6.4.2 Choose communication tools to support advocacy activities

Having chosen your target audiences, messages, and set of advocacy activities, you next need to choose the set of advocacy communication tools you will use to deliver these messages and support the chosen activities. This issue is often referred to as selecting “formats” and “packaging” of messages by commentators in the literature. However, as you are no doubt aware if you have developed such tools, producing effective advocacy tools involves a lot more in comparison to a simple process like packaging a parcel!

As with all aspects of the message and activities development process, your target audiences will guide the choice of communication tools. You need to select types of communication tools that are
- recognizable,
- commonly used,
- designed to give the level and type information that suits the capacity and expectations of target audiences,
- easily accessible to target audiences.¹

If you do choose the right tools for your audiences, you will have a better chance of engaging them and also of building the credibility of your messages and advocacy campaign.² It is important to avoid the classic mistake of sending your 120-page technical policy paper to the nonexpert decisionmaker, who not only does not have time to read it, but actually does not have the capacity to engage with the evidence or arguments. Such an approach will usually mean that the decisionmaker will probably not read the report and those sending it are highly unlikely to get a response, apart from the negative impression they have made.

In choosing communication tools, you need to consider three main types of audiences:

• Experts — those who have a deep technical knowledge and background in the target policy area. These are commonly advisors, bureaucrats, and people from international organizations, research institutes, think tanks, and universities. In order to convince this audience, they need to see the full argument including literature, evidence, proposals, predictions, and research (methodology and analysis). Having said that, it is also important to note that such groups are still much more heterogeneous in background and experience than those from a single academic discipline and this needs to be considered in making your communication accessible.

• Informed nonexperts — practitioners who work in the target policy area and are users rather than producers of policy research. They are often decisionmakers, journalists, NGO employees, or civil servants. These people can normally be convinced by seeing the significant outcomes of research and do not need all the in-depth academic and research detail. If possible, these people will consult experts to confirm if their reading of a policy proposal is correct. This is usually a much more heterogeneous group than the expert group in terms of educational background and experience.

• The general public — unless they have a stake in the issue or it is a matter of broad public concern, the public are not normally interested in policy research. Of course, if a policy proposal will divide them into winners or losers or feeds into their hopes and fears, they can easily be made interested. Such an advocacy effort would have to target the specific relevant sector of the general public to get them to buy into the ideas. What is needed in this case is the simplest and clearest presentation of the evidence in such an argument.

Exploring these three types of audiences or publics, the following table presents an overview of the common types of communication tools used to deliver advocacy messages.

A number of lessons can be drawn from this table

• Communication tools sometimes have more than one audience.
  In some cases, communication tools primarily engage or target one group, for example, long technical papers for experts. However, there are many communication tools that overlap for different audience groups, for example, with most of the advocacy based on information and communication technology. Oral presentations for experts and informed nonexperts are also together, as conferences and meetings in which such presentations are made normally include a mix of these two audiences. In the design of such shared or overlapping tools, this normally means an attempt to bridge between both audiences in what you include and how you explain things, but with a definite tendency to make sure to not exclude the group with less expertise.

• It is important not to confuse exposure to communication tools with targeting.
  In the table above, the columns include the common types of communication tools used to target each group, that is, the primary means to engage and convince them of the advocacy messages. In contrast, the arrows on the top of the table are there to indicate which communication tools each audience is exposed to. The tools included only under informed nonexperts and the public does not mean that experts do not read or see them; it is just that they are not primarily targeting expert audiences and would not include nearly enough detail to convince such an audience. The arrows above the table face in one direction, as this is not normally true in the other direction. For example, the public will not normally have easy access to policy studies or briefs, nor would they read them if they did. The lesson for the advocate is that if you want to engage particular audiences, you must develop communication tools that target and fully engage them in the debate. For example, it is not usually enough to outline your position only in an opinion editorial article if you need to get experts to buy into your proposals.

The following table details the specific combination of communication tools developed for each of our cases.

The comparison of cases leads to two further lessons:

• Developing communication tools for broader audiences requires more effort and resources.
  The table shows that multiple tools were used and needed in each case, but as the cases moved towards including broader public audiences, more tools were needed. For example, the Kosovar (UNSCR 1244) and Mongolian cases required more communication tools as they had a broader public dimension. Managing these types of campaigns can take a lot more time and effort as you have multiple levels of the discussion or dialogue to engage in. Also, it often becomes more expensive as more manpower, communication tools, publications, and so on are required. For example, in the Kosovar (UNSCR 1244) case, the European Stability Initiative made a very professional documentary on the situation in the town and this cost them approximately EUR 20,000.

• Different communication tools may be needed through the different stages of the advocacy process.
  The European Stability Initiative case, which played out over a four-year period and in which they wrote multiple policy briefs as the discussion developed is a good illustration of the type of commitment and persistence that is needed through each wave of the advocacy process. The ability to respond in this manner also illustrates the advantage of having the “iceberg” of research evidence available behind the “tip” that was presented in initial stages of the debate. To a certain extent, the same is true for the Mongolian case.