If you haven’t already checked out Alliance for Justice’s new(ish) site, Bolder Advocacy, I’ll wait here while you go do that.
Regular posts about nonprofit advocacy news, interviews and profiles of changemakers in the nonprofit advocacy field (including foundations, community organizers, nonprofit lobbyists), all of their valuable materials on the legalities of nonprofit work in ballot measures, electoral activity, lobbying, and broader social change…
and a revised version of their Advocacy Capacity Assessment, which I have now used in practice with several nonprofit organizations here in Kansas.
It’s certainly not the only good capacity measure out there, and, indeed, there are others that have some features that I really appreciate. There’s a lot to like about AFJ’s, especially this newer version, which has ‘advanced’ options for organizations whose advocacy is a bit more well-developed, and the ability to compare an organization’s assessment against an aggregate, thanks to the free access to their tool and the categorization and clustering their site does behind-the-scenes.
This post is not an evaluation of the evaluation tools, though, but, instead, some thoughts on advocacy capacity, and the assessment thereof, culled from my work in advocacy capacity-building over the past year.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has used AFJ’s tool, or another advocacy capacity measure, about what they found helpful, and not. Similarly, if you’ve embarked on an advocacy capacity-building process, what reflections can you share? Next week, I’ll link to some case studies of organizations with which I worked on an advocacy capacity technical assistance project. Their experiences, I believe, hold a lot of lessons for we capacity-builders, for organizations committed to advancing their own capacity, and for the foundations that make this work possible.
Today, though, some thoughts on baselines–how we know what we need to do–and on using advocacy capacity assessments to measure our progress towards that goal of ‘capacity’, with, perhaps, some thinking about what capacity is, and why it matters so much, anyway.
- Partners matter: One of the things that I appreciate most about the new version of the AFJ assessment is that it includes an option for “relying on partners”, when asking organizations about their abilities in specific areas. This isn’t a liability, but, instead, reflects a sophisticated understanding of the capacities of partners and how to leverage them to complement organizations’ own strengths. We’ll only get truly strong fields when we stop leading organizations to believe that they need to possess all of what they need for advocacy success themselves. We need a field lens, and this type of capacity assessment–asking organizations to think about how they rely on others and how they can build on those alliances–takes steps in that direction.
- Measuring adaptive capacity is tough: The AFJ capacity assessment has a few different questions designed to get at the concept of adaptive capacity–how well organizations can read their environments and adjust their strategies accordingly. This is laudable, but it’s still somewhat elusive, I think. When I talk with organizations, adaptive capacity is their goal, but it is somewhat hard to grasp, both because getting that ‘read’ on the environment can be difficult, and because few advocates have structures that are adequate to facilitate quick responses to changes in that context, even when they know that should be their aim.
- The how matters: I have used advocacy capacity assessments with organizations where only one individual completes the assessment, and where multiple actors complete it. In my experience, that process makes a difference, in terms of how capacity assessment can serve to catalyze thinking, within an organization, about where you stand and where you want to go. I know that it’s not easy to get Board members and other key stakeholders to sit down and fill out an assessment that takes 30-45 minutes. But, really, if we can’t get that much buy-in around questions of how to position our organizations for advocacy, how can we get buy-in to take the steps that move us to where we want to be, in terms of advocacy?
- Numbers don’t matter, much: When I’ve had organizations complete the Advocacy Capacity assessment, there’s a strong temptation to focus on the ‘score’. How many points did we get? How does that compare to others? And, I get that. It’s not that the numbers don’t matter, of course; it can be really helpful to have a sense of where we stand, within our sectors, and, especially, of where we’ve come. But, as I’ve said before, organizations can have very highly developed capacity and still not be deploying it strategically. Conversely, there are organizations that can be limping along, without some of the key investments we consider crucial, but still accumulating advocacy successes. Maybe not sustainably, but still. The important point is that the numbers are relative, and that the scores don’t mean as much as the analysis of how different elements of capacity build on each other, how organizations can invest in their capacities, and how to make sure that capacity translates into real advocacy ability and will.
What have you learned from participating in capacity assessments? What is your reaction to this tool? What do you wish existed, in terms of advocacy capacity measures? And how do you use these tools to spark conversations and build momentum, for advocacy, within your organizations?
In search of elusive collective impact
This summer, I spent a lot of my time working on a sort of landscape assessment of the advocacy capacity–individually and collectively–of organizations working to combat obesity and support healthy eating and active living in the Kansas City area.
It was a tremendously exciting project, for me–a chance to learn more about work happening in an area that I care about but have relatively little experience in, and an opportunity to try out some of the tools I’ve been reading about, like a new network mapping system and a different method of analyzing coalition advocacy capacity.
For me, that passes for absolutely thrilling. Seriously.
I may have some other insights from this work to share in the future, but, for today, I want to highlight what was an unexpected development:
Everyone was talking about collective impact.
OK, so not technically everyone.
But, where I was expecting to have to prod folks into thinking, not about what their own capacity looks like or how they leverage that towards policy change, but, instead, how their capacity fits with that of others in the field, for greatest combined impact…
They were already there.
Several informants (I interviewed almost 40 people working in the field) talked about things like the need for shared metrics and a common vision, the importance of a network mentality so that individual organizations’ capacities were truly available to others, and the need for ‘backbone’ organizations that can catalyze a field approach.
They didn’t have the answers, certainly. It’s one thing to know that we need complementary skills and strategies AND the will to use them collaboratively, and another thing to really make that happen.
But they’re thinking about it. And talking about it.
And hoping for help–from foundations (who can fund in ways that encourage consideration of combined contribution, rather than individual attribution), from consultants (who can help them to map the capacities of others and focus on their best ‘niche’ in the network), and from each other (because impact is, after all, what we should all be in this business for).
I can’t definitely prove that this attention to collective impact comes from this Stanford Social Innovation Review article, although more than one informant mentioned it (and one even emailed it to me after we spoke).
It’s definitely worth reading, though, if you haven’t.
And I’d love to hear from you, today.
First, what about collective impact? What would it look like, in the field where you work? What would it take to get there?
And, second, has there been an article that has really ‘echoed’ where you work? A particular way of thinking about organizational change, or capacity, or advocacy, or, really, anything, that has shaped how you and your colleagues see what you do, and what you need to do differently? I’d love to see it.
We mostly face complex problems that have multiple potential intervention points, in this world.
It seems that most of the quick ‘technical’ fixes already have been. Fixed, that is.
So it’s going to take thinking, and working, collectively, in order to get to the scale where we can make a difference.
Share this:
Like this:
Leave a comment
Posted in Analysis and Commentary, My New Favorite Thing
Tagged consulting, impact, networks