Key Questions for Developing Your Objectives

Often campaigns arise out of the urgency of a social need, with objectives that may have come from an instinctive or unspoken sense of the context for advocacy.

To prioritize objectives, evaluate progress to date, understand results, and formulate the most strategic possible next steps, we find that stating the advocacy context more explicitly will not only ground the campaign in the source of its power, but may indicate actions to take it to the next level.

To develop your objectives, ask yourselves the following questions:

• Who are we?
• What is the problem?
• What is our vision of change?
• What objectives - or piece of our vision - are we focusing on?

Your group's identity will guide the objectives you ultimately choose. As author and activist Lisa VeneKlasen says, “Who we are and how we think affects what we care about and how we relate to others….What we learn from self-analysis can then be used in improving our participation and in changing the wider power relations affecting our advocacy.”

You may return to these kinds of questions throughout your strategy development. Consider:

• Who are we? What perspectives and identities do we bring to our work?
• Do we represent someone besides ourselves? If so, what is our accountability to these people?
• What are our sources of power?
• What are our sources of legitimacy and credibility? From the perspective of those we represent? From the decision makers' perspective?
• What risks do we face? What are we afraid of? What might happen if we take action?
• What are our values? Why are we engaged in advocacy? How do we want to work together as a group?

To better understand the problem, create as full a picture as possible. Share stories, experiences, and information with others. You might ask yourselves:

• Who does the problem affect? How? Be as concrete as possible. For example, how large is the affected group relative to the total population? How intensely does the problem affect people's lives? Does the problem affect different groups differently?
• What causes the problem?
• Who is responsible for addressing the problem?
• What are possible solutions?
• What will the impact of these different solutions be on the entire affected group? Subgroups?

You can refer to the stories of Mohammad Zakaria and Suneeta Dhar for some actual examples of this process.

Some advocacy efforts do not begin with a vision. It is possible to create a strategy and engage in advocacy without one. However, in the Advocacy Institute's experience, creating a vision - whether at the beginning of an effort or mid-course - can be a significant sustaining force for those working for long-term, transformative change.

With a vision, a group can: Focus and make strategic decisions when faced with turning points or setbacks

• Identify common ground and build cohesion
• Motivate people who do not yet believe change is possible
• Evaluate alternative solutions
• Identify practices and behaviors that can be enacted in the present
• Imagine a future world that is different for their children and grandchildren
• Call members to action now to build toward changes that may not be realized in their lifetimes
• Bring forth a sense of purpose as a significant sustaining force

To create a vision for your group, ask yourselves:

• If the changes we want happen, what would be different? Whose lives would be improved? How?
• If we created a world based on our values of a just, decent society, what would be different?
• Will the solutions we want help to create this world? How?
• What can we do now to begin to create this world on a smaller scale - in our personal relationships, families, communities, organizations, and/or civil society?
• Imagine that we resolve all the problems we described. Imagine a morning ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now. When people awaken, how do we want the world to be?

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.

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 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.