6.1 Targeting ownership and action through dialogue — an advocacy communication model

The connotation of the word “message” is quite unidirectional, in that it is something you send to someone else and then wait for his or her reply. If we take the literal meaning of the word for advocacy planning, you might see your primary job as the preparation of this first message, after which you wait for the reply. This approach is nicely summed up as: “Research it, write it, and they will find it.”¹

However, experience has shown that effective advocacy is a two-way process of mediation and negotiation that normally takes considerable time and effort.² In adopting this approach, you immediately move away from ideas of advocacy as “presenting your findings” or one-way transfer, but rather see the development of your message as a process of planning to start a dialogue.³ Of course, you cannot predict all the responses to your initial message nor be sure how the process will move, but with an in-depth knowledge of the players and the playing field, you can make a pretty good estimate of how it is likely to go. Also, seeing your advocacy campaign as the start of a dialogue will mean that you are immediately considering responses and also see the need to stay involved in steering the developing discussion. This further reinforces the centrality of designing your messages, communication activities, and tools with a strong focus on engaging and persuading specific target audiences.

Of course, staying in the dialogue is not enough; you must have a clear purpose for your involvement in these discussions and a clear intent to influence the decision-making process in a certain direction. We stress again that the advocacy challenge is a process of leading and steering opinion leaders and decisionmakers to make your words, ideas, evidence, and proposals their own and act on them. This process naturally includes and often starts with presenting your ideas, but the heart of the communication process is more about mediation and negotiation, and ultimately transferring ownership of your ideas.

Ownership is the end result of a successful advocacy process and in planning your messages, range of advocacy activities, and communication tools, you need a set of initial targets to get there. We have developed the policy advocacy communication model below to illustrate the challenges or stages prior to the goal of audience ownership and subsequent action. Starting at the bottom box and moving up, these are the stages that any audience needs to move through to finally take ownership of policy proposals. Hence, it is crucial that you keep this movement and these stages in mind throughout the design of your messages, activities, and communication tools, so that they are designed purposefully to facilitate this movement. It is important to stress that the staged targets in the model are how you want your audiences to respond to your messages and activities.

Constructing effective messages is an artful balance of attention grabbing, incentives and threats, appealing to the audience’s concerns and values, supported by just the right evidence to bring the intended target audience over to your side. As the multiple stages of the communication model imply, you also usually need to be willing to invest time, effort, and resources; be persistent in reacting to the responses you elicit; and manage and steer the process with your activities and communication tools to reach the goal of target audience ownership and action.⁴ With this advocacy communication model in mind, we outline the five main steps in mapping and planning for the message and activities circle of the APF.