Having found a way into the process and identified the key audiences you need to target in your advocacy efforts and made at least an initial decision on your messenger(s), we now come to making plans for the communication of what you want to say: in other words, your “message” and your set of advocacy activities and communication tools. Following an in-depth process of research and analysis, researchers often find it difficult to know where to start in retelling the story and extracting the essence of what they have found. They often try to tell the whole story and are caught up in small details or methodological challenges that are very interesting to them but are often confusing to any nonresearcher.
In planning your advocacy messages, the focus should not be on what you want to say about the research, but on how to draw on the research to get your target audiences to understand, engage, and be convinced of your findings and proposals. As a first hurdle, you simply want to avoid being ignored or misunderstood. Too often good ideas do not even merit a response because no communication planning is done. As we often remind trainees, we are trying to change public policy, not fill library shelves, and although it is often less valued, focusing on the communication aspect of a policy project time and time again proves to be just as important as doing a thorough analysis.
The message is not focused on what you want to report, but on how to engage your target audience.
Once you have an idea of how to focus your message, you then have to decide how you are going to deliver the message so that it is engaging and convincing. Maybe even more importantly, you also have to design for enough interaction with the target audiences to allow them to engage, understand, negotiate, and ultimately take ownership of your ideas. That is, you need to design a targeted set of advocacy activities and communication tools. Drawing on the mapping and planning you completed in the “way into the process” circle, you will have identified an opportunity or timeline to start or continue your advocacy campaign and a specific audience(s) that you are targeting. Now, in designing your messages and activities, you are planning to take advantage of the chosen opportunity and steer the policy debate in the direction that serves your objectives. The overlapping nature of the planning is represented in Figure 10.
Advocacy activities must provide enough opportunity for target audiences to engage, discuss and ultimately take ownership of your ideas.
Figure 10.
Message and activities (APF)
Informed by your planning in the other APF elements and taking the third circle, you need to go through the following five steps in making plans for constructing your message, deciding on advocacy activities, and managing the advocacy communication process:
- Developing an in-depth audience profile
- Shaping the message for the audience
- Selecting advocacy activities and communication tools
- Assessing the strategic risk of the campaign
- Planning for challenges and responses
In order to focus the planning in this circle, you need to understand your staged objectives in moving the audience from understanding to ownership and this section begins by outlining our advocacy communication model that will guide you through the planning for the five steps in this circle.