How to Build a Nonprofit Advocacy Campaign: Tips & Examples

Ensuring an advocacy campaign stands out and achieves its goals requires clear objectives and a strategic plan that starts with identifying a problem that needs to be solved.

It can be challenging to make your advocacy campaign stand out amongst the millions of competing causes in a digital age. Because of this, it is crucial to have clear objectives and a plan when creating a successful advocacy campaign. In this post, we offer a step-by-step guide, including examples, to help you achieve this goal.

What Is an Advocacy Campaign?

The word “advocacy” describes the process of supporting a cause or idea. While the term “campaign” may evoke images of politicians running for office, it technically refers to a set of activities designed to bring about a certain change or result. Hence, an advocacy campaign is a set of activities designed to garner support for a cause or idea.

The activities associated with an advocacy campaign may include holding rallies, contacting public officials, circulating petitions, fundraising, marketing, lobbying, and outreach. The goal may be to raise awareness, raise funds for a group in need, change behaviors, or influence legislation. In sum, advocacy campaigns are designed to target specific issues, whether they be local or affect an entire region, state, or nation.

A successful campaign has the ability to not only change laws but also change lives. One example is organizing a community to contact state lawmakers to encourage them to pass a law centered on universal pre-K. Another example involves leveraging effective storytelling techniques to talk to community members and legislatures about issues that affect their livelihoods.

What Makes a Successful Advocacy Campaign?

The basic process of an advocacy campaign involves identifying a problem and developing a solution before reaching out and building an extensive network of supporters who can turn up the heat on an issue.

Key components of a successful advocacy campaign include:

• Personalized messaging: To connect with supporters, you need to make the campaign relevant to them. Target your messaging by connecting your cause to something that impacts them. Similarly, it’s a good idea to personalize messages to lawmakers based on their support or opposition to the desired policy. Quincy, Quorum’s AI assistant, can help you instantly generate personalized outreach for staffers or grassroots updates, ensuring your message lands with impact.
• Easy mobilization of supporters: You need a way to get your message in front of people effectively and make it easy for them to take the next step. The easier it is for potential supporters to learn about your cause and take action, the more likely they will do so. Using grassroots texting is a highly effective way to reach people where they are—on their phones—with a 95% read rate within five minutes.
• Use of advocacy software: Technology is the great accelerator. The right software helps you engage and re-engage supporters, send personalized messages, and cultivate grassroots growth. The ability to generate reports and perform AI-powered analysis also helps you consistently improve your results.

How to Create an Advocacy Campaign

If you are ready to get started, the following steps will help guide you:

1. Define Your Outcome: Clarify your cause or goal. By defining a specific and measurable goal, you can more readily identify appropriate actions and determine how close you are to achieving the goal.
2. Grow Your Advocate Database: Identify the individuals and organizations best suited to support your campaign. Use segmentation to organize your advocates by engagement level or issue interest to ensure your asks are always targeted and relevant.
3. Carry Out a Plan to Gain Support: Once you have a team of advocates, use those resources to gain support from policymakers. This could involve an email campaign where advocates send messages en masse to key legislators. With Quorum, you can track these interactions and record every meeting or email open to refine your strategy.
4. Track Progress with Legislative Advocacy Software: Advocacy software allows you to track progress and measure KPIs. Quorum’s unified platform allows you to track what is happening on the legislative side in real-time, so you can see which laws are up for a vote and what the outcomes are.

Driving a Successful Advocacy Campaign: Tactics & Examples

To help with inspiration, here are three examples of successful advocacy campaigns:

1. Contact Lawmakers: National Restaurant Association

With a large portion of the population carrying smartphones, a digital advocacy campaign has the potential to reach a broad audience fast. The National Restaurant Association used text messaging, email, and social media to empower members to contact legislators regarding the threat COVID-19 posed to their businesses. They mobilized 200,000 advocates to send half a million messages to Congress.

2. Get Out the Vote (GOTV): Providence

Taking steps to increase voter turnout is a powerful way to drive change. Providence developed its Vote for Health campaign, where voters could register and find ballot information. This achieved the goal of empowering individuals to play an active role in shaping the future of their communities.

3. Events: Susan G. Komen

Events are crucial for meeting advocacy goals. While traditionally an in-person lobby day, Komen successfully pivoted to a virtual fly-in event. They trained nearly 600 people and oversaw more than 150 virtual congressional meetings in a single day. This event supported year-round advocacy to increase federal funding for critical healthcare programs.

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