What To Do when Your Advocacy Work has Stalled - Episode 21

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode, we reveal what to do when your advocacy work has stalled. And how to get it back on track. 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. Calf 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 your advocacy work has stalled or just isn't moving at the pace you want or need. It's time to intervene and get things back on track. But to do that, you first need to know what has caused the slowdown. The good news is it's probably one or more of a set of common problems that have fairly simple solutions. Today we examine Each of those causes and we share how to fix them. So you can get your advocacy work back to the performance level you need Yes. Hey there folks. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. I'm your host calf, Patrick. Today, I want to talk with you about a problem that comes up pretty frequently. You've made this great advocacy plan. You have your goals laid out. You've got your timeline. You got your assignments. The team got off to a great start. Had some early wins. Awesome. But then over a period of months, you find that things are stalling in one place, or maybe a couple of places. And then people kind of start focusing on other things and you look up one day. And you realize that actually. Not a lot has happened on the plan in quite a while. what you don't want to have happen is to then just forget about it and walk away. at whatever point in the process you catch onto the situation that in fact one or more aspects of the plan has stalled, the time to do something about it is the moment you realize it. how you reset yourselves as a team and to refocus on the plan will depend a lot on what caused the stall out in the first place. the most common causes of a stalled advocacy plan. the number one thing is that folks on the team just got busy with other things. Your time and attention is being pulled in a lot of different directions. I understand that for the vast majority of direct service non-profits you don't have a bunch of full-time advocacy staff who are doing this work. your advocacy team by design is comprised of people who are doing. Uh, other work in the organization. Another cause is just a lack of clarity in the plan about what's supposed to be happening. And this can happen in a number of different ways. Maybe the assignments aren't clear, maybe the goal or the action steps are a little more vague than they could be. And, rather than try to figure out what exactly should be the next thing, it tends to just kind of get ignored. Another cause is that an unrealistic timeline was set in the first place. And that can be a problem in and of itself. I've seen this happen a lot. I was just talking with a client today about they got really excited when they first put together their plan and they were like, we're going to get this done. Let's bang this right out. We're going to get her all done right away. And they set a really ambitious timeline for themselves. And then what happened was a lot of those deadlines kind of came and went and they weren't realistic to begin with. And so now here they are with a bunch of things that aren't done and now people feel bad that they missed the deadlines and so on. A big cause. And this is a caution for you to pay attention to from the very beginning. Is that the team's not getting together regularly enough to analyze and strategize. Whatever. Uh, updating tool, you create, whatever method you create to keep each other informed in writing is great, and I strongly encourage you to do that. But there is no substitute for checking in with each other in person. Even if it's only for a 15 or 30 minute meeting once every two to three weeks where it's just on everybody's calendar that we sit down and we check in on the plan and we check in on what everybody's doing. Simply the fact of that meeting is going to cause the work that is laid out in the plan to be front and center in everybody's mind, at least once every two or three weeks, whenever the meeting is scheduled. And that alone can go a long way to giving people just that little nudge that they need. Oh yeah. Hey, I need to be working on this piece over here. Another cause can be that one or more team members is stuck in some way, and they're not communicating about it. Maybe they've run into a roadblock. Maybe they tried a couple of things to get the plan item done and neither thing worked and they're stumped and they don't know what else to try. But they haven't raised the issue. And they've kind of filed it away in a corner of their mind to say, I'm going to think harder and work harder on this when I get a minute. And of course that minute never comes. Another issue can be a lack of an effective shepherd. You can't ask your shepherd to do too much because that's not fair to the shepherd. The Shepherd's job is to help keep people on track and remind people of deadlines. But there has to be other forms of accountability. And so the regular check-in meeting goes hand in hand with supporting the shepherd in their job. But if you forgot to assign a shepherd or the shepherd you assigned didn't really want the job and isn't doing it, then that's a missing piece. Another problem, and this can be More serious, is there's simply not enough investment in the outcomes that you're aiming for. That it doesn't feel important or urgent enough to the team members to devote their A game, their time and their energy and their best work to working on it. And if that's the case, then that's something to come back together about, And then last, but certainly not least, sometimes there can be a lack of focus from senior leadership. And we talked about Episode 15. where you always want to make sure that you have at least one member of senior leadership on your advocacy team, and ideally that's the CEO. But if they're not able to stay focused, then that sends a message to the rest of the team about how important the work of the team is. So, those are not the only causes of a stalled plan, but they're the ones that I see most often. And the good news is that all of them have remedies. And none of the remedies are particularly difficult to implement. The biggest thing is that you have to notice that the stall has happened. And then get folks together and say, okay, we're stalled. Let's figure this out. And sometimes that's going to fall to the shepherd to do that. And, or to the senior leadership person on the team. That is typically who's most likely going to take that on but somebody's got to do it. So let's talk about how you fix this. the first thing that has to happen is somebody's got to call the team together. And ideally, this is either the senior senior leadership the person on the team, or maybe it's the shepherd. But honestly, Whoever notices first ideally really would raise this. no matter who does it, the first step is to call the team together and say, Hey, we have gotten off track with the plan. Let's. Let's sit down and figure out where we we are, and what we need to do to get back on track. And then have folks come together and have a conversation about it. And carve out a decent amount of time. Don't say, oh, we're going to meet for 15 minutes and figure out what went wrong with the plan and where are we and how do we need to get back on track? This is going to take probably I would recommend carving out at least an hour to an hour and a half, at a minimum. To I have a dedicated time where you're all in the same room. Preferably the same actual room and not the same zoom room, but do what you can. Because a big part of what you need folks to do is refocus on the work. And one of the best ways to do that is to say, okay, we've gotten off track. It's time for us to check back in and see where we are and see if these are still our priorities, if this is still the work we believe is important to get done. Let's check in and see where we are. Chances are when you call this group together, you're not going to know what all the problems were that caused you to wind up with a stalled advocacy plan. So you may want to invite folks to think ahead prior to this meeting. a couple of things you can ask people to do ahead of time is to take a look at the plan and say to them ahead of this meeting, anything that has your name next to it as an assignment, come to the meeting prepared to give a brief, like two or three minutes, synopsis of where those items are. What's the status. What's the progress. What have been any roadblocks you've run into? And what do you think are the next steps? So you have folks come in, they're ready to talk about this. before you get into the details of the plan and all of that, you just do a check-in. get a temperature reading of the folks on the team. If you haven't been together in a room for a while, acknowledge that. And say, you know, it's probably been too long since we've gotten together as a team and really focused on this. So this is an opportunity for us to do that. and then do a quick overview of the priorities that ground the plan. And, just briefly recap. So when we put this plan together, this was the conversation. We were thinking about these things being important for these reasons. everything that's in the plan is what we said on whatever day, however many months ago, it was what we said were the most important things for us to focus our advocacy efforts on. So one of the things we want to do today is not only checking where we are with the work, but also to check in and say, has anything changed? Is part of the reason we're not working on these because our priorities shifted, but we didn't shift the priorities of the plan? Or is it some other thing? What's going on. Let's figure that out. but first let's just check in with where everybody's at and how are you feeling about your piece of the work. And then let people say what they have to say. you might hear any number of things. You might hear, I really want to do this. this as such a priority for me, but I feel like I have so many other things on my plate that I can't give this the attention it deserves and I don't know what to do. You might hear, oh, I've pretty much been doing this. It's just that I haven't been keeping anybody updated. That's the part where I fell down. I've had my head down doing the work, and I forgot to tell anybody that I was doing the work. You might hear that somebody had something happen in their personal life that basically caused them to have to just go to basics and just get the core of their work done, and that they haven't had time to do anything else it could be lots of stuff going on. So get a feel for what's on people's minds and how they're feeling about the work And then dive into the plan and just ask folks to give a short update. Very short. Couple of minutes. On their pieces of the plan. Let's say you have three main goal areas in your plan. so you take it one goal area at a time. But within that goal area, you might have each team member who is assigned to certain pieces of it. So you say, okay, let's take a look at goal area number one. And who's ever name is first in the plan, just say, okay, Susie Q you start us off. Tell us about your pieces of goal area one. Where are things at? What's the status? have you run into roadblocks? What has that been about? is the timeline still realistic? What's going on? And then people say what they have to say. And you go through the plan that way. for each goal area, each team member is only going to talk one time. you're not going to go through like item one. Okay. That's Susie Q item two. Oh, that's. Joe item three. That's Mary. Okay. Oh, now back to Susie Q for item four, don't do that. for each goal area each team member says what they have to say about their parts of that goal area And hopefully they're also talking about some of the wins that they've had. They're saying, well, you know, I started off great. I got this relationship going and it produced results right away. And it was awesome and I was so excited. But then when I went to do the second part, I just went into like email hell. And I've been trying to get this person to respond to a request for months. I've tried all these workarounds and nothing's happening and I really can't move forward until I get this information from this person. And so I, you know, I just kind of stalled out. Okay, well, great. So there was a win there. Let's celebrate the win. Don't let that get lost. This is not a meeting to beat yourselves up. This is a meeting to identify what's in the way, and clear it out of the way together. nobody's being called on the carpet here. Nobody's getting yelled at. This is about we're a team. How do we support each other to do the work that we believe is important. So you check in and you find out from each person what's happening with their piece of a goal area. And then the first thing. is to start tackling the issues people raised. you troubleshoot the roadblocks as a team. Okay. You ran into this problem. What can we do to solve it together? And you work through each of the issues and roadblocks for those action items. And come to an agreement as a team on the next steps. Another thing that. Is pretty common is is that you get a few months out from when you created did the plan, and a team. Team member is looking at one of their our pieces and refreshing their a memory. Maybe they I haven't looked at it in a a little while and they go, wow. This was so clear to me when we created this, I knew exactly what this meant and exactly what I was supposed to do. But now I read and I'm like, I am not sure sure what that that means I'm supposed to do. And so so they kind of set it aside and say, well, I'll think about that later. Maybe I can recollect, I'll go back to my notes, maybe. I can think about that later. And of course, once again, Then later never comes. So. if there are pieces of the plan plan, even if it's just a particular color line or an action item where. It's no longer clear or what it was was you meant by what was supposed to be happening there. Then that's a really good good thing to have the team revisit and say, Okay. What did we mean? If people have notes, great. If not, you can, you know, Here's the thing. If six six months later, it doesn't make sense anymore, or maybe it wasn't all that critical to begin with. It depends. But usually as a team, you you can reconstruct pretty quickly why it was that that that was in there. And what what exactly it was that you you expected to have happen. And you you can flesh that out and make it clearer. For. Now I will say that the problems that I just walked through, getting stuck because something's not clear, getting stuck because there's other work on your plate, getting stuck because you ran into a roadblock that you couldn't figure out a way around. All of those are things that could have been addressed much earlier in the process if you had been meeting regularly to check in. So there's that. And then the other thing is that all of those could also have been addressed much earlier if team members had honored their commitment To one of the ground rules of the team, which is always, always, always. If you know that you are going to miss a deadline, if you're going to not be able to go through on one of your pieces of the plan. That you raise that with the team as soon as you know it. So that as a team, you can work out what to do next. And this is so common, particularly for teams that are new as a team. You all may have been working together for years as colleagues in the organization, but you haven't been part of this specific team for this specific set of work. every time you create a new team, You have to help that team gel and function well together. And so if you recall an episode 15, where I talked about how you get your advocacy team up and running really well and stay running well. One of the most critical things is to have folks meet regularly so that they can build that sense of team and be checking in with each other and not only holding each other accountable, but feeling accountable to one another. And wanting to show up with work done to say, Hey, I've done my part. And I'm making progress and this is exciting. Or I'm trying to do my part and I'm not making progress, and it's really frustrating and I need some help from the team to figure out what's next. How do I break through this? Either way. But not meeting regularly, as in every three weeks or so for the first few months of the team's life, is the underlying cause for 90% of the problems that happen and cause advocacy plans to get stuck. So before you finish this meeting that you've now called one of the things you're going to do is set a regularly scheduled meeting for the next three months, minimum. you're going to set aside at least a half an hour every three weeks, that is a regularly scheduled time. whatever it is. Every third Tuesday at 10:00 AM. That's when we have our advocacy team meetings. And we all know that at every one of those meetings, we're going to be expected to report in very quickly on progress we made, what we learned, what it means and what is next. Another key question you may want to ask is, has anything happened since we last met? To cause you to think that we either need a new priority or need to move some of these higher or lower on our priority list. So then that's part of what they talk about too. Say. I think this is still a priority. Or this is still a priority. But this other thing has happened, and I feel like now the other thing may actually be important to attend to first And let's integrate that into our advocacy plan.. this is a balancing act because while you are checking in on the plan, you're not opening it up for wholesale tear it apart and build a whole new plan. That is not the goal. The goal is to check in and make sure are the priorities still the priorities. Has anything happened that would cause us to shift those priorities in one direction or another. And if not, then let's focus on how we get this plan back on track. Now some of the other problems are a bit more complicated. if there's an issue of not enough investment in the outcomes that you're aiming for, it may be that you didn't aim high enough. it may mean that you picked priorities that don't feel so urgent or don't feel so important to folks. And if that's the case, then it's definitely time to take a look at those and not continue either spending energy or failing to follow through on something because people just aren't feeling an investment in it. that shouldn't be the case most of the time, if you developed your plan as a team And you really spent the time to work through the priorities and choose them carefully. Usually this doesn't happen. But I have seen it happen where not enough time and attention was focused when the plan was developed, to make sure that everybody was bought in on the priorities and that they felt they were important enough to warrant the team's work. so if that is your situation, Then don't go another day with it being that way. if you discover this part way through this check-in meeting where you're figuring out why is the plan stalled. And you start to realize that, oh, people just aren't invested in these priorities. They don't feel like they're that urgent, that important. They just never rise to the top of the to-do list because, eh, You know, just not that committed to it. If that's the case, then it's time to have an honest conversation about that and say, okay. Then what are the priorities that we should be focusing on? Because if these aren't them, then we need to change them. but again, I don't see that happen all that often. But when it does, that's usually why it happened was that the initial planning was not as thorough as it probably could have been. Lack of focus from the senior leadership person or persons on the team can be a very tricky issue for obvious reasons. It depends on what is causing that lack of focus on the advocacy work. It could be that there are some major fires that the CEO or the other senior leadership person is really focused on dealing with, and that has been an anomaly over these months. And so they have just been a hundred percent focused on whatever this either a major crisis or major opportunity is and all their energy has gone to that. That's one thing. and then the conversation really probably should be about how long will that be the case? And who else can take up this work in the meantime? And do we need a different senior leadership person on the team if that individual is going to be tied up with whatever this major thing is for a longer period of time. but then you're going to need another senior leadership person to step in and take that on. Because what does not work? Just to not have senior leadership involved. cause then. If you don't have senior leadership involved in your team there are too many ways that the work of the team can get sidelined. Because senior leadership is moving in some other direction And the team isn't getting the support from senior leadership that they need. because one of the critical pieces of support that has to come from senior leadership. Is that people on the team? Have to be given permission. At a minimum and ideally enthusiastic support for devoting a chunk of their time and energy in their Workday to the advocacy work that has been developed by the team. If that support isn't there, the work will not get done. That is pretty obvious, but I have seen this happen a number of times where. senior leadership was initially involved, then they got distracted and they moved on and the team is still chugging along trying to do their work, but they no longer feel, accurately or inaccurately, they no longer feel that it's a, top priority for senior leadership. That they, the team members be spending their time on this, when there are so many other demands on folks time as well. So that has to be there. And the presence of senior leadership in the team meetings helps reinforce that. Likewise, the absence of senior leadership in those team meetings sends a different message. And it's not one that you want to send. Because folks are very sensitive to where senior leadership's attention is and isn't, and. what the spoken and unspoken messages are about priorities for work. And if people don't feel that they're spending time on advocacy will be supported enthusiastically, then they're not going to do it. And I don't blame them because that is a recipe for unhappiness on the job. So senior leadership folks, if you have been guilty of not focusing when you're part of an advocacy team, then this is your heads up that you need to be fully present in these meetings and in the conversations. if you want advocacy and strategic relationship building work, which is essential to your organization's thriving. If you want that to happen and be successful you've got to find those 30 minutes every three weeks to be in that advocacy team meeting and to be fully present. Because whatever you model is what the team will interpret as what's the right approach to this. if you're not there on a consistent basis, or if you're There, but not there. You're physically present, but you're checking your phone. You're looking at other papers. your head's not in the game, then that will be noticed. And then that will be interpreted as an indication that this work is not a priority. So please don't send that message. Something that simple can completely undermine all of the good work that went into building an advocacy team and creating a sound advocacy plan. None of this is complicated. But it's not easy either. What I hope this episode will encourage you to do. Is, if you find that your work on advocacy has stalled. That instead of ignoring it or saying, oh, well I guess that didn't work out. Don't do those things instead, say, Hey, wait a second. Pretty recently, we thought this was an important enough to pull ourselves together for a day to build a team, to build a plan. And this stuff still matters. Let's get ourselves back on track. Let's get going again. This is worth doing. But you have to actually do that. You have to actually say some version of those words, call yourselves together and then. Absolutely the most important thing beyond that, he is to first of all, if you need to make any shifts, any edits to the plan, you make those. And you make those promptly. Not three weeks from now. like within a day of the meeting happening, those plan edits get made and redistributed to folks in whatever system you have created for that so that people have it immediately. And then there's a quick summary that says, remember we recommitted to this, this is the plan, check where your name is, make sure everything is as you remember it. If it's not, now's the time to say so. Communicate with the team by the end of the week if there's anything that doesn't look right to you. And ask people to affirmatively sign off that yes, everything looks good. Or no. Uh, there's a thing here that isn't right. Let me fix that. Here, now. It's right. And then you create. a standing meeting schedule that absolutely is in everybody's calendar. and send a recurring calendar invite that is plugged in to everybody's calendar. So that they are getting pinged by that every three weeks, and they got to show up and engage. That will solve the vast majority of your problems if you're just meeting regularly and meeting in a meaningful way. Where you are showing up, checking in about what's happened with your pieces of the plan. What's been the progress? What have been the roadblocks? What have we learned? And what does that mean for next steps? And be mindful that some of the next steps will be about solving the roadblocks that pop up. Learn to recognize the things The can stall your advocacy teams work. And. Become active in identifying that in addressing the situation when it comes up. And not allowing it to persist on a dressed and then go back to stalling things out again if you do that, you'll be back on track. And if you keep doing that, you will stay on track. The main thing here is to function as a team. But that is not going to happen on its own. You have to create some structures that will reinforce the functioning of the team until it's been functioning together long enough that it is acting like a team on its own. But that doesn't happen right away. That really takes usually a minimum of six months of meeting quite regularly. And checking in with each other. Even if you're not making a ton of progress, but hopefully you are. Hopefully you're having some wins along the way and you're celebrating those wins. But you're also supporting one another when you do get stuck. When there are challenges or when one team member can't see their way past a problem, but another one has a thought about how to fix that. And so you support one another, you work as a team and you get stuff done. And you move your advocacy agenda forward together Making change in the world for the better for. for your organization and the people you serve That's what it's all about Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.