Advocacy

Susan Markham is a partner and co-founder of Smash Strategies. Previously, she served as Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), director of Women's Political Participation at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and a senior strategist here at The Campaign Workshop. Susan is a passionate advocate for gender equality and female empowerment, and advocates for the critical role that women play in politics and development. She also just recently released her new book Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice. This week, we asked her 7 questions about her work and career path.

You can also listen to this interview with Susan Markham on the How to Win a Campaign podcast. 

Brandon Wolf is a nationally recognized gun safety and LGBTQ+ civil rights advocate and public speaker. Brandon is a survivor of the 2016 shooting at Orlando's Pulse Nightclub. After losing two of his best friends that night, Brandon set out to honor their and the other 47 victims’ legacies with action. Brandon is a co-founder of The Dru Project, a non-profit organization that helps fund higher education to empower youth and future leaders in the LGBTQ+ community. We asked Brandon 7 questions about his experience and career path.

Advocacy strategies can be time-consuming to create and difficult to execute. We have written often about the core elements of an advocacy plan, but taking the time to develop your advocacy strategy is an important step. But where do you begin? Try using strategy tools.

When you’re a part of an advocacy campaign, spotting issues and fixing them are not always easy. In the realm of advocacy, there will always be bumps in the road, that is the nature of making change. Identifying common advocacy hurdles and proactively planning for solutions is a good strategy that can improve your campaign. 

If you've ever worked on an issue advocacy campaign, you know that convincing a person to even listen to your message can be a difficult task. Now, more than ever, public opinion has become harder to shape when people tune out information more than they tune it in.

Advocacy emails are a powerful tool. For many groups and organizations, advocacy emails can amplify their message in a positive way. As you are probably well aware, most people use their email for both work and personal use, so communicating with your supporters with this medium is a logical choice.

We have all seen the exponential rise of short, viral videos in the last few years¬–so how can we garner the same popularity for advocacy videos? As social media platforms continue to expand and become more popular, creating videos for your campaign can prove to be a worthwhile financial and creative investment. 

Engaging individuals in advocacy efforts is an essential part of creating lasting change. But it can be a challenge to get people to take meaningful action, and even more challenging to keep them engaged over the long term. That's where the advocacy engagement funnel comes in.

Executing a successful and impactful advocacy campaign requires time, dedication, and organization. In today’s day and age, there is strong competition from various advocacy issues fighting for attention, so to run a successful campaign, you will need to be ready to hit the ground running.

Online advocacy and digital engagement can grow your movement and hiring an advocacy campaign consultant can help, but achieving real online advocacy results can be tough in both execution and budget.

Advocacy, defined in the simplest terms, is about fighting for something you believe in. When we talk about advocacy, the issues and tactics may change, but the core is about supporting a cause or policy and working to create the change we want to see in the world.

Advocacy tactics and advocacy campaign strategies will continuously change with the times and so must we. Public affairs campaigns are now common on smaller federal issues as well as state and municipal issues.