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10. Effective Advocacy: Lessons for Nonprofit Leaders from Research and Practice
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter ten Effective Advocacy Lessons for Nonprofit Leaders from Research and Practice gary d. bass, alan j. abramson, and emily dewey Most of the chapters in this volume report on original research studies that have as their main goal the scholarly objective of deepening understanding of nonprofit advocacy. In contrast, this chapter has a more applied purpose: to draw on scholarship—from this volume and beyond—and the experience of leading nonprofit practitioners to provide guidance to nonprofit managers about their advocacy work. In particular, in the pages that follow we consider what systematic research and lessons drawn from practice have to say about these critical questions: Should nonprofits become engaged in advocacy? If so, how can their engagement be facilitated? And if nonprofits become engaged , how can they maximize the impact of their advocacy? What Is Advocacy? Before addressing these questions, we pause to note that providing guidance to nonprofit leaders about advocacy is complicated by the fact that there is no universally agreed upon meaning of the term “advocacy” in the nonprofit sector. In their introduction to this volume, Robert J. Pekkanen and Steven Rathgeb Smith note that the lack of a common definition means advocacy “resists scholarly analysis.” Pekkanen and Smith make the point that not only is there a lack of a common definition of “advocacy,” but also of “nonprofit.” If researchers have no common definitions of what they are researching, it makes it hard to apply lessons from scholarly research, placing a higher premium on experience. Yet Pekkanen and Smith do attempt to bring common ground by defining advocacy as “the attempt to influence public policy, either directly or indirectly.” While research in this volume generally follows the Pekkanen and Smith definition, the authors of this chapter have some preference for a broader Effective Advocacy 255 definition of advocacy given by Ohio State University sociologist Craig Jenkins . Jenkins has defined advocacy as “any attempt to influence the decisions of any institutional elite on behalf of a collective interest.”1 Note that under Jenkins’s definition, activity undertaken by nonprofits to affect decisions by both governmental and nongovernmental elites (e.g., corporate leaders) is considered advocacy. For example, the nonprofit that tries to shape a particular corporation’s behavior (e.g., change workplace conditions, limit release of pollution, bring CEO pay in line with other pay) is engaged in advocacy under Jenkins’s definition but not under Pekkanen and Smith’s because the nonprofit was not attempting to influence public policy. While Pekkanen and Smith’s definition of advocacy may be helpful for the purposes of this book, we have a more expansive definition and believe that advocacy is fundamentally about speaking out and making a case for something important. The target of the advocate’s voice is most often a person, group, or institution that holds some power over what the advocate wants. For a variety of reasons, advocacy can be a challenging concept. The word “advocacy” is often used interchangeably with related words such as “lobbying ” and “public education.” Some groups use it to describe what others would call lobbying; other groups say they do advocacy work, but to an outsider it is not clear that they are engaged in public policy or any other type of advocacy (Bass et al., 2007, 157–61). Too often, lobbying and advocacy are perceived as synonymous. In fact, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) narrowly defines lobbying as an attempt to influence legislation at the local, state, or federal level. Thus discussions of broad policies or efforts to influence executive branch actions are not lobbying communications. Lobbying always involves advocacy, but advocacy does not always involve lobbying. It may be more useful to define advocacy by the activities in which a nonprofit engages when trying to “influence the decisions of any institutional elite,” as described by Jenkins. (Although we have a broader definition of advocacy than Pekkanen and Smith in this volume, we concur that studying the different types of advocacy behavior will “advance our overall understanding ” of the field.) There are countless ways for nonprofits to engage in advocacy; some common methods include educating, public speaking, commissioning polls, mobilizing, petitioning, holding or attending public meetings, performing media outreach, protesting, or filing lawsuits (Bass and Mason, 2010; Donaldson, 2008; Reid, 2000; see also DeVita et al., chap. 4, and Mosley, chap. 5, this volume. Even commenting on proposed regulations [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:27 GMT) 256 Organizational Politics, Strategy, and Tactics or...