Step into the advocacy mindset of being the initiator of action. From that perspective, take an honest and pragmatic look at your context. Assess where you are, always with an eye to determining your next action: your context will suggest your strategy.

The most important thing that advocacy tools will do for you is give you different ways to look at your own context. Continuing the analogy of the advocacy journey, these tools are like different guides one might use in planning or directing a journey.

At the same time, your own experience and expertise will still be what guides you in deciding what to do with what you see. In this spirit, if the steps in a given process make more sense to you in a different order, change them around. If some seem to be missing, add them, and if some seem wrong, take them out. You are the expert on what will work for you.

We've grouped a number of tools here according to the views they afford of a particular context:

Some tools allow you to see your advocacy in terms of linear movement through time, with a sense of ongoing growth as one moves forward. This is a little like having access to the logs or records of others who have taken the journey before you, and being able to judge where you are and where you might go by comparing your experience to theirs.

Issue life cycle & Organizational life cycle: A good starting place. These tools direct thinking towards both long-term and short-term objectives. They also immediately encourage a wider context for considering advocacy efforts: environment, allies, and your own and others' capacities.

Some tools, by contrast, deal not with movement through time, but with a static picture of your context at this particular moment in your advocacy. Using these tools can be a little like taking a current inventory of one's resources for the journey, or like looking at a map or an overhead view of the immediate landscape. You use information about this moment to decide what you want to create in the next moment.

Capacities/Possibilities - Current inventory of resources

ACT-ON: Also a good early-use tool. This is a good first step before either more detailed assessment of capacities or campaign planning (as with the NineQuestions)

Objectives: "Who are we?": Will often turn up advantages and challenges for advocacy inherent in a group's composition or position in its advocacy context, that might otherwise be overlooked

Structures/Points of Leverage - Overview of the immediate landscape

Triangular analysis : Particularly valuable for assessing culture as a factor in social justice advocacy - also particularly popular with advocates outside the U.S. context

Some tools assume not a natural progression through time, but a purposeful step-by-step movement toward an advocacy goal. These tools are often more campaign-oriented. Using these tools, it is as if a traveler has broken down the next stage of the journey into set pieces, and is executing specific plans to accomplish those set pieces. These tools are very action- or next-step-oriented.

Path toward product-oriented results - Step-by-step specific plans

Nine Questions: Best done after some more basic capacity assessment (such as ACT-ON). A fast and very usable tool for creating and developing existing campaigns, though sometimes needs to be adapted creatively in non-U.S. contexts.

Some tools step back and examine the reasons for advocacy, not for their own sake, but for the purpose of determining the campaign's contents or direction. Using these tools is like examining possible destinations for the journey, or determining features that the journey must include, such as interim stops, special events, or the chance to practice important skills.

Anatomy/diagnosis - Understand the need to select appropriate and effective goals

Objectives: "What is the problem?": A broad tool for causal analysis that opens a number of useful inquiries such as identifying audiences and developing messages

Possible futures - Examining possible end results

Objectives: "What is our vision of change?": A good beginning for developing a unifying and inspiring vision of change for an organization or movement

Arrow of Anticipated Advocacy Outcomes: This model illustrates the possible levels at which an advocacy campaign can work, in terms of creating and perpetuating change in a society

Moving forward with an advocacy strategy is about more than taking next steps - it's about finding the forward motion in everything that happens.

When acting on their strategies, successful advocates adopt a kind of “rolling incrementalism” - an awareness of those aspects of their campaigns, whether results or processes, that signal moving forward towards their overall vision.

Your environmental scan focuses on your capacities and on all the factors in your context that affect those capacities - timing, allies, knowledge, experience. Through rolling incrementalism, advocates go on to:

• Select strategic goals: Identify key capacities and set advocacy objectives around them
• Consolidate gains: Recognize and celebrate important gains that may take place - even during seeming setbacks - in arenas they might not otherwise have noticed
• Fine-tune strategic choices for greatest effectiveness: Recognize when small gains in multiple arenas may together warrant the reassessment of their capacities - and the selection of new strategic targets

Rolling incrementalism requires a balance between short-term and long-term views, always relating the one to the other. One way to get started is to translate your long-term vision into short-term objectives.

We offer some tools for keeping a wider perspective when setting advocacy objectives:

Strategy Planning Objectives point out multiple dimensions for advocacy objectives, which can also mean multiple arenas in which to identify later progress

Anticipated Advocacy Outcomes also illustrate multiple levels on which a campaign can focus its possible gains.

We then have a tool for choosing objectives (See below), which offers a way to prioritize among the possible objectives and make the most strategic choices.

You may be able to see what you want to create, but your vision may seem so big, so complex - how could you possibly do it all? The key is to focus on one piece of your vision - one set of objectives.

As you focus, remember that objectives have multiple dimensions: short-term and long-term, outward and inward, and multi-level.

To choose a set of objectives, think about which piece of your vision is:

Important enough?

• To build the support and/or active involvement of those affected by the issue? Of potential allies? (For example, is it a priority issue for them? If not, will they at least support your efforts?)
• To engage the general public?
• To build toward your vision?

Small enough to achieve in the short-term (six months to two years)?

Many steps - and people's sustained involvement - will be needed to reach your long-term objectives. A small, achievable step that leads to visible, concrete results will give your group a sense of progress and momentum while you build confidence, skills, and support.

An opportunity to build skills and facilitate grassroots empowerment?

Inward objectives are incredibly valuable. By drawing people in and creating opportunities for people to “learn by doing,” an advocacy effort can build its long-term capacity, and strengthen and sustain itself in the long run. By investing in “hands-on training” for those directly affected by the issue, advocacy efforts can also begin to shift the power of who can be an “advocate” and who can participate in public argument and problem solving.

Inward objectives also link to outward objectives. By drawing people into the effort, especially those affected by the problem, an advocacy effort broadens its grassroots base and increases its credibility and legitimacy - both to the affected groups and to the key decision makers.

To choose one piece of your vision as a focal issue for your campaign, we recommend this issue checklist adapted from the work of Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller of Just Associates.

As you move on to gathering more information about your specific context and forming your action plan, you may want to check out some of our strategy planning tools (See below). Return to Objectives Questions

While each of our program facilitators approaches strategy planning a bit differently, the following two tools are used by all of them:

ACT-ON- This tool gets you moving, and is the prep work for the next. ACT-ON is a variation of what many people know as the “SWOT Analysis.” Where SWOT stands for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats,” our variation stands for “Advantages, Challenges, Threats, Opportunities and Next Steps.” While SWOT ends the process on a negative note (“threats”), ACT-ON ends with Opportunities and Next Steps, not only rounding out the discussion more positively, but closing with action items that will move your process forward, leading planning and analysis into action!

The Nine Questions- Once you've completed the ACT-ON exercise, you can dive into the Nine Steps to Planning an Advocacy Campaign, developed by Advocacy Institute colleague Jim Schultz of the Democracy Center. In a nutshell, the Nine Questions are:

1. What do we want? (Goals)
2. Who can give it to us? (Audiences)
3. What do they need to hear? (Messages)
4. Who do they need to hear it from? (Messengers)
5. How do we get them to hear it? (Delivery)
6. What have we got? (Resources; strengths)
7. What do we need to develop? (Challenges; gaps)
8. How do we begin? (First steps)
9. How will we know it's working, or not working? (Evaluation)

Information on this page came from Advocacy for Social Justice: A Global Action and Reflection Guide, now available in English and Spanish from Kumarian Press.