of recession and retrenchment, though, many nonprofit social service organizations feel pressure–internally, at least, if not from external players–to advocate primarily for restoration of critical services, investments in core infrastructure, and capacity to deliver programming.

When an advocacy agenda could easily be filled with 6-8 examples of really important services that have been restricted or even eliminated, it’s easy to understand why a lot of organizations stop there.

That kind of advocacy agenda, though–one where nearly every priority item relates to the organization’s ability to meet its own bottom line, in a way–does not wield the same moral authority, bring people together across sectors, or, ultimately, carry as much potential for fundamental change as an agenda that also addresses some of the root causes that could really change lives.

This need for balance, then, this sort of ‘dance’ between a desire to incorporate root causes and live up to the aspirational visions that many nonprofits have embraced for their work, with the urgency of defending the tools that allow them to meet people’s needs and advance their basic functions.

For example, one of the organizations with which I’m working addresses child abuse prevention. As they begin to shape their agenda, they are very open about these different ‘pulls’.

On one hand, there is a need for stronger criminal penalties related to some forms of child endangerment and maltreatment. Funds that sustain forensic interviewing and emergency supports are threatened, and funding for foster care programs–including tuition forgiveness for children who age out of care–is far below what it really needs to be. There are needs for more parenting classes and mental health services, especially as the child welfare system feels the strains of other systems that have suffered cuts of their own. The organization knows that it could do far more, for more families, with more resources.

On the other hand, the organization’s leaders are acutely aware that, as witnesses to what happens when society fails to invest adequately in families across the board, they are well-positioned to add critical perspectives to debates on education policy, workforce development, anti-poverty efforts, and health/mental health. They understand that even the best intervention for a family identified as at-risk of child maltreatment is, already, somewhat late, and they want to shape what happens long before that point.

So, as we bring clients and partners and staff into conversations about what should ‘make’ the organization’s advocacy agenda, they are intentional about seeking to balance the priorities that will warrant their attention between those that reflect those underlying root causes, and those that are urgent needs that cannot be ignored.

There’s no magic math to it. And pragmatism and limited hours in the day will likely always mean that blazing fires win out, at least to a certain extent.

But these conversations are important, and finding ways to carve out at least a little of the organization’s advocacy capacity to dedicate to stemming the need is, in its own way, urgent too.

As the proverb goes, we have to stop babies from being thrown in the river.

Even while we’re trying our best to pull them out.

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When it’s time to walk away

Posted on March 26, 2013 by | 4 Comments

I believe, very strongly, that social workers (and even social work students–sometimes, especially social work students) can be change agents in their own organizations.

We know, usually better than those on the outside, the injustices that need righting, within our own shops, and we are often well-positioned to attract attention to the needed changes.

Sometimes, we get real results.

But, sometimes, we need to know when it’s time to walk away, because we can no longer be complicit in (fill in the blank, but my students usually grapple the most with angst around unethical supervisors who can’t be reined in, agency policies that unduly punish clients, and severe budget cuts that imperil well-being).

There is a story in A Problem from Hell about some foreign service officers who resigned during the genocide in Bosnia, in response to the lack of U.S. action, that has me thinking about the role of protest resignations in social work organizations, too.

Our Code of Ethics states clearly that there is no excuse for silence, and our first recourse has to be to summon our courage and speak up.

But, then, sometimes we recognize that we have become the ‘inhouse devil’s advocate’ (p. 312). We complain, people look grave and nod their heads, and then they move forward, unimpeded. It’s like a safety valve that inhibits fundamental reforms, and it can be dangerous. I mean, it can feel good for all involved, it keeps the system intact. It slows change. It lends legitimacy to decisions that, at times, cannot really be legitimized.

In those cases, we have to use our advocacy skills to recognize when our internal dissent has become just a coping strategy, instead of a change strategy. If we’re just playing to type (we let her complain, and that’s her role), you won’t have an impact. Instead, it becomes the way that you live with working within a system, or a context, contrary to your values.

Ultimately, in this anecdote, these insiders decided that there was nothing conscientious about objecting to a policy that would never change.

They had to make a more dramatic move.

And, no, the spates of resignations during the U.S. government’s failure to act in response to the Bosnian genocide didn’t immediately and dramatically change U.S. policy, despite the hope of one foreign service official, who wrote, “I am therefore resigning in order to help develop a stronger public consensus that the U.S. must act immediately to stop the genocide” (p. 286).

But it did attract attention, especially because of the recognition of the considerable cost of such an action, to those involved.

That means that, sometimes, walking away can be an act of great moral courage, and of advocacy.

And can even be a game-changer.

One of the officials said, “When you are in a bureaucracy, you can either put your head down and become cynical, tired, and inured, or you can stick your head up and try to do something” (p. 301).

Sometimes, deciding to stick your head up means deciding to turn around.

Have you ever walked away from an organization you just couldn’t justify working for? How did you come to that decision? And was it gratifying–or did you feel like they were just relieved to get rid of you?

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We have very special interests.

Posted on March 25, 2013 by | Leave a comment

I know.

“Special interest” is a bad word. Like lobbyist.

But the truth is, we have very special interests.

Interests that, most of the time, if we (nonprofit organizations, social work advocates, forces of good) are not defending and advancing, no one else will.

And, of course, power abhors a vacuum.

Where there is silence–on a given issue, or event, or piece of legislation, someone will likely be quite ready to step into the breach.

Just maybe not on our terms, from our perspective, or in our interests.

This dynamic was illustrated clearly in the incidences of genocide, which cried out for U.S. involvement, described in A Problem from Hell. For example, when Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against Kurdish people, and there were chemical companies and other interests speaking loudly against action, that was only part of the problem. The other half of the equation was that, apart from these lobbies that were especially interested, there were no competing voices making phone calls on behalf of the Kurds. There was, effectively, no ‘human rights lobby’ and, even today, there are relatively few voices oriented in that direction.

Similarly, in the struggle to ratify the UN genocide convention, senators complained that they only heard about the treaty from John Birch Society types, not from ‘reasonable’ people who urged U.S. participation in the convention’s tenets. The pro-ratification folks didn’t call, or email, or show up at forums. The interests, then, of basic human dignity and protection–while just about as ‘special’ as they get–didn’t have a lobby.

Our failure to claim our identity as a special interest, and to coalesce around the concerns that unite us, is particularly alarming given historical evidence that, in the arena of congressional policymaking, these one-sided interest group politics are an especially serious liability. Many members of Congress fear acting against the special interests to which they respond even occasionally, even when a rational actor could presume that a history of supporting a given organization’s cause could allow some independence on another issue.

To a large extent, this is because of the distorting influence of money in politics.

But it’s also because those powerful interests are moving in to fill the vacuum. As they will.

We are special. We engage in politics, and in policy advocacy, not primarily to enhance our own market standing, but to improve the conditions of those we have the honor to serve. And they–and we–deserve to be represented, as interests, within a policymaking structure that works that way, even as we seek to change the terms of engagement.

We can’t hold ourselves out as above the fray, when we, and our issues, are very much on the battlefield.

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An easy ask: Including advocacy in volunteer orientations

Posted on February 18, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Boys Telling Secrets
Just ask–and pass it on!

As part of my consulting work, helping nonprofit social service organizations integrate advocacy into their operations, I am working with some agencies in 2013 that have HUGE volunteer operations.

As in ‘the equivalent of an 86-person full-time workforce, year-round’ volunteer operations.

It’s an awesome thing.

Kids are having their birthday parties packing food for pantries and shelters. Older adults are spending their time reading in classrooms to children in poverty. Families have a tradition of hosting birthday parties for children in foster care.

These organizations have figured out that, while working with volunteers is never easy, it brings huge dividends, not just in terms of any actual labor completed, but also in creating ambassadors, of sorts, for the organizations and their causes. When people come and have a meaningful and invigorating experience at the organization, they are much more likely to donate their money, encourage others to help, and champion the organization.

Which is exactly why we’re totally missing a golden opportunity when we don’t invite our volunteers to advocate alongside us.

I had the benefit of having volunteered in some of these organizations before starting the advocacy technical assistance process, so I knew that, at least in my case, I was never provided with information about the organizations’ advocacy priorities, the targets who needed to hear from us, or how writing a letter or making a phone call could be just as valuable–if not more so–than sorting through school supplies to fill a backpack.

My early assessment and planning work with the organizations confirmed this. For the most part, nonprofit social services don’t do a great job of asking one of their most dedicated constituencies–their regular volunteers–to join them in advocacy.

So that is one of the first pieces I’m working on with these organizations. We’re doing things like:

  • Including a write-up of the advocacy agenda in all volunteer orientations
  • Integrating root cause discussions, even briefly, in volunteer training and debriefing sessions (this can be as simple as, “Why do you think people are hungry in the United States? What kinds of policies would need to change to make it better?” as a starting point)
  • Weaving advocacy asks into the “How You Can Help” sections on organizations’ websites, where they offer volunteer opportunities
  • Providing letter-writing materials to groups of volunteers, as a continuation of their service
  • Signing volunteers up for agency newsletters, and including advocacy information and calls to action
  • Crafting job descriptions for more extensive advocacy roles (everything from 3 hours/month to 20 hours/week–students need internships!)

This isn’t just about roping another group of stakeholders into advocacy (although, of course, I’ve got nothing against that). It’s also about showing volunteers that we value them, completely, which is the same reason why we need to be inviting our donors to advocate, too. It’s about helping people to make sense of the need with which they are confronted, and providing them with the tools they will need to keep from feeling accusatory or hopeless or myopic.

It’s about creating a stronger, more accurate, more whole volunteer experience…while changing the conversation around the issues, too, by including these voices policymakers wouldn’t necessarily expect to hear from.

What experiences do others have in crafting advocacy ‘asks’ for volunteers? What works, and what doesn’t? Does anyone have any stories to share?

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Prepare for the worst, and open your own window of opportunity

Posted on February 11, 2013 by | Leave a comment

window

If I hear one more person say, “We just have to wait for the pendulum to swing back,” I think I might scream.

I know that I don’t have a long history in the struggle for social justice, despite the way that my houseful of young children can make me feel old sometimes, these days. I feel that we should all have learned, though, by now, that, while the arc of the universe may bend towards justice, we surely have nothing to lose by leaning on it…quite a bit.

We have to open our own political windows of opportunity, if we possibly can.

Sometimes that means trumpeting our successes and singing our own praises from the rooftops. Sometimes our work is so extraordinary that we can create momentum where there otherwise was none.

But, sometimes, advancing our cause has to mean being prepared for something bad to happen, because that can draw attention to the needs and galvanize action, sometimes even more surely than a promising development.

Some of the organizations with which I’m working on the advocacy technical assistance project in 2013 deal with child welfare, especially the prevention of and response to child abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

For them–and, I believe, for nonprofits working in every social sector–part of developing adaptive capacity, the ability to succeed in changing political, social, and economic contexts, is the creation of a critical incident response plan.

As we’re currently walking through it together, that’s a sort of ‘wonk-ish’ way of saying ‘plan for what to do if something bad happens, in order to take advantage of the fact that reporters, and maybe even policymakers, will be calling.’

It means that, while we hope against hope that no child–ever, anywhere–loses his or her life to abuse or neglect–ever again–we also prepare for what our response would be, and how we would insert the key messages about what contributes to maltreatment and what could really prevent it, in case it does happen.

It means that we are ready, with spokespeople identified, to talk about what moving towards policies of true child welfare, not just prevention of these horrific cases, would look like, and what difference that would make for all children.

It means that we can identify, for those who WILL ask, the 3-4 policy changes that we think (while being careful not to over-promise) could reduce the likelihood that something like this happens again.

It means that we have something to say other than just, “It’s awful.”

Or, “No comment.”

When I did immigrant rights work full-time, I had letters to the editor ready for the eventuality that there was another mass fatality of individuals crossing the border. When 19 people died in a tractor-trailer, we got great coverage about the need for compassionate and workable immigration reform.

We had a plan in case an undocumented, unlicensed driver was involved in a fatal accident. We had many opportunities to use messages we developed to respond to high-profile cases of individuals and businesses caught employing unauthorized immigrant workers.

It’s not the same thing as having soundbites to insert into every media interview.

It doesn’t replace the need to respond authentically, and with empathy, to the unique circumstances at hand.

But it’s also different from just waiting for the pendulum to swing, and failing to notice all of the times that the window of opportunity is cracked open…and we blow it.

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A Voice for Nonprofits: What Makes an Effective Nonprofit Lobbyist?

Posted on February 7, 2013 by | Leave a comment

There are still some sticky note tabs in my copy of A Voice for Nonprofits, which means that I’ll probably revisit it again in a few months, but this is the last post for now.

Despite the reluctance that many 501(c)3 executives express about getting involved in lobbying, and despite the rules that constrain that very participation, I think, ultimately, that many, many more organizations would advocate–vigorously–if they thought that they knew how to do so successfully.

I mean, the vast majority of nonprofit leaders, and the people whose work centers on providing programs, and certainly those most directly affected by the social problems to which the organization responds, are completely committed to eradicating those problems. They are looking for ways to ‘move the needle’ on the social conditions that plague us, collectively, and they are willing, in many cases, to sacrifice their time and energies to try to improve the lives of those they serve.

They would advocate, I truly believe, if they had a surer chance of success.

And, of course, there’s no guarantee.

There never is, in this world-changing business of ours.

But the search for signals, for paths that are more likely to lead to good outcomes, still occupies a lot of the time of people like me, academics (and, in my case, quasi-academics) and practitioners trying to help would-be advocates be great advocates.

While much of A Voice for Nonprofits centers on why so few 501(c)3s play leading roles in policy change, and how regulatory changes could reverse that, there is also some evidence about organizational practices, and even individual advocate characteristics, that tend to correlate with more successful advocacy engagement. I have pulled out some of those pieces below, but I want to hear from you: What makes an effective nonprofit lobbyist? Beyond legislative policy change, what characteristics distinguish effective advocacy organizations, and individual advocates, from those less successful? Who are your advocacy role models, and what about them is worthy of emulation?

  • Nonprofit advocates utilize a wide range of both confrontational (because we can’t be afraid to disagree) and more collaborative approaches. They do little hobnobbing, though, in the way typically associated with lobbyists; their currency is good information, passion, and a reputation for commitment to their mission, not free tickets to sporting events or golf junkets.
  • The most effective advocates, in many cases, have an organizational ‘home’ that affords them some immediate legitimacy. As the authors describe, especially on the local government level, “Developers and city hall do not negotiate with the “community” or the “people.” They negotiate with nonprofits.” Certainly free agents can change the world, but, for the long haul, having an organization’s support seems to make a difference.
  • Effective nonprofits enhance the status and improve the performance of government officials at all levels, and, in turn, are afforded access and influence. They trade in information and credibility, both commodities sorely needed by policymakers. They are more than willing to share the credit for good policy ideas, and they understand that making elected officials look good is good advocacy practice.
  • They strategically partner with other entities, especially other nonprofits, to convert their collective resources into advocacy potential. They find organizations that complement their weaknesses, and they use their leadership to harness what they have towards advocacy aims. It’s about making the best of what you have, and the most effective advocates are great at it.
  • They make it someone’s job. One of the foundational questions to assess an organization’s advocacy capacity is whether someone is expected to advocate and, therefore, held accountable for it. Ideally, advocacy is integrated throughout an organization, but the buck has to stop somewhere. And the person whose job it is has to really have the time and space, within the work day, to do that job, whether that’s the executive director or a program director or a stand-alone government relations professional.
  • They invest in information capacity, even hiring people with the initials after their names that afford respect for what they know. They gain competitive advantage with the quality, relevance, timeliness, and accessibility of their information, and they prioritize its production and dissemination as their most valuable resource.

What would you add to this list? What makes for an effective nonprofit, in the advocacy arena? And how do we grow more of them?

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