How to make a good plea?
In this training, we will look at how to make a successful advocacy campaign. Well-designed advocacy will help you reach your target.
1. Choose a public policy objective
Many people fail to do advocacy well because they simply think that what interests them interests everyone else, or what bothers them bothers everyone else. This is not the case.
You need to target a case, a general interest issue that affects, or may affect, a significant portion of the population. This population can be national, or located in a geographically targeted area. Therefore, your message will be heard, relayed and supported by a fairly representative sample of this population, if not the entire population that supports it.
So it is important not to wear blinders, but to have a much broader vision, an all-encompassing vision. You should not target several strains of populations with divergent interests. On the other hand, if you are forced to have several strains with divergent interests, the theme of your advocacy should be one in which all of these different strains come together, so a unifying theme.
2. Conduct a survey
To find the theme of your advocacy, you have several options: start with an observation, start with an experience, start with a denunciation, or do an investigation.
We will look at each of these options.
Starting with an observation means that you noticed something. This thing has caught your attention because it is abnormal, unworthy, or any other attribution that might attract this finding. In addition, the observation can come from others as well.
When you start from experience, it involves you directly. In this case, you are directly concerned, or touched by this fact which pushes you to react, to denounce. With experience, you have more elements at your disposal, normally more arguments.
Concerning the denunciation, it is someone or some people who came to report facts that they have noticed, experienced or that were also reported to them.
In any case, whatever the way you got this information, you must conduct an investigation. It is out of the question to rely on speculations or free assertions.
The investigation is very important and it should not be neglected or rushed. It is the survey that will give you the answers to the question of whether or not it is worth making the case. You must conduct it with the population concerned.
3. Bring out the targeted problems
We don’t do advocacy for the sake of doing it. When we do, it’s because there are problems we’ve noticed that we’d like to address. It’s not about bringing up every possible problem either. If you do, you will waste a lot of time and risk missing your objective. Just write down the most critical, and certainly the most common, problems.
You must understand that a problem can be critical and temporary, or ephemeral. In this case, there is no need to dwell on it, because it will either not happen again, or it happens very rarely.
On the contrary, note recurring problems, because even if they are not critical, the fact that they happen often requires that they be dealt with if possible for good.
However, the priority should be the critical and recurring problems. If you can find these problems, you are more likely to have the support of the people you are advocating for.
You will probably ask how to sort out these issues. We won’t be able to go into that in this training, but you need to sort them out by degree of importance and recurrence.
4. Propose appropriate solutions
Advocacy is not just about listing problems. You have to not only list them, but also provide solutions. Don’t be one of those simplistic people who just talk about it. If you’re going to do advocacy, you have to come up with your share of answers to the problems. And to do that, it is the investigation that will also give you bits and pieces of the solutions, or simply the solutions. By doing the survey, you must allow those who can to not only identify the problems, but also provide solutions.
Once you have cross-checked all these proposed solutions, you must be able to choose the most relevant ones. And to do this, you must proceed by elimination. A careful filtering process will allow you to avoid far-fetched answers and to propose relevant ones.
For the answers to be relevant, they must be applicable to the resolution of the problems mentioned, otherwise they will be of no interest. They must also be easily achievable in time, and in implementation. Imagine solutions that are difficult to implement and that may take a long time.
So make sure that your solutions are effective, and if possible, easily achievable in design, implementation and time.
5. Write the content well
It is important to get the content right. It should specify the target population, the problems noted, and the solutions that advocacy provides. Each of these elements should be written with as much precision as possible, with the investigation report attached to the file. Writing well does not just mean filling pages.
You must be careful not to make mistakes, and to write a text that is easy to read and understand. You should avoid complex literary styles. You will often be writing for an audience with an average level of education, who will not be able to understand complicated words. You are not writing for yourself. You do not write to be told that you are a great intellectual. You write to get a message across to a population.
So be as clear as possible. If you don’t, your advocacy will have a hard time getting through to its target audience.
6. Reach out to channels of influence
After you have written your advocacy, you need to think about making it resonate, you need to think about making it achieve its goal of being implemented. As you can imagine, advocacy is not something to be put away in a drawer.
Therefore, you need to find the people who can help you get the message out. You need to find or have channels of influence. These channels of influence today can be social networks, media, influencers, and other organizations. They will help you to easily reach your targets. You should not confuse advocacy with lobbying. Advocacy is directed at the people, while lobbying is directed at the government or leaders.
On the other hand, a government official or a leader can help to pass an advocacy through his financial means or through his popularity or notoriety. In this case, he too becomes a channel of influence. Channels of influence are very important in advocacy. You absolutely must have them. You should not choose them anyhow. Just as you chose your target population, you should select your channels of influence in the same way.
For example, if your advocacy is aimed at young people who listen to rap music, it is obvious that your best channels of influence will be rappers, not those who play Cuban music. You will also use RAP shows to get your advocacy across.
So as you can see, everything has to fit together to reach your target.
