Five Insights from our Effective Advocacy Strategies Panel
When you think of using advocacy strategies to create change, what comes to mind? Petition signatures? Calling your legislators? Sure, but to engage this generation of digitally native youth, advocacy can and should be so much more than this. To explore beyond the beaten advocacy path, our very own Max Steinman, Vice President of DoSomething Strategic, joined Brian Lacy, Data Consultant at NPOInfo, and Mike Snusz, Director of Nonprofit Customer Experience at Tatango for a conversation hosted and moderated by Malou de Garcia of NXUnite Marketing.
Here are five key insights Max shared during this conversation:
1. Have a clear theory of change when mobilizing your constituency.
For example, DoSomething’s campaign Nude Awakening from 2015 mobilized members to flood Merriam Webster’s comments section on their website calling for them to update their definition for the color nude to not indicate that it was that of “a white person’s skin color.” Over 800 members left comments and while this may not seem like a huge number, it’s a great example of how even a small number of people can have a big impact if you take your action to the right venue and the right target. Merriam Webster changed the definition as a result to be more inclusive.
Another example from our history is Diversify My Emoji. Back in 2014 we mobilized our members to call on Tim Cook to update Apple’s emojis to offer options for more diverse skin tones. Rather than just a petition, members took to social media and emoji-fied themselves by posting a photo of them doing the no-good gesture we’re familiar with from emoji character sets. Nearly 5,000 members posted photos and in 2015 Apple released an expanded emoji set with support for many skin tones. In response, Cook said “everyone deserves representation, even in emoji form.”
2. Stay nimble and be able to balance both a short and long term strategy.
It’s important to start with having an advocacy platform. We know from research that only 17% of young people believe that lawmakers consider their voices in policies enacted in this country. That’s why DoSomething developed a National Youth Agenda where we have collected the stories of young people through in-person events and on the DoSomething digital platform to understand the priorities that matter most to young people. We also know that 76% of young people want to create change, but only 32% know where to start so this helps give them that starting point. It also allows young people to know they are taking action alongside their peers and offers us an artifact to point back to. This strengthens the efficacy of advocacy actions by showing decision makers why an issue matters to young people in particular with real data and stories to back it up.
And of course, there will always be urgent, pressing advocacy demands. We monitor the landscape to see where there are rapid response moments to mobilize our community around. However, we’re careful not to simply jump on the bandwagon. Often there may be a partner organization already leading the charge where we can amplify their action with our members or we can use the moment as an opportunity to further educate our members on how the particular landscape of an issue is evolving.
3. Employ storytelling and personal narratives to make your calls to action more effective.
We believe that the most effective advocacy actions are those that are inspired by the stories of our members. To do this, we have hosted hackathons with our members to design campaigns inspired by their lived experiences. For example, we worked with The Allstate Foundation on a hackathon in 2020 to develop campaigns addressing the lack of culturally responsive mental health resources in schools. The resulting campaign was called It’s Not All In Your Head and included both an education component to connect students with a hub of mental health resources targeted to BIPOC youth and an advocacy component to call on legislators to increase funding for mental health in their community.
4. Experiment with new technology and platforms to bring your message to your audience.
SMS has long been an effective tool for mobilizing our membership. DoSomething was an early adopter of using SMS to engage young people. Back in 2012 we hosted the first ever Text-the-President event when Obama took office to help young people share their views and get their questions answered with the new administration.
While SMS continues to be an effective platform for us, we’re also seeing SMS start to resemble email given how oversubscribed we all are. So we have been also looking to new channels to reach young people where they are. For example, through our partnership with Niagara Bottling, we’ve turned to gaming where we’re engaging players of Roblox (40% of which are 13-25) to participate in recycling activities in Robot World, where players take part in a virtual version of our Talking Trash campaign. By completing the DoSomething Quest, and then participating in our 50 Bottles, 1 Goal challenge to recycle 75,000 plastic bottles, participants can unlock limited edition Roblox player customizations within the Robot World game, and be entered for a $1,000 scholarship.
5. Use a mix of signaling and confirming metrics to measure success.
We like to think about gathering both signaling and confirming metrics to assess the efficacy of advocacy campaigns. For signaling metrics, we might look at the number of actions taken whether that’s petition signatures or letters written as well as the visibility the action had with our target community. Wherever possible we try to establish benchmarks that are appropriate for the community we are engaging or a threshold we believe we will need to create our desired change. For example, in the case of Nude Awakening, exceeding 500 comments on Merriam Webster was likely sufficient to get the attention of their executives, whereas for passing legislation we’d likely need to demonstrate that a significant portion of an entire constituency is taking action. This can seem daunting but these numbers should be calibrated based on what kinds of action people are taking – you’ll want to strive for greater scale for a simple petition signature whereas calls or letter writing hold more weight.