4 Quick Tips to Remember When Planning an Advocacy Campaign

If your nonprofit is planning an advocacy campaign, congratulations. You’re on the right track to engaging donors, supporters, and other community members in new, inspiring ways as you work to make meaningful change.

Now more than ever, audiences want the organizations they support to take a stand on relevant issues and take clear steps to address them. By planning your advocacy campaign thoroughly and strategically, you’ll be better prepared to enact change at a local level and engage these audiences in the process. In this article, we’ll explore a few tips to help you get started.

1. Identify the advocacy actions supporters can take.

Every advocacy campaign needs a clear target and objectives your organization plans to achieve to reach your ultimate goal. The best campaigns include supporters in their plans to mobilize true grassroots support.

Start by considering all the steps needed to achieve your intended outcome. For example, advocating for a law change may require speaking to lawmakers, getting the signatures of various elected officials, and changing public perception. On the other hand, advocating for a corporation to stop funding a certain PAC might just require the signature of one person at the company.

Think about which steps of your plan supporters can realistically help with. Your supporters might be able to take meaningful actions like:

• Signing and sharing petitions
• Contacting lawmakers
• Spreading awareness of the issue
• Volunteering at your events
• Attending rallies or community meetings

Once you’ve identified several objectives that will help you reach your campaign goals, work backward to design an appropriate, feasible timeline. Determine when you’ll start contacting volunteers, how you’ll reach out to the broader public, and what milestones you aim to hit (such as “Get 400 petition signatures by 9/30”). If your advocacy campaign is tied to the results of specific legislation, use the voting day to guide your campaign’s timeline.

2. Empower your volunteers to lead.

Every successful advocacy campaign is fueled by passionate advocates. Keeping volunteers at the heart of your advocacy campaign inspires their long-term support and helps you convince others to join the cause.

However, volunteers can be even more powerful assets to your campaign if you let them. When you identify a volunteer who’s particularly motivated, empower them to take their support a step further with a leadership role. This way, they’ll propel your campaign forward, deepen their relationship with your organization, and gain valuable skills in the process.

To identify these volunteers, look at the current donors, supporters, and contacts stored in your database. Use your nonprofit’s CRM to:

• Create segments based on volunteering history, participation in past campaigns, location, and donation history.
• Customize suggestions. Based on collected data, identify and suggest volunteer assignments that align with individual interests and abilities.
• Personalize your messages to every contact. Even if you’re reaching out to hundreds of people in your network, your CRM should enable you to automatically include their names and past participation details.
• Use a volunteer management tool to monitor volunteers’ advocacy actions, note those with high potential, and support them with additional resources and advice.

Offer leadership opportunities to promising volunteers, such as speaking at events, training new volunteers, or even managing a text banking event. This extra involvement will increase their confidence and the ultimate impact they’re able to make on your cause.

3. Leverage the digital channels at your disposal.

Your nonprofit has plenty of impactful methods for marketing your campaigns, from emails to events to text messages. When you’re planning an advocacy campaign, spreading awareness widely is the name of the game, and technology is the perfect conduit to do so.

Develop a detailed digital marketing plan that outlines your target audience, the communication channels you’ll use, and how you’ll use them. The tools and channels you use might include:

• Your website: Create pages and blog posts describing your advocacy campaign and all the ways supporters can get involved, then optimize them to perform well in search results for relevant terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves creating helpful content and ensuring your site’s accessibility and user-friendliness, among other tactics.
• Social media: Plan several strategies for different social media platforms. For instance, you might engage supporters with a Facebook Challenge, provide quick updates on X (formerly Twitter), and use Instagram to share infographics. Be mindful that some of these opportunities, like Targeted Ads on Facebook, will cost your campaign money.
• Text messages: SMS alerts, reminders, and updates are perfect for fast-paced advocacy campaigns. Supporters will receive your messages and read them right away, making them more likely to take swift action.
• The Google Ad Grant: Google’s Ad Grant program donates up to $10,000 in monthly Google AdWords spending to qualifying nonprofit organizations. That means you can promote your campaign landing pages, among other important advocacy information, on Google without taking a hit to your budget.

Allocate your marketing budget strategically, and you can amplify your campaign’s digital reach and inspire more people to get involved.

4. Refine your message to appeal to supporters.

No matter which platforms you use to spread your message, your best bet for moving supporters to take action is to tell a compelling story that resonates with them and their values. To do so, you first have to understand your audience’s opinions using data.

Explore your past advocacy campaign data along with any supporter preferences recorded in your CRM to understand what messages resonate most. 

For instance, if many donors and volunteers responded to a survey in the past saying that their top cause-related concern is animal welfare, you’ll know to focus promotional messages on your advocacy campaign’s potential impact on animals. If you see that your last campaign’s best-performing messages were texts that included photos, you can focus more on your SMS strategy this time to connect with supporters.

Remember to balance your outreach by including both hard data and emotional appeals. Draw on both to resonate with your audience and keep supporters invested in helping accomplish your goal.

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To ensure you stay on the right track as you launch your campaign, keep a close eye on your supporter data from beginning to end. Use your CRM to organize and analyze data, identify new opportunities, and make adjustments as needed. In the end, your campaign plan will come to fruition and you’ll positively impact the community you serve.