Reading about Citizen's United v. FEC and the possible implications for nonprofit advocacy, it occurred to me that not all the right questions are being asked by researchers when it comes to nonprofit advocacy. We are faced with an excellent opportunity to move the field forward.
We spend a lot of time figuring out if tax laws, organizational cultures, governmental contracting and other factors suppress nonprofit advocacy. We also look at the techniques they use, how much time is spent on doing advocacy and whether advocates think their work is useful. The field of nonprofit studies has developed a reasonable research base on many of those questions.
All of that research appears to presuppose that we have evidence that advocacy is effective. If advocacy doesn't work then it doesn't matter if anyone does it. I am not arguing that nonprofit advocacy is ineffective. My point is that the evidence attesting to it's effectiveness is pretty light. This is more a comment about the state of the research rather than the state of the field.
There is no shortage of opinions on whether advocacy works and what varieties of advocacy techniques are effective. Some of these arguments are backed by experience and some are not. Experience has limitations when discussing practice. Quite a bit appears to be based on self interest. Few are based on research.
To be sure, there is some research on nonprofit advocacy effectiveness. A good deal of it is survey based and lacks the ability to make firm causal statements. Don't get me wrong, this is useful research and can help us answer the needed questions. The problem is that it doesn't go far enough--the field needs to take the next step toward different types of methodology.
I suspect that at least some advocacy efforts are very effective and some are far less effective. Others might be counterproductive. Better information will let us improve this critical area of nonprofit practice.
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteYou ask a critical question - one that I also encounter all the time.
Evaluating if an individual nonprofit organisation's advocacy effort has worked is usually very difficult and is only rarely clear-cut. Most of the time, any individual nonprofit's advocacy is usually just one of many efforts on the same issue, each with nuanced differences (or opposing differences). Due to this, answering your question can only really be done on an individual basis: did *this* nonprofit advocacy work.
And then there is how to define 'did it work'. Is it based on public objectives, or private objectives (what was being asked for publicly or what was expected as realistic by those initiating it). Is it expected to fail but create the conditions (e.g. political space) for future success? When is the question 'did it work' evaluated since nonprofit advocacy on an issue may be never be completed as vigilance is needed for decades or centuries. Some examples of this include:
- the Internal Campaign to Ban Landmines: Public objective: get international law banning landmines (achieved). Intended objective: stop production and use of landmines worldwide and get existing landmines destroyed (not achieved yet). Current effort: ensure signatory government ratify treaty, get non-signatories (primarily the lamdmine producing countries) to sign and implement plus removing all existing landmines in the ground. So "did it work": yes, no and we might only know in 100 years.
- Campaigns to end human slavery, for women to have the right to vote, ensure fair labour laws and practices, end all forms of discrimination (gender, ethnicity, age, sexual-orientation, etc.), to end poverty and many more campaign. Each of these have made huge progress over the last centuries but are still very alive nonprofit advocacy efforts. Since they haven't been fully and universally 'achieved' as of today does that mean nonprofit advocacy doesn't work? I think not.
I agree that established methodologies would be nice - and I know that some practitioners already have methodologies in place (some of which may stand up to academic standards). These same people not only assess the impact of advocacy, but also the impact of development programmes and other activities, and the challenge is the same.
A quick Google search of "advocacy impact assessment" came up with almost a million results. Some of this is from the development and human rights fields, some from the perspective of institutional donors, but it seems there is a field of practice out there already - perhaps this is what you were looking for?
Cheers,
Duane
Duane,
ReplyDeleteThank you for a thoughtful analysis. It is difficult work to evaluate whether advocacy campaigns are effective in a rigorous way. It is not impossible and I think a lot of efforts we currently engage in (including some of mine) fall far short of what we need to move the field forward at this point.
I am not arguing that nonprofit advocacy doesn't work. I am arguing that we don't have enough evidence to conclude that it does or (more importantly) how it works. This is true of quite a lot of things that organizations of all types do in their day to day operations.
It is easy to infer causality after the fact from things that appear to have been effective. One of my friends thinks that the local football team only wins when he wears his lucky hat. This is probably not true. I do not mean to trivialize what I feel is important work by this comparison but there are often other forces that lead to the success or failure of our efforts.
This work is too important to be ignored by the the research community. What is really needed is a partnership between the research community and the practitioner community to provide the best knowledge for those who are trying to make the world a better place.
John