10 steps to advocacy
This tool is designed to support career development practitioners when they are undertaking advocacy work for individuals or groups. The duration of advocacy work will vary depending on the nature of the advocacy.
Inspiration for the tool
This resource was inspired by the 10 step advocacy planning tool created by the National Council for Social Studies (see https://www.socialstudies.org/advocacy/advocacy-planning-your-10-step-plan-0).
Rationale: Why is this needed?
Advocacy is an important part of the practice of career development practitioners. This tool is designed to provide practitioners with a practical process that they can use when they are engaging in advocacy.
Objectives
This tool will support practitioners to:
- prepare for advocacy
- put advocacy strategies in process to support students and clients
- reflect on the effectiveness of advocacy strategies.
Activities
This process offers a 10-step approach to advocacy in career development work. It is useful to follow these 10-steps whatever kind of advocacy you are doing. Each advocacy situation is different, so following these steps through is important to ensure that you create the most effective advocacy approach.
- Identify an advocacy challenge or opportunity. Who are you advocating for and why? What is it that they want to achieve? How are you negotiating and clarifying the aims of the advocacy? What limits are you and the people that you are advocating for setting?
A student says that they want to challenge a particular employers record on pollution in an upcoming employer session, but they don’t want to make it impossible for them to get a job with that organisation. In such a case you might agree to read out their questions and challenge the employer on this issue on behalf of the student. - Determine the key audiences. Who are you advocating to? Are you the best person to undertake this advocacy?
A client wants you to help them provide feedback to an employer on their environmental record. In such a situation, a key challenge is to identify who is the right person to speak to in the employer organisation. - Find out what those audiences currently know or perceive. What do you know about the people/organisations that you are advocating to? What do they know about the issue that you are advocating on? What do you think that their reaction will be to your advocacy? How do you think that they will feel?
In any interaction with an employer or organisation around environmental issues, it is important to consider whether you are bringing them new insights, whether you are trying to change their mind or whether you are putting pressure on them to change the way that they behave. - Determine how each audience receives its information. What options exist for you to engage with the audience for your advocacy? Can you write to them, meet with them, or do you need to organise a protest to get their attention? What do they read or take notice of? What has worked in the past?
e.g. In many cases a one-to-one meeting to raise an issue or concern may be the most effective form of advocacy. But, where an organisation is unconcerned about its environmental record, simply meeting with them is unlikely to be effective and you may need to get their attention by creating publicity. - Establish measurable objectives for each audience. What are you actually trying to achieve? What do you think is realistic or achievable? How far are you willing to compromise? How will you know what you have achieved?
Sadly, we rarely get everything that we want when we are engaged in environmental activism. Student concerns about the oil industry are unlikely to result in overnight change, even with your advocacy. So, it is important to identify clear objectives for your advocacy. This might be something like, ‘I want to receive a letter from the company acknowledging the concerns that I have raised on behalf of my students. - Define message points for each audience. How are you going to advocate? What are you going to say or write? What is the most important idea to get across?
Effective communication is likely to be simple and quick. It is better to have clear demands or requests, than to present endless amounts of detail. For example, we might have lots of problems with an organisations environmental record, but a strong message might be ‘Jobseekers are concerned about working for you because of your environmental record, can you publish a sustainability strategy to show how you are going to improve’. - Determine the communication activities to deliver those messages. How are you going to engage with your audience? Is this an email, a meeting, a protest, a paper or something else? Can you do something unusual or creative to get their attention or is this a bad idea?
One option might be organising something like an open letter signed by lots of your colleagues and clients to raise the issue. Another would be a quiet phone call to given the person you are advocating to a chance to think about the points that you are making. - Decide what resources are necessary to complete each activity. How much time do you have for this advocacy? How much time do your students or clients have? Who else is available to support you? Do you have a budget or access to any other resources?
Most advocacy does not require many resources. It will typically involve making a phone call or sending an email on behalf of a client. But in some cases this might evolve into more sustained correspondence, for example debating with a learning provider about whether they should offer more courses suitable for the green economy. In such cases it is critical to think about how much resource you have, before you embark on this approach. - Establish a timeline and responsible party for each activity. How long will the advocacy take? When do you need a result by? When can you start?
Where advocacy activities are linked to recruitment processes they are typically very time sensitive. If a student calls you up saying that an employer criticised them for their environmental activism and asks you to speak up on their behalf, it is probably something that has to be dealt with on the same day. Other forms of activism will have a longer time horizon and so give you more chance to plan. - Evaluate whether you have reached your objectives. What were you trying to achieve? Did it work? What can you learn from this? What will you do differently next time?
Environmental advocacy is often very challenging. It rarely results in quick fixes. So, just because you haven’t single-handedly achieved Net 0 doesn’t mean that you have failed. Cumulative efforts often pay off and result in long-term change. It is important to spend some time reflecting on this once your advocacy comes to an end.