Planning the Political Intervention: Advocacy Campaigns

Abstract

This chapter builds from the five-stage process for developing political strategy introduced in Chap. 5, and adapts it specifically to the process of planning an advocacy campaign. An advocacy campaign is a political change effort focused on bringing about a specific policy change or changes. This process is most relevant to domains 1 and 2, specifically to strategies involving advocating for expanded political power, and for influencing policy agendas and policy decision-making.

In this chapter, you will select a specific policy problem and then use this five-stage process to design a campaign to advocate for a policy change that resolves this problem, using all that you have learned so far in this book. Each of the planning elements described in this chapter can be applied to either a campaign you carry out individually or one you carry out as part of an organization. As a quick review, the five stages are as follows:

• 1. Determining the specific purpose of the advocacy campaign

• 2. Assessing the internal (organizational) and external (environmental) context for the advocacy campaign

• 3. Identifying the campaign’s long-term, intermediate, and short-term goals

• 4. Selecting specific targets for the advocacy campaign

• 5. Identifying and selecting the advocacy tactics the campaign will use