Why bad advocacy happens to good causes
Many advocacy coalitions with important goals still fail. What makes the difference? The reasons are more mundane than you might think.
According to CBS News, the Justice for Mario Woods, Justice for Alex Nieto and Justice for Amilcar Perez Lopez coalitions which were created in the wake of three fatal shootings by San Francisco police announced their merger “in an effort to end what the group believes to be police violence and abuse in communities of color.”
What are the factors that will help this coalition succeed? According to forthcoming research, successful collective action depends on four key pillars:
- Leadership — Especially the role of a “backbone” organization that mobilizes and manages resources of the participating organizations.
- Preparation/Formation — Agreement on the common mission and the common metrics to track if the collective is moving toward the agreed upon goals.
- Structure — A robust organizational structure to carry out the work and manage the participating organizations. Some of the structural features include the participants, size of the coalition, organization (teams, geographic clusters, hierarchy), coordination of activities and autonomy.
- Process — Pro-active and mindful management of communication.
One of the critical factors is the day-to-day organizing of coalition activities, from organizing conference calls to tracking progress towards the Coalition’s goals. The research shows that the presence of one “backbone” organization that takes on this leadership role helps to ensure success.
Increasingly, the role of the backbone organization must include data management. Having a centralized location for data and information helps to facilitate resource sharing and makes strategic decision-making by coalition members easier.
Likewise, frequent communication, both face-to-face and virtual, correlated with success. Face-to-face meetings are important for building trust and to keep participants engaged. But frequent virtual communication is also important for success, especially where participants are geographically distributed.
So, success depends not only on a soaring mission, but also on creating an organizational structure that facilitates collective action.
We created the iVocate platform to make implementing the key success factors easier. You bring the leadership and cause, and we provide the collective action infrastructure — formation of the coalition, organization of the work, sharing resources and real-time communication tools. Click here to learn more.
