How to Plan Your Breakthrough Advocacy Year - Episode 29

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode, we share How to plan your breakthrough advocacy year. So stay tuned. If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I'm Cath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive non profit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter. It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner, and to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. Hey everybody. Cath Patrick here. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the nonprofit power podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. If you're ready to have a breakthrough advocacy year. 2024 can be that year. To make it happen you need to apply four main keys with your advocacy team. Mhm. Hey there folks. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. I'm your host, cath Patrick, happy new year! I took a break from the podcast during the holiday week to allow myself uninterrupted time to be with family. It was an absolutely lovely week. And I'm returning with renewed energy for the challenges and opportunities the new year will bring. Like most of us, you're probably coming into 2024 with some unfinished advocacy business from 2023. And that doesn't go away. But before the busy-ness overtakes us, now is a really good time To revisit and refresh our focus for our advocacy work. take some time with your advocacy team in the next couple of weeks to have a conversation about four big things that will help you have a breakthrough year with your advocacy. To have a breakthrough year, rather than just advocacy business as usual, it takes a little bit different focus. And it starts with vision. Start by regrounding in your vision specifically in the context of advocacy. Of course you have the big vision for your organization that's tied to its mission, And that's seldom. seldom. changes. But what is your vision for a set of money and policy realities that would create the environment in which you can have maximum impact? That's the advocacy vision arena that I'm talking about. some examples of vision around money realities might be. Elected officials are enthused about allocating sufficient funding to meet the full need for our services. Or. All our current and prospective contracting partners gladly pay the full cost of our services because they see the value, the impact and the ROI. Some examples of vision around policy realities might be. All elements of our services are fully covered by XYZ authorizing legislation with no need to patch the gaps with random other funding. There are no policy created barriers to delivering our services nor to people accessing our services whenever and wherever they need them. All outcome measures are focused on making a genuine and meaningful impact. those are some of the broad visionary looks at money and policy that you might want to think about. And obviously you'll fill in your own, but this gives you sense of the scope. re clarifying your vision will do several things for your team. it helps energize and inspire each of you individually. And it helps keep you focused on the big picture when the minutia of the daily work I threatens to overwhelm you or pull you so far into the details that you lose sight of the larger goals. And it provides a key touch point for decision making by the team throughout the year. As new things come up they should be evaluated in part based on whether they move you substantially closer to that vision or set of visions that you set out at the beginning of the year. Next is to choose one or two highly impactful goals to focus the bulk of your advocacy energy on. There's a temptation, particularly with beginning of the year planning, to identify 27 goals that are all super important. But the problem is, particularly with advocacy unless that's your primary job, having 27 goals or even seven or eight is likely to result in not making a ton of progress on any of them. Because you simply don't have the bandwidth. So the best strategy you can employ is to identify one or two, maximum three major goals. And then decide that you will make a specific set of progress on each of those goals. But you're always checking back with what's the highest impact, what's the biggest result for our effort. And you focus your planning energy on that. There's a wonderful saying that I use to remind myself often, which is "just because you can doesn't mean you should". The goal is always to focus on highest impact. Biggest results. Most impactful results. And let that center your decision-making. So to figure this out, first thing, sit down with your team. And identify any concerning problems or threats or challenges that any of you are aware of that could come your way in the coming year around money and policy decisions. And map those out. Because that's the kind of stuff that will blindside you, if you haven't scanned for it. You can't know everything ahead of time. But it is very valuable as a beginning of year exercise to just kind of scan the environment and say, what do we know? What do we know that's out there that might be coming at us that could be a problem for us. That could be a serious challenge. And map it out as a team. Obviously one of the most common threats or problems is the potential for a funding cut from a particular source, whether it's a funder or a contractor or a government source, whatever it is. I had a conversation with a client recently where the organization was totally blindsided by a state agency, making a decision to shift priorities for a pool of money that had long been designated for a particular set of services that the client provided. And while this kind of sudden shift isn't uncommon behavior from foundations, it's not that common for a state agency. And I had several immediate questions about the legitimacy of that move. Particularly since the state agency hadn't included any sort of hold harmless provision to help soften the impact on the organizations that were currently getting the funding. So I was talking with the client and I said, state agencies don't usually have the authority to make those sorts of decisions unilaterally, especially if it's money that the state legislature was involved in appropriating. So my first question to you is who's your best friend in the legislature. Engage them and see if they'll help you get to the bottom of this, because something's up here. Ideally you want to either reverse the decision or at least get the agency to do a hold harmless provision. Well, the client lit up and said their best friend in the legislature just happened to be someone for whom these services are a pet issue. So they were able to engage that legislator as their champion who got to the bottom of it, got other legislators involved and intervened with the state agency. So that's a happy ending to a story of being blindsided. But it's always better if you can have your ear to the ground and see this stuff coming before it becomes a serious problem. another example would be a policy change that would have a negative impact. Perhaps it would be a change in eligibility rules, or a narrowing of permissible services, or dropping a target population that you consider to be particularly important. Those are the kinds of policy decisions that aren't directly tied to money, but that could have a profound impact on your ability to serve some or all of your clients. if any of those sorts of things are on the horizon, you'll want to evaluate them for their potential significance and decide if they need to be included in your top advocacy goals for your year. Now if you don't have any looming problems or threats or challenges, hallelujah. that means you can focus on the top one or two things that you want to move forward from a money or policy decision-making standpoint that's wholly positive. And advances things rather than blocks the bad stuff. So when you're doing this, again, you want to pick the one or two that are the most impactful for your organization and or the people you serve. Lots of things you could focus on, but scan for potential impact. How big a deal will this be if you get it done? And an example of a big money-related goal might be to add x number of new contracting partners who all pay the full cost of the services. Or to increase city funding for your services by X percent. A significant policy goal might be focused on making existing policy better. Like eliminating roadblocks in authorizing legislation, restrictive eligibility requirements or unnecessary hoops the clients have to jump through. If you make those go away, that's a big win. Or it could be focused on creating new policy that improves your ability to serve more people while helping your organization to thrive. Now one caveat as you're looking out into the world around you and identifying emerging challenges and opportunities that are showing up in the new year. Don't overlook the elephant in the room. One major factor that can present both huge opportunities and potentially serious challenges is the reality that 2024 is a massive election year in the U S. in addition to being a presidential election year, all 435 seats in the us Congress and a third of the seats in the us Senate are up for election all in one year. 44 states will have elections for state house and Senate seats. Plus hundreds, if not thousands of county board and city council seats will be up for election all in 2024. Needless to say, this will have a high degree of relevance for advocates everywhere who want to influence decision-making at any level of government. In the months to come, I'll be talking much more about how elections and nonprofit advocacy intersect and how you can navigate and leverage that as an advocate. So grounding your team in vision. Identifying the key opportunities and challenges you see coming. And creating two or three main goals for your advocacy work that are built around those. Those are some key moves in January that will help set you up for a breakthrough advocacy year. The other critical thing is to schedule opportunity and challenge review conversations. That are on the calendar every two or three months. You can't possibly scan ahead for a whole year and see everything coming, good or bad. You do your best at the beginning of the year. But you must revisit this regularly. The way you do that is you get it on the calendar. And it's once a quarter at a minimum. More often is better. I like every two months. You'll figure out what works for you, but it should never be less often than once a quarter. And when you have these opportunity and challenge review conversations, it's everybody on the advocacy team. And each member has the responsibility of coming to the conversation with a scan of what they have noticed, what they see on the horizon as the most significant or pressing challenges and opportunities that they've identified are coming your way. And this can be primarily from their perspective as an advocacy team member, that's related to a specific goal that you've already agreed on. Or equally relevant and valuable, it might be from their other role in the organization. If they're a program person or finance person or a messaging person, whatever their role is. They have a unique take on what might constitute an important or significant opportunity or challenge that is emerging. And maybe they're the only one who sees it because of their specific role in the rest of the organization. So they should be bringing both perspectives to the advocacy team meetings when you're having these conversations. And then those emerging challenges and opportunities must get incorporated into your advocacy strategy in order for you to stay ahead of the curve and not get caught flat-footed by either a challenge or an opportunity. It's just as bad to get caught flat footed by an opportunity cause sometimes we miss out when that happens. It's too late. We haven't had time to mobilize and get ourselves in the game to pursue that opportunity. So it's flagging both as early as possible is critical. It also has the highly beneficial effect of training your entire team to be responsible for opportunity scanning and for challenge scanning. This is an absolutely essential skill for every advocate. But too often we let that just be the job of the CEO. And say that's their job to see around corners as our primary leader. And that's true. That is a big part of their job. But you are so much more powerful and effective as an advocacy team if every member of your team develops that skill and practices it regularly. And the way you do that is you schedule it in. You make it part of every person's job and you have them engaging accountably with that skill at least once a quarter. Now, if you're not accustomed to doing this already, it will feel clunky and challenging for a little while. Just like any new skill. Don't worry. It's fine. That's normal. Remind yourself that you are learning a new skill. Or you're practicing the skill to get better at it. And it has a nice benefit of actually helping the organization as you develop the skill. So that is a key ingredient for a breakthrough year to establish that as a regular practice and to develop the skills of the entire team so that everyone is doing this. Once you have five or six people in your organization regularly practicing this skill, it will produce incredible benefits for you. And ultimately what you want is for people to take the next step. Which is to identify an emerging opportunity and begin to formulate a vision centered response that they then suggest the organization take. An example of what it is not. Is for someone to say, oh, I see an opportunity here. Someone should go do something about that. Or I see an opportunity over here. I'm going to make up a recommended plan of action that will miraculously not involve me doing any work, but the whole rest of the team will have to kill themselves to get this done. Those are not helpful kinds of opportunity scanning. And I'm sad to report that I have observed this behavior in too many nonprofits. It's all too easy for someone to say," this small program over here should be much bigger. We should expand this program. And the way I think we should expand it as we should go make the state legislature give us lots of money." and they say that from a position of having not a single clue about what that would involve. Not helpful. What would be helpful it would be to say, "I see an opportunity to grow a specific program arm within the organization. There's a lot more attention on this now than there has been. The mayor or city council person has taken an interest in this and is talking about it a lot and that's putting it on the radar of a lot of other decision makers. There's a lot of buzz around this right now. this could be an opportunity for us to expand the resources available for this kind of program The thing is though we're a significant, but not the only player in this program area. So it's probably going to call for a collaborative effort. I've identified these three other organizations that are likely collaboration partners on this. And this could really be an opportunity for us to expand resources, create higher visibility for this service area, and build stronger collaborative relationships with allied organizations in the community. Here's what I think it would take for us to do that, i.e., the cost. Here's what I think we could realistically make happen i.e the benefits. And here are the risks. There's a risk that we could advocate for this, and then our organization wouldn't get any of the expanded funding. I think there are some strategies to mitigate that risk. We would need to put ourselves in a highly visible position in the advocacy work around this. We couldn't be behind the scenes. We'd have to be front and center so the decision makers and our colleague organizations are seeing us as key in this process. That's the way you present an opportunity that is realistic and well thought out. If you don't have the capacity to answer all those questions right away, you at least have the responsibility to raise them to the team. So in a case where you didn't have all of that figured out, you might say, it seems to me the best strategy would be this collaborative approach with the other organizations. There are some critical unanswered questions here. I don't yet know if these other organizations are already involved in some sort of advocacy work on this. And would we be late to the party? Would that have an impact on our ability to be effective? I don't yet know how serious XYZ council member is about this. We'd have to investigate that, to understand the level of potential for this opportunity. But I wanted to bring it to the team's attention because this came onto my radar. And I want to alert the team so that we can talk about it more. That is a perfectly acceptable way to bring a potential opportunity to the advocacy team. you don't have to have all the answers before you bring it to the team, but you do have to have some thought already put into it. And to the best of your ability with the information that you have, do a preliminary analysis and pose the opportunity with a set of questions that would have to be answered before making a decision about going forward. And when you're training new team members to do this work, help them understand, by modeling, by example, teaching and support. Help them understand what does and does not constitute a helpful way to bring opportunities and challenges to the team. It's important to understand that that analysis is also a skillset. And it takes time to develop. So for this to work, your team needs to practice both of these skills regularly. Both the scanning for opportunities and challenges, and the analysis of the opportunity or challenge and a plausible path forward. And the way you do that is you build it in. You schedule it every two or three month intervals. Just even a 30 minute session. It doesn't have to go on for hours. 30 minutes is usually enough when people have done their homework. And the team sits down and does a quick emerging opportunities and challenges scan. What are you noticing? What's on your radar? Everybody weighs in. Nobody gets to be quiet and silent. Even if what they have to say is "nothing new on the radar right now". But everybody has to say something. And then you have a conversation as a team of where does this fit in our overall set of priorities? Is it significant enough, impactful enough for us to build it into our advocacy work? Or is it something we simply say, we're going to keep this on our radar, but for a variety of reasons, we're not going to elevate it at this time. We'll revisit it at our next conversation in two months. And then the job of the person who has raised it. Is to continue to monitor that emerging opportunity or challenge. And be ready to report any new analysis or developments in the next conversation. Now that person is also responsible for flagging if something suddenly changes between conversations that would likely elevate it rapidly on the priority list. An example of this would be a policymaker who kind of mentioned in a meeting once that they'd like to maybe shift the priority of some county funding away from a thing that they're paying you to do onto something else. And it was kind of an idle conversation thing that didn't seem to have a lot of momentum behind it. so you raised that with the team, four months ago. And then you're in another meeting and all of a sudden this council member is hot on the case of this change and they've decided they really want to push it. Well, now that just became really important and you do not wait until two months from now when your next scanning conversation is scheduled. You raise this immediately with your team. And say, yikes. All of a sudden, this seems to be really a priority for this council member and it has huge potential negative impact for us. We got to get on this right away. Instituting scanning and analysis for both opportunities and challenges as a practice ,and doing it effectively, is one of the most valuable things you can do to create a breakthrough advocacy year for yourself. And the last ingredient is for each team member to commit to growing at least one aspect of their personal advocacy capacity. This might be to develop a new skill or to strengthen an existing one. It might be to expand their knowledge of an ability to navigate a complex policy or funding system. Whatever it is, it should feel like a stretch. The more we venture outside our comfort zone, the greater our growth will be. And to help support team members in this exciting and sometimes scary growth process, build into your regular advocacy team meetings time for folks to share what's happening on their advocacy growth journey. The purpose of these sharing opportunities isn't just for everyone to put on a brave face and talk about how they're crushing it with their personal growth. I mean, if that's happening, awesome. Celebrate that. But it's also an opportunity to share in a safe space the challenges folks are having on that journey and to get support from the rest of the team. And that support could take a lot of different forms. It could just be we feel you, We understand how challenging that is. we got you. Or it could be, a piece of valuable insight or advice, or if maybe you've faced that same challenge and found a way to deal with it, you can share that. There's a lot of things you can do to support one another in that process. You may have noticed that everything I've talked about in this episode, Centers on team. And that is not an accident. The keys to a breakthrough advocacy year are all grounded in having a strong team that's focused on the right things. And is working together with commitment to one another. And to achieving the goals of the team. So for your breakthrough year as an advocacy team, Remembering that 99% of all advocacy is focused on either money or policy, you're going to ground yourself in a money and policy focused advocacy vision. You're going to identify one or two, maximum three, highly impactful goals that are also responsive two any major challenges or opportunities that you've identified coming your way in this year. And then you build your planning from that. And then you build in regular, meaningful opportunity and challenge scanning conversations that allow you to continue to reassess any new incoming opportunities and challenges that might belong in your plan or that have relevance to it. And then you are intentional and plan for your personal growth of your advocacy capacity to make you even stronger as a contributing member of the team. And together as a team you support one another and have each other's back. When you do that and you do it consistently, you can't help, but have a breakthrough advocacy year. I look forward to hearing about your breakthroughs in 2024. And I hope you'll keep me posted on all of those. I'm excited to hear what you are accomplishing as we begin the new year. You can reach out to me@thenatnonprofitpowerpodcast.com or on LinkedIn at the nonprofit power podcast. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.