Planning your advocacy strategy
The steps for planning an advocacy strategy
There are five key steps for planning an advocacy strategy:
- Identify your issue
- Set your goals and objectives
- Identify who you are going to target
- Establish your message
- Develop an action plan
Step 1: Identify your issue
The first step in developing your advocacy strategy is defining your issue. An issue is a broad problem which affects your work.
- Are you annoyed that only 48% of countries deliver the birth dose vaccine to newborns?
- Are you frustrated that you can’t access hepatitis C medicine?
- Do you have a great idea to improve screening in your community?
- Or is there something else?
Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding on your issue:
- Does your issue align with your organisational mission?
- Can your organisation make an impact?
- Do you have the resources?
- Timing
Step 2: Set your goals and objectives
What are your root causes?
The first step in the process to find your longterm goal is to define the root causes of your issue. Root causes help you examine what problems are important to your issue which in turn helps you create solutions. Root causes may be the criminalisation of people who inject drugs, that diagnostics are too expensive, or that front-line medical professionals don’t have adequate knowledge of the disease and new therapies. There could be 100 root causes for any issue. As an advocate it’s important to take time to understand these. These will be important factors to consider when developing your strategy.
Top Tip: Keep in mind that it while it would be ideal to advocate on all the issues identified, choosing just a few will help ensure focus and success. Above all, it is important to select an issue that is realistic and will drive action towards WHO’s elimination targets.
The five Whys
The next step is to choose one of your root causes in the problem tree and apply the 5 Whys. The 5 Whys will help further develop your advocacy goal by repeating the question “Why?” five times, or as many times as needed. You may want to do this several times with the different root causes until you agree on an issue which aligns with your organisation’s mission and your expected impact.
Once you have completed the exercise and decided on the root cause you’d like to tackle as your advocacy issue, you will then have to turn it into an advocacy goal. For example, your overall advocacy goal may be: By 2030 all governments will support screening and treatment of hepatitis C in prisons.
Top tip: Keep your goals as close to wider advocacy efforts. For example, we have used 2030 and 2021 as our advocacy touch-points to coincide with the global WHO targets. This will help align your advocacy and increase impact.
5 Whys?
- Acquiring hepatitis C via injection drug use or through tattooing is widespread in many prison settings.
- Lack of proactive approaches to offering testing means that many prisoners are living with hepatitis C unaware.
- Insufficient resources including cost of tests and follow-up treatment, availability of medical staff and lack of knowledge about viral hepatitis reduces the motivation to test and treat.
- The cost of hepatitis C medications, the length of treatment, lack of prison medical staff, and the public reaction to spending large sums of money on the general prisoner health budget has stopped systematic testing and treatment.
- Governments often don’t have policies in place to support screening and treatment practices in prisons
SMART objectives
Objectives should be used to underpin your activities and are important steps to take to help you reach your goal. Remember, it’s important to develop SMART objectives – keep them simple and attainable whilst ensuring they are measurable for impact.
Top tip: When creating your objectives, check back to your root causes and answers to the questions of your 5 Whys. This will help you create more targeted and impactful objectives.
Identify your target audience
Once you know what you want to achieve, it is necessary to understand the people and institutions you need to influence to make it happen. After people living with viral hepatitis, decision-makers are most likely to be your most important advocacy stakeholder. These are the people with the power to bring about change and usually work in places of influence such as governments, the media or corporations.
The best way to find out who your key stakeholders are is by doing a stakeholder analysis. There’s lots of ways to do a stakeholder analysis, from interviews, informal consultations to desk-based research, however we’d suggest the following activities:
- Brainstorm a list of all the main people and groups who influence or are influenced by the issue
- Using the template grid on page 74 of the NOhep Advocacy Toolkit, write the name of the stakeholders into each box depending on whether you think they have a lot of power to influence change on the problem you want to address.
When thinking about your key stakeholders, it’s useful to break them into two categories; primary and secondary targets. Primary targets are people who can bring about change the quickest. It’s important to think about them as individuals and not organisations or entire governments. Secondary targets are individuals who exert pressure over your primary targets. Secondary targets could range from a reporter to a spouse or even a physician.
Top tip: Brainstorm beyond the usual suspects. For example, your Minister of Health may not be the person who holds the purse strings. Why not include the Ministry of Finance, Labour or Social Affairs?
Creating allies
You shouldn’t just focus on key stakeholders you want to influence for change. Think more broadly about other stakeholders who can support your activities. The participation of a wide range of stakeholders can generate broader support for specific issues and increase the legitimacy and effectiveness of advocacy campaigns. Choosing the right partner can increase access to decision-makers, provide technical expertise, support evidence gathering and mitigate risks.
Global partners include the World Hepatitis Alliance, the International Alliance Of Patients’ Organizations, Union for International Cancer Control to name but a few. You can also forge partnerships with local organisations to better support your work. Find out more on how you can build partnerships on page 48 of the NOhep Advocacy Toolkit.
Establishing your message
Once you have a sense of who your target audiences are, reaching them requires crafting persuasive messages. Your key messages are the most important element that your audience will use to decide if they support you and your cause. There are no one set of rules to writing good messages, you will need to practice and pre-test them to see if they get across the information you want, in a way that is compelling, but also concise.
In theory, they should be:
- Compelling and convincing: your message should help you connect with all stakeholders
- Clear and concise: your message should be delivered and understood in less than a minute
- Consistent: people are more likely to believe a message if it’s being continually used
Here are the core elements of a strong set of key messages:
Most advocates recommend having one primary message supported by two or three secondary messages.
The primary message should be broad, appealing to all audiences, simple and direct. It is the theme that holds the whole advocacy campaign together. For example: Globally, 15% of people in prisons are living with hepatitis C. Unless detected and treated, they may experience liver disease, cirrhosis and liver cancer. Now is the time to act and stop needless deaths.
The purpose of the secondary messages is to support the core message and to explain how it can be achieved. Secondary messages should be targeted to your specific audiences.
We’ve outlined some sample secondary messages for policymakers:
- We can prevent 100% of all hepatitis C infections in prisons. All we need to do is implement a screening and treatment policy, supported by education and harm reduction services.
- 60% of liver-cancer deaths are attributed to viral hepatitis. If people living with hepatitis C are diagnosed early and linked to care, it will reduce long-term health costs and save the government millions by 2030.
- Most low-income and disadvantaged people are at higher risk and have less power to protect and improve their health. They are solely dependent on their government. For their sakes, the time to act is now.
Build your evidence base Build your evidence base
The most effective messages for advocacy are based on credible evidence which is localised to your setting. Viral hepatitis has a legacy of poor surveillance which means that consistent data is often scarce, especially at a local level. We recommend using WHO data in the first instance. In 2017, they launched their first Global Hepatitis Report which includes validated data for the first time. This provides a useful global snapshot. Other good sources for global data are the Global Burden of Disease Study and the Centre for Disease Analysis Foundation, which give an overview on each country’s progression to the 2030 goals.
Here are some other common sources of local information about viral hepatitis:
- Hospital or health centre disease registries
- Interviews with patients or healthcare professionals
- Media reports from local media outlets
- Published materials and studies by other hepatitis NGOs
- Local government surveys
Choosing your messengers
Well-recognised celebrities, sports personalities or politicians can help amplify your cause enormously and get your message out.
When choosing your spokesperson, there’s a few things to keep in mind:
- Be authentic: your spokesperson should have an authentic interest or connection with hepatitis.
- Be committed: the best partnerships work when both parties are actively involved. The celebrities who commit their high-profile recognition, talent and understanding to support a cause can serve as highly effective messengers.
- Know your audience: when identifying your spokesperson, know who you want to target with your message. For example, if we want to raise awareness of hepatitis amongst teenagers – get in touch with a popular singer or blogger.
Securing endorsement from a popular figure does take time, planning and perseverance. If you haven’t worked with them before, we suggest taking part in a smaller activity like asking them to tweet on World Hepatitis Day. This will open the channels of communication for bigger projects.
Top tip: If you want to contact a high-profile celebrity, get in touch with their publicist and not their agent. Agents charge commission on any work secured so they are less likely to follow-up on a charity partnership, whilst publicists are paid a salary so they are more likely to get involved.
Develop an action plan
Now that you’ve done the research and the mapping, you’re nearly ready to go. Before you get started, take time to reflect on how all the different elements can come together.
We’ve outlined a simple action plan in the NOhep Advocacy Toolkit which puts everything you’ve learnt together and fits directly with the specific objectives. Remember that these actions may need to be revised as you work towards your medium and long term goals. For example, you may wish to focus on drafting and passing legislation, securing funding, and then the development, implementation and monitoring of programmes.