Advocacy at its most basic is about interacting with people; therefore, cultivating relationships with key target audiences is a crucial dimension to advocacy communication. In addition to, and overlapping with a strong presence and reputation in the policy network outlined above, the face or spokesperson for the campaign should have a range of broader skills and style, including:
- strong social/interpersonal skills,
- impressive oral and written communication skills,
- effective negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy skills,
- good networking and leadership skills.
However, researchers often do not possess the wide range of skills needed to do this kind of work.1 A common response by some practitioners is to assign the messenger role to the person in an organization responsible for communications or public relations.2 In fact, often the whole advocacy process is somehow seen as the communication person’s job. This assumption is a major fallacy, given the multifaceted role that the messenger plays and broad spectrum of knowledge, skills, and reputation required. Advocacy is a team effort, which of course, will include the communications person, but they are rarely able to see through a policy change without a team behind them.
The messenger needs strong communication and interpersonal skills together with a good reputation in the policy network.
In all our cases the organizations weighed the issue of messenger choice carefully, and in two cases they decided to take on the role of messengers themselves: both organizations are well-established and well-known players in their contexts on the issue in question, and therefore had the legitimacy to do this. They also had the internal advocacy experience, capacity, and skills in their team to plan and conduct the range of advocacy activities.
Case 2: Kosovo (UNSCR 1244)
Reorganization of local administrative units in Mitrovica (2003–2006)
Think tank (European Stability Initiative)
In the Mitrovica case, the European Stability Initiative acted as the sole messenger; in fact, their whole team put a huge amount of effort into managing and facilitating the discussion. They are a well-established think tank with a solid reputation internationally for strong policy research and advocacy in the Balkans. Through this earlier work, they had developed a strong presence and network in the international community (that has commissioned and funded much of their research), and among national governments and civil society in the region. They also stressed the strength of having a team working on this advocacy effort and how important it was to divide the roles according to the audiences and languages. One member of the team speaks Serbian and he was the main contact person on the Serbian side, while another speaks Albanian and she was the face of the campaign on that side of the effort. They also had a lot of interaction with the media (local and international), international organizations, the diplomatic corps and opinion leaders in the region. With such a large number of audiences to manage, a team of messengers was key.
Case 4: Mongolia
Preventing the signing of an ill-considered mining contract between Mongolian government and international mining consortium (2006–2007)
National and international NGO Coalition
(Open Society Forum, Mongolia and Revenue Watch Institute)
In this instance, the Open Society Forum is a long-established NGO and is seen as an independent, apolitical player in Mongolia: this means that it has friends and connections in many political and NGO circles. Therefore, they had little problem deciding to be the local face of this campaign. However, they have little experience or capacity in the legal or economic details of such mining contracts. It was at this point they decided to engage their international partner, Revenue Watch, to give them the legitimacy they needed. In fact, even the mining consortium admitted to them that they were the only local player to provide a detailed analysis and response to the draft agreement. This obviously carried a lot of weight with local NGOs and parliamentarians.
Two further lessons can be drawn from the cases:
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Divide messenger roles strategically among team members based on their capacities and the specific requirements of the campaign.
In addition to having the legitimacy and broad skill set outlined in this section, the European Stability Initiative team was also in a position to act as the face of the campaign as their individual team members had the specific skills and characteristics needed for this particular advocacy effort. In this sensitive issue, communicating in local languages with target audiences in different countries was paramount to being listened to and trusted. Hence, it is worth considering that when dealing with an issue of a sensitive nature, factors such as language, ethnicity, location, or affiliation may be especially important when deciding on a spokesperson for your campaign. However, an organization acting as sole messenger in such circumstances does entail significant commitment of resources, especially in terms of time and manpower. -
You may need to draw on additional partners to play the messenger role for specific purposes.
The Open Society Forum is well established in the Mongolian policy network on this issue and possess advocacy and communication capacity and experience, and so they could have been the sole face of the advocacy campaign. However, they realized where their weaknesses were in terms of legal and economic analytical expertise of mining contracts and, as a result, strategically drew on an external partner, Revenue Watch to fill this expertise gap. Thus, teaming up the local face with an international partner for key advocacy activities, such as an editorial opinion placed in the national newspapers, served to strengthen and reinforce the case, making it more difficult for the government to ignore their message of the need to stop the signing of the mining contract.