If advocacy is a dialogue with the goal of convincing a particular target audience to adopt your proposed ideas as their own, then having an in-depth knowledge or profile of these audiences is a key starting point.1 This insight is a core guide to how you focus your messages and choose suitable activities and communication tools, as well as informing you on what to avoid.
In looking for the right way into the process in the first APF circle, you mapped the players and the playing field in the target process, including current thinking and positions, and the levels of consensus and conflict in the debate. Building on that analysis, this mapping and planning now involves going much deeper to try to better understand your particular target audiences and get behind the reasons or incentive structures that have led to their current positions. Such an analysis of the incentive structures that guides their opinions and positions is an extremely useful starting point in thinking about how you can design messages and proposals that will easily resonate with them. You also need to try to go beyond statements of simple interests and values to the more emotional or “personal” elements of their hopes and fears around the issue.
Go beyond current positions and interests of target audiences to understand their incentives, hopes, and fears.
Some may say that this is just stakeholder analysis, true to an extent. However, in our experience, the tools of stakeholder analysis tend to stay at the level outlined in the “way into the process” circle of the APF. The depth of analysis we propose in this step is a much more qualitative elaboration of trying to understand the history and evolution that has lead to the current positions of your identified target audience. Having conducted in-depth research or analysis in a target policy issue, you more than likely already have this knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not normally the type of in-depth insight that is put down in a policy paper or report. So, it is useful at this point to elaborate these audience profiles more fully with your advocacy team to serve as a guide to making more informed and better decisions on messages, activities, and tools targeted at your specific audiences.
One of our cases illustrates how the researchers elaborated such an in-depth audience profile:
Case 2: Kosovo (UNSCR 1244)
Reorganization of local administrative units in Mitrovica (2003–2006)
Think tank (European Stability Initiative)
In the Mitrovica case, the researchers developed a very in-depth profile of the minority Serbian population on the north side of town and what lead to their entrenched positions at the beginning of the advocacy effort. The incentive structure and the hopes, fears, and memories of the local population were at the center of their advocacy effort:
Incentive structure
In the years preceding and following NATO intervention in Kosovo (UNSCR 1244) in 1999, many Serbs had left the region and moved to the territory of undisputed Serbia. By 2002, northern Mitrovica was the only remaining urban population of Serbs in Kosovo (UNSCR 1244) that had a hospital and a university, that is, a population of professional and urban elites. The government in Belgrade was, of course, interested in keeping this population in the town and was paying a subsidy to public workers who stayed there. Their salaries, including this subsidy, were two to three times more than what public servants such as doctors or teachers were being paid in the rest of Serbia. Also, the size of the public sector was greater on the Serbian side of town than was when the whole town had been administered as a single undivided unit. The subsidy from Belgrade was also supplemented by a subsidy from Pristina, which also wanted to be seen as supporting minority populations.
Furthermore, the town had one industry, the Trepcsa mine, during state socialism. The mine was run down in the 1990s and destroyed in the 1999 conflict but in order to save the economic foundations of the town, the UN through the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was paying former workers a stipend. Basically, the Serbian population of Mitrovica was living off subsidies: the European Stability Initiative research found out that only 14 percent of income of the Serbian population was coming from private business. Moreover, the European Stability Initiative found out that many of the better-paid professionals in Mitrovica were hedging their bets and buying flats in Belgrade if the whole thing fell apart.
Recognizing the strong monetary element of the incentive structure in the dispute, the European Stability Initiative started with the striking and very basic economic facts summed up in the phrase that the town was “living off the crisis” and would be the “biggest slum in Kosovo if it went away,” so “what are we fighting for?” It is unsurprising that a message focused on the lack of a sustainable future was something that resonated with both sides.
Hopes, fears, and memories
To tap into this side of the story for both communities in Mitrovica, the European Stability Initiative made a documentary film called Chronicle of a Death Foretold2. In it they tried to bring people back to the memories of the town during socialist times and contrast them with the ethnically divided town. The film remind the viewers of how Mitrovica was a very integrated town under the old system: it was the town in Yugoslavia in which the highest percentage of Serbs spoke Albanian. They worked side by side in the Trepcsa mine and had a famous football team made up of players from both ethnicities. To make this relevant to the present day, they talk to two former teammates, one Serbian and one Albanian, who remained friends but could not visit each other because of the conflict. They contrasted this with the impressions of children and other adults in the divided town. By focusing on the history of Mitrovica and the damage to the social fabric of the town due to conflict, the European Stability Initiative sought to steer the emotions surrounding the debate away from the strong and fearful nationalist narratives that lead the conflict towards a more hopeful local narrative.
Advocacy planning checklist
Develop an in-depth profile of your target audiences:
- What is the current position of different key stakeholders on the policy issue? And how strongly entrenched are they in their current position?
- What is their incentive or interest in holding these positions? Try to elaborate the story behind these positions: what is the history behind their position and how has it evolved to the present day?
- Is there some element of personal or emotional attachment to the position they hold? How do they discuss their hopes and fears in this regard?
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International Development Research Centre 2004. ↩︎
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Mitrovica: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Available online: http://www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=48. ↩︎