What if You had Unlimited Advocacy Resources? - Episode 40

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode, we take a look at the question: what if you had unlimited advocacy resources? 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 Kath 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. Kath Patrick here. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the nonprofit power podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. If you've ever said to yourself, if only I had a paid advocacy person or team. Everything would be great. You're in good company. But you might be surprised by the path you need to take to get there. It's not as intuitive as it might seem. And there are some common mistakes that often block that path. Hey there folks. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. I'm your host Kath Patrick. I hear all the time from nonprofit leaders that they feel like if only they had funding for advocacy work, if only they had money to hire a policy person. everything would be great. And I could hand most of that off to them and they could just go get it done and I could get on with my work. And that would be awesome. And in theory, that might be awesome. If it worked that way. But I want to talk a little bit today about what's underneath that desire. And what about it could work really well. And what about it actually might not serve you. Because here's the thing. Even if somebody dropped a hundred K on you tomorrow. Or 200 K. And said here you go. Go do advocacy with this money. .Wow. You know, that'd be awesome. But also, what would you do? Would you be prepared to deploy those resources effectively? To achieve proportionate results to that level of investment. Could you do that? Probably not. The thing is, that even when you have dedicated paid positions for policy, for advocacy writ large, for strategic relationship building with contracting partners. Whatever combination of things that cover the interests that you have around strategic relationship building and advocacy. Even when you have multiple dedicated positions to that work, you still have to have other people in the organization who are involved in that work as well. And here's why. And this is quite specific to direct service nonprofits. You're in the business of providing a set of services, of changing people's lives for the better, of improving their circumstances, helping them thrive. And there are so many pieces of what you do, how you do it and the impact that it has that are absolutely integral to any sort of effective advocacy messaging on behalf of the organization and its work. That the people who are doing the advocating have to know all of that, have to be well-versed in it. And the truth is that you will need one or more of your program people helping to inform that messaging and that approach to advocacy. You're going to need one or more of your senior leadership team helping to inform the strategy around how is the advocacy work, the strategic relationship building work, moving the organization's objectives forward as a whole. Because when we're doing advocacy in direct service nonprofits, we're really focused on the money and policy decisions that are going to affect the wellbeing of the organization and or the people we serve and their ability to thrive. So we can't separate that out. We can't just say to a policy person, go make good policy, go get us a law that'll fund us. It doesn't work that way. There has to be a hand in glove relationship between those who are doing the direct contact with the decision makers that you're targeting, and the people who are doing the direct service work of the organization. Those folks have to be working together. There's really no scenario in which you can hire the advocacy people, turn them loose and then the rest of us can just get back what we do every day. It really will never work that way. So it's, I think really important for nonprofit leaders to understand that because we all go there from time to time. Right. When we're feeling overwhelmed and we're feeling like, ah, how do we fit advocacy and strategic relationship building into all the other work that we have to do? It is tempting to say things like, gosh, if I only had an advocacy person or an advocacy staff, that would be so much better. And it could be. But only with a comprehensive advocacy plan in place, that is informed by the strategic plan of the entire organization. Only with the cooperation of the program people and the senior leadership team to inform the messaging. It's a collaborative effort, no matter how many dedicated paid positions you wind up having focused on strategic relationship building. And I know you know that on some level. But I wanted to get into it a little bit in this episode to talk about how we can actually prepare and set ourselves up for the day when we do get to have those dedicated, paid positions. That can take a chunk of the work and really focus on it. And that is a good thing. But where we run into trouble is when we tell ourselves that if only we had that, then we wouldn't have to focus on that so much. If you're a CEO or a member of the senior leadership team, that will never be true. Advocacy will always be part of your job. And honestly, people who are engaged in program work. People who are engaged in almost every aspect of the organization's work. There should be some strategic relationship building functions built into their job, into their role. Because what we can't ever afford to do is treat advocacy, to treat strategic relationship building as if it is auxiliary to the work of the organization. It is integral. It should be part of your organization's DNA. That this is what we do. We provide the service. And we advocate for those services and for the people we serve. And we make sure that policy and money decisions that are getting made every single day by decision-makers across a wide spectrum that affect us. We make sure every single day that those decision makers understand the impact that their decisions have on the people we serve. And that they are aligned with helping the folks that we serve to thrive. That is absolutely integral to our work as direct service non-profits. So we can never not do this work. Or we are missing a big piece of the work. We wouldn't think of trying to run a direct service nonprofit without a fundraising component of some kind. And we've all dreamed of having a full-time staff of a gazillion grant writers who are really good at that and can just go out there and crank out the grants and bring the money in. And then we've got some people over here who are brilliant at major donor, and they're bringing in the other tons of cash, and yay. And we just got all the money. And we know that even if we had that big fundraising staff, they wouldn't be able to do their jobs well without the engagement of the senior leadership and the program people. But we also know that if we don't have those things yet, that we still have to raise money. By definition. If you're a 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit, you got to go raise money from somewhere. And so we know instinctively, as leaders of nonprofits, that if we don't have that dedicated staff for fundraising, that doesn't mean we don't have to do fundraising. It just means we got to fit it in with all our other work and we all have to be involved. Advocacy and strategic relationship building is exactly the same thing. And the truth is, and in a minute I will tell you how I know this. But the truth is that the more a direct service nonprofit has fully integrated advocacy and strategic relationship building into the work of their organization. Regardless of their total resources, regardless of whether they have any sort of dedicated funding to support that specific work. The more they have fully integrated it, the better their chances of ultimately getting resources to specifically support that work. And here's how I know that. Number one, I've seen this happen over and over again for so many of my clients.. Those who now have dedicated positions to strategic relationship building for contracting, to strategic relationship building for policy, for any number of advocacy roles. None of them started out having that. They all started out the same way everybody else does, which is recognizing that it is integral to the work of the organization. And we got to figure out how to do it. So let's figure out who's going to take on which pieces and who's naturally inclined toward which, and who's good at whatever and who wants to go learn and we just figure it out. Organizations that started from a perspective of well, we're not going to do any advocacy until we have money to hire an advocacy person. Wind up never getting the money to hire an advocacy person. Which is not really that surprising. So. That's part of how I know this. The other part of how I know this is that a number of funders over the years have hired me as a consultant to advise them on how to support the advocacy work of direct service nonprofits in their community. And they've hired me to evaluate the potential of a group of prospective grantees. And to see whether or not they would be a good investment for advocacy dollars. And the very first thing I always look for in those prospective grantees, is what are they doing with what they've already got? Do they already have some sort of advocacy and strategic relationship building work going on? And what are they being able to accomplish with that? And obviously it's appropriate to the scale of the organization. Nobody expects a small organization to be having the level of impact that an organization 10 times its size has. That's not the point. It's not that you have to be achieving earth-shattering outcomes in order to merit investment. But it's that you've got to have already made the decision and achieved the understanding that advocacy is important and it is integral to our work. And we are going to figure out how to get it done. Even if we're not able to do a lot, we're going to get done what we can. And we're going to be as strategic as possible about how we deploy the resources we do have. Mostly in terms of people's time, because we don't have any extra cash for this. And we're going to come at it that way. And then there were the organizations who said well, we'd love to do some advocacy work if only somebody would fund us to do it. It wasn't my job to say, Fund this one. Don't fund that one. My job was to say, here is what I can tell you about where they are, what they're doing, how impactful it is and what their approach to advocacy is right now. And how they would make use of an investment in their advocacy work. And from a funder's perspective. If you're given the choice between two organizations that are both doing wonderful direct service work in the community. No quarrel about that. And one of them is already engaged in some small amount of advocacy work using the minimal resources that they have available in terms of staff time and maybe pulling in some volunteers or whatever. And they have a plan. They're working on it. They have some goals, they're working toward it. They have made some progress, even if it's not big and earth shattering. But they've taken this on. They've made the effort and they're working toward it. And when they're asked the question, what would you do with an investment? They have a multitude of answers. We could increase this work that we're doing over here already. We could increase this by putting more time into that. And our priority would be this and this other thing, because those are the two things that either are the most impactful or that we've made the most progress on. And therefore that's where we'd want to put our energy first. But they can answer the question. With what would we get done, what goal would we further advance or fully achieve if we had this investment and how would we do it. Whereas the ones who weren't really doing much advocacy work, sitting around saying, well, if only we had resources, we could do some advocacy. Their answer to that question tends to be things like, well, we'd hire somebody. And then they would make a plan and they would go do stuff. Which one would you rather invest in? Consistently the ones the funders wanted to invest in were the ones who had already shown that they understood the role of advocacy in the work of a direct service nonprofit. And the ones who didn't get that yet, who thought it was optional, and who were waiting for resources to come from somewhere before they were going to take any serious action in that direction. Were the ones that did not get an investment. And this happened over and over again. So. I know this from a couple of different perspectives. And to further underscore it, in the very near future. I'm planning to bring at least one funder on the podcast who does fund advocacy work, and have them share from their perspective. What they look for and what they like to support, and how they view the role of advocacy work in a direct service nonprofit. Just to give you that additional perspective. The bottom line is, you want to dream big. You want to have big ambitious advocacy goals. That's a good thing, because that means you want to have an even bigger impact than you do now. And you are working toward it right now with what you've got. But you're not saying, well, once we have advocacy staff, then we can go work on that. That's a bit of a doom loop. That won't really serve you. So what I'd like to share a little bit about is how I have seen many many of my clients successfully get from a place where they started with very little in the way of advocacy capacity. And are now operating with at least one, and in many cases, multiple dedicated advocacy positions that are focused on specific areas of advocacy. The most common way to get this done is to grow your own. I have lots of clients who started out with no particular expertise on their staff about any of this. How. About contracting, about engaging elected officials, engaging government agency officials, engaging any of the likely decision-makers who have influence or power over money and policy decisions that affect you. They didn't start out with any of that. But they knew they wanted to affect those decisions. And they wanted to start to shift how those decisions were being made and to make sure that they were being made in a way that supported their work. That supported them making an even bigger impact and that supported their clients being able to thrive. And so they set about saying, all right, well, what are we going to start with? What's the most significant or important or pressing thing. And they all came at it from a slightly different way of identifying if you have not a ton of time and energy to put into the work, what's the most important place to focus. And so they started there. And in most cases, It was an advocacy team comprised of a program person, a senior leadership person, the CEO. And then one or two other people who either had an interest, or for internal organizational reasons, it made sense for them to be in this group. There's a lot of different ways to decide how you're going to structure an advocacy team. And we go over that in a lot of depth in episode 15 where we talk about how to build a strong advocacy team. But they all built an advocacy team, with the understanding that they were going to need to spread the work around, because nobody had the bandwidth to do all of it. And they got to work. And in the process, through a combination of trial and error, of practice, and in some cases, training and coaching support. For the ones that I was working with when they were in that phase of their development, they got a lot of training and coaching from me to help them become effective. But for those that I wasn't working with at that phase, they figured it out some other way. They apprenticed themselves to somebody they knew who was good at this. They watched and learned. They tried to stuff and learned what worked and what didn't. They did whatever they needed to do to begin to have some traction and to start getting the strategic relationships in place that were going to help them. And then they built on those piece by piece until they began to have kind of a scaffolding of strategic relationships that we're helping them move toward their advocacy goals. And what happens in those situations is that along the way, people discover their zone of genius with respect to advocacy work and strategic relationship building work. Some people are drawn to contracting. Some people are drawn to straight up lobbying with legislators. Some people are drawn to learning the minutia of local budget processes and they love to get involved in that. I know a bunch of CFOs who are all in on working the budget process for their city or their county, or what have you. And they just love that because they're numbers people anyway. And they're like, yeah, let's do budget. People will find their happy place around the many facets of advocacy work. Some folks are really instinctively good at messaging. And when they start finding messaging that's working, they can teach it to the rest of their team and say, Hey. I did this and it worked, and this is awesome. When I did this it totally turned the decision-maker around. It's amazing. You should try it too. And they begin to develop a coherent messaging strategy. And so you get there in pieces. But you wind up developing incredible depth of skill capacity within your team. And there's a couple of things about that that are uniquely valuable. One it ensures that the strategic relationships are spread across multiple people in the organization. It is always very risky to have all the important strategic relationships be concentrated in the hands of one person. And often that is concentrated in the hands of the CEO. The risk associated with that is that if at any point that person leaves, or God forbid, something happens and they're unable to be in their job for an extended period of time. If nobody else has got any of those relationships, then whatever advocacy stuff they were working on falls apart because they're not there to continue to engage in the relationships. And, if you've worked with me or listen to any of these episodes, you know That I'm on this all the time. That decision makers don't have relationships with organizations. They have relationships with people in those organizations. So you want some redundancy in your most critical strategic relationships. There shouldn't be only one person in your organization who knows the two or three most important decision makers that affect your work. There should be a couple of people who have those relationships. Somebody will be the lead and somebody will be second chair, but you want some redundancy there. So that's one huge advantage to growing your own is that you're not only growing those relationships across a large team so that you're protected from any one person leaving or being out of commission for a bit. But it also changes how your organization functions and it changes how your teams think. If a substantial portion of the leadership team and some other key players have a stake in advocacy success, and have a role in the organization's advocacy success. They start thinking like advocates in other parts of their job. It changes how they talk to people. It changes how they think strategically about the work. It changes how they think strategically about opportunities that may be coming your way. And that is invaluable. Then you start to have a coherent group of people who are all scanning for opportunity all the time. And are not only scanning for it. They're not just saying, oh, I see an opportunity. Hey boss, you should do something about that. They're scanning and analyzing. And they're thinking about, okay, well if we wanted to pursue that, what would that involve? What would we have to do? What strategic relationships would we need? What work would be required to go after that? And they can bring things to the leadership team at a much more sophisticated level than if that function is siloed off. And you have the strategy thinkers in a little group. And then you have everybody else just doing whatever the strategy thinkers tell them to do. Much better model to have as many strategic thinkers in your organization as humanly possible. Yes, that can get a little messy from time to time. But if you're also cultivating your team, and a team ethic, then you don't have people going rogue with that. So. Growing your own has a lot to recommend it. That said there are times when it makes sense to go hire somebody. Whether it's to retain the services of a lobbyist as a consultant on a short-term or long-term basis. Whether it's to bring in a messaging person to help you fine tune your messaging. There's any number of instances when it makes sense to bring somebody in to help with a specific thing. What is much less effective is to bring somebody outside the organization in, for something that isn't clearly defined. You're going to hire for a specific job, you want to make sure that the focus of their work is very clearly defined. You don't want to hire somebody to do, quote, policy work. And then have them come in and have to figure out, okay, well, what's the policy work I'm supposed to be working on. That shouldn't be the decision of one person who just came in from nowhere. It also shouldn't be the decision of any one person ever. For reasons of buy-in, for reasons of getting the team to be able to work together to help move that strategy forward. You want to be creating strategy as a leadership team, as an advocacy team. And creating it together. So that you are sure that you're not missing stuff. That you're not putting blinders on and getting all excited about an opportunity, but then you forgot to consult with your program person who says, oh, wait a second. There's a huge thing there that we would have to deal with in order to do that successfully. Not saying don't do it. Just saying, Hey, we've got to account for this big thing. And you have much higher danger of that if you've got any one person being in charge of say, advocacy strategy, policy strategy, contracting strategy, without the input of the larger team. Some really great examples of people who were grow your own exemplars are the two episodes that I did with, Alita McClain. And with Dorella Walters. Both of them did not start out as contracting specialists. They are now both super effective, high powered contract negotiators, strategic relationship builders with contracting partners. They both bring in millions for their organization. And neither of them started out doing anything remotely like that. But that's the capacity they developed within the organization over time. They're now highly skilled at building business relationships that generate massive revenue for the organization and that allow them to expand the reach of their services and have a greater impact with more people. That's what we're all about. Similarly, I know a number of policy people in organizations that I've worked with, where they started out not knowing anything about public policy. Not knowing anything about how legislative or agency structures worked. And they have now not only learned that deeply, but built the relationships that allow them to be powerfully effective advocates in state legislatures, in city and county elected bodies, in city and county and state agencies. Negotiating with very large, very complicated state agencies to get really important policy in place and to get funding streams dedicated to do critical work. And again, have a greater impact, serve more people at a higher level. It always comes down to that in the end. Those organizations might have been able to say, we want to impact a piece of state legislation. We're going to go out and hire a lobbyist. And there are times when that is the way to go. In episode 19 I talked about when is it a good time to hire a lobbyist, and how do you work with one for maximum effect. So you might want to take a listen to that. They could have hired the lobbyist if they could have found the money, but they wouldn't have had the internal expertise when they were done. And so at some point, you also have to think about, when we understand that advocacy and strategic relationship building is part of our DNA as direct service non-profits, it's as essential a core function as anything else that we do. That it would be kind of crazy not to develop that capacity in house. And the advantage is that when you're developing it in house, In addition to all the other things I mentioned, it also allows you to develop it incrementally. All of these superstar advocates that I have the privilege to work with in these organizations. That's not where they started. They started knowing next to nothing about any of this. And they learned it over time. With coaching and support and training, but also with trial and error and practice. And just learning what works and fine tuning and going back and fine tuning some more, until you get the combo that works right for your circumstances, for your decision-makers and your organization. Finding that right combination is a process. And so now these organizations have incredible depth, incredible expertise on staff. And over time, what they were able to do is bit by bit, add a few more hours to that person's time that were dedicated to advocacy work, dedicated to strategic relationship building work. Until now that's their full-time job. And in some cases there's more than one person who's got a full-time job in the organization working on some aspect of strategic relationship building and advocacy. But it's hard to go out and hire somebody for 10 hours a month to do really good advocacy work for you. Not impossible. But it's not real easy. And again, when you're done, unless you've somehow found somebody who wants to just work the 10 hours and they have all that expertise. In the end, you don't have them integrated into your team. So as much as we want large resources dedicated to our advocacy and strategic relationship building work, the best way to create that is actually to invest incrementally over time in building the capacity of multiple people on your staff, across functions. So that you've got program people. You've got finance people. You've got senior leadership people who are all involved in advocacy work. And are developing advocacy skills, developing strategic relationship building and messaging skills, so that they become very effective strategic partners in the organization's work and advancement. And the ability to attract resources and opportunities. And to get decision makers to engage and get them to help you expand your work, and do more and have a bigger impact. What will happen when you invest consistently in that, and by investing, I simply mean saying we are going to make sure that this is part of several people's job. And we are going to create space for them to be able to do that work. We're not going to say to them. Okay. You already have a 50 hour a week job over here doing all these things. And now I'm going to add another five hours a week that's advocacy work, and I'm not going to take anything off your plate. That is not reasonable. Please don't do that. That will burn people out. And then you will lose good people. And we don't want that. The key to all of this is understanding that advocacy work is central, whether or not you have dedicated funding to support it. The reality is the more effectively you engage in advocacy, the more resources will be coming to you. And some of those will be resources that are flexible enough to support some of that time that is going into strategic relationship building and advocacy work. So that when the day comes that you write a proposal for a substantial chunk of money to support your advocacy work. A funder will look at that and say, wow. Look at what they've done just with what they have, without having dedicated funding. Imagine how much we could multiply their impact if we make this investment. Because I promise you that is how funders are thinking about this. They're not interested in dropping chunks of money on organizations that don't have any advocacy capacity and hoping that something good will happen. Unless that comes with a lot of training and coaching and support over an extended period of time, like say at least a year, that is unlikely to be a successful investment. So the truth of the matter is that, I don't know about unlimited resources, but to attract substantial resources to your advocacy work, to support the capacity building and the actual advocacy work that you're doing. To be able to attract significant resources to do that, you have to already be doing the work. That's how you start making an impact. That's also how you make yourself very attractive for investment in creating additional advocacy capacity for your organization. And that is probably the closest anybody's going to get to unlimited resources for advocacy. But think about how, if you already have the expertise and the talent and some success under your belt. How much more equipped are you to, when you are able to attract a significant grant or other support for advocacy work. How much more ready and prepared will you be to take that investment and just blow the doors off your goals. Because you will have everything else in place. And then it's just a matter of adding more capacity. And you will already know exactly where you need that additional capacity. You know exactly where you want to direct those resources to make the bigger impact. That's how you get there. That's how you get to a place where you've got serious resources coming in to support your advocacy work, as well as all your other work. I hope that helps you think about advocacy resources in a little bit different way, and in a way that will help you get to the impact that you want. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you in the next episode, right here on the Nonprofit power Podcast.