Top Tips for Advocacy: Social Change Anytime Everywhere
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Jan 22, 2014 07:04 AM CST

This article was written by guest author Amy Sample Ward, CEO of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).

In our recent book, Social Change Anytime Everywhere: How to Implement Online Multichannel Strategies to Spark Advocacy, Raise Money, and Engage Your Community, Allyson Kapin and I share successful approaches to making change in this multichannel world. Your supporters are using myriad tools every day, and your opportunity is to give them content they are interested in sharing so they can spread your message on your behalf, easily, wherever they are.

From our chapter focused on advocacy, I want to share three top tips:

1. Use multiple channels to engage people
When we are in the office, planning out our content or appeals, it’s easy to think of every piece as a linear path: people receive our email, click on the link to visit the microsite, take the action and then share it on Facebook, for example. What we miss when we think about our content in a multichannel but linear path is the reality with multichannel content: people may enter at any point!

You aren’t just interested in engaging those already on your email list who can send the call to action to directly. As such, you don’t just want to use multiple channels to move people, but actually engage them. Ensure that the microsite and social promotions all create natural “starting places” for people coming across your call to action or campaign for the first time. It’s important to keep people moving, after they take one action to give them the next one; it isn’t though, realistic to think you can predict the path they will come in on and stick to throughout.

2. Tell stories that move people into action
We’ve all heard it: Tell stories! Sure. I can tell a story. Just any old story won’t do, though. I bet you can think of a story right now that if you told it in even the most dynamic, multichannel way, you would even bore yourself. So, make sure you and your team are thinking not just of converting information into a story, but finding and sharing stories that are tied to action.

These kinds of stories have two pieces. First, they have the core components of a story arc: an individual person (or team or organization, depending on your audience and mission) that meets a crisis (this doesn’t need to be a literal “crisis” but a challenge, what makes all good stories worth a struggle) and overcomes that crisis. Second, and important for your campaign, they show how supporters can help with this process of overcoming the crisis – be it for one more person or a legislative systemic change.
 
3. Measure, learn, and iterate
It’s easy to think that your next advocacy campaign will mean weeks of planning with various staff, launching and running it publicly, and then some reflection and evaluation about how it all went so you can improve for the next one. In order to be as effective as you can with a multichannel campaign, you’ll need to identify ways you can measure each piece of content and the engagement of each channel in real time. The more you can learn on the fly and iterate as you go, the better.

I know, that sounds like even more work in the middle of a campaign when it’s already “go, go, go” time. It doesn’t have to be more work, if it is smarter work. Identifying easy to capture metrics ahead of time and thresholds that you want to meet for your content will help you lighten up posts on channels that aren’t responding (saving time) and let you concentrate on channels that are showing more engagement (optimizing investment). If you see that likes and shares of campaign messages on Facebook have dropped significantly, for example, while reblogs of campaign images on Tumblr have increased, you know you can decrease the number of posts you’re pushing to Facebook and give more attention to posting and to responding to supporters on Tumblr.

Check out more tips and buy your copy of the book today!