Advocacy Campaigns

Getting more advocacy engagement for your organization involves finding new supporters and turning them into dedicated advocates. But getting people to make the transition from giving you their email address to taking action on your organization’s behalf requires a thoughtful engagement strategy.

During the time of COVID-19, getting together and sharing stories is an impossibility. So, when my mom turned 80, my sister came upon an easy user-generated content tool to organize friends to send a message to my mom for her friends and family. Five days and a few tutorials later, using Video Hug, we had organized a couple dozen 80-year-olds to send a message to my mom you can see the finished product here.  

This is often the time of year when folks think about updating or building a new advocacy website. You may have a had the same website for years now, the look is stale, the platform is old, integrations are bad, and your site is not achieving the goals you would like it to. If your team is thinking it is time to update or redo your website but is unsure where to start, this is the resource for you.

Running an effective advocacy campaign takes skill and planning. No matter how big or how small your effort is, having some basic structure can make a huge difference in your assets and results. Here are fifteen tips to run a winning advocacy campaign

Lame duck session should not come as a surprise. After election season is over, it’s easy to just want to hole up, make sour dough bread, chicken soup and shut off your political brain for a while. But across the country, as well as in Congress, we are about to go into the legislative season and lame duck sessions.

Every year groups go to Washington, D.C. or their state Capitol to try and impact legislation. At the same time, they are there with a dozen other groups doing lobby visits and it’s even hard to get nonprofit lobby days on the calendar. Lobby days can be a complicated business, but we’re here to help.

Black Lives Matter. Across the country and around the world, we have seen protests demanding an end to systemic racism and police brutality in our country as well as justice for the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain and countless others.

The goal for your advocacy RFP should be to compare apples to apples and make the best decision for your organization. Check out our Advocacy RFP Template to determine what questions you should be asking your advocacy consultants in your request for proposals. At The Campaign Workshop, we fill out a ton of advocacy RFPs and have seen a lot of good ones and some not so good ones.

Using an advocacy RFP template can help streamline the process of hiring the right partner for your next project. The exercise of filling out the template should help you identify your goals, any constraints on the project, and strengths and weaknesses in your organization.

Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit industry for long enough will tell you that it is full of quirks and choosing the nonprofit consultant that is right for you is no easy task. Time and time again, we have nonprofit clients come to TCW after hiring the wrong firm.