The Elusive Craft of Evaluating Advocacy
From Standford Social Innovation Review:
Most successful foundations and nonprofits understand the importance of advocacy. Over the last decade, foundations have put more resources into advocating for the policies they believe in, with some notable successes. Yet grantmakers have often hesitated to plunge in. Sometimes they worry about appearing too political or partisan. But more often they hesitate because effective advocacy is difficult, and evaluating whether various approaches are working is even harder...
The word advocacy is in many ways a misnomer. Funders do not, for the most part, give organizations money to simply fly the flag or make the case for a particular policy. Their goal is to change actual social, policy, and political outcomes. And ultimately, advocacy efforts must show progress toward those outcomes. But the relationship between the work to create those outcomes, and the actual results or signs of that progress, can be elusive, because advocacy by its nature is complicated and its impact often indirect.