Why should anyone else care about your issue?
This is the first post in a series on advocacy strategy. The posts draw on a forthcoming book about the meeting point of strategic management and advocacy.
Over the years, I have run into the same situation time and again: organisations spend a great deal of time thinking about how to justify their objectives.
To support the case, studies are commissioned, data is gathered, impacts are calculated, and arguments are polished. Meetings are prepared, and much thought goes into what the most effective and convincing message would be.
All of this is absolutely necessary and worth doing. Yet far too often, and far too easily, a much more fundamental question goes unasked:
Why should our issue interest anyone but us?
The question may even feel slightly unfair. To the advocate, the importance of the objective is usually obvious, at least at a general level: a company sees the problem in its business, an association through its members, a regional health authority in its services, a university in its research and teaching.
A decision-maker, however, does not look at the world from the viewpoint of any one company, association or even citizens' movement. On a decision-maker's desk, there are dozens of issues at once, each of which is, in someone's view, urgent, important, and societally significant.
That is why the first hard task of advocacy is not merely justifying your own objective. It is turning your own issue into a shared one.
Your own interest does not yet amount to a wider need for societal change
Consider a pharmaceutical company that wants a new vaccine included in the national vaccination programme.
Let us assume there is strong evidence of the vaccine's efficacy and of the need for it, and that its adoption would also matter commercially to the company. From the company's point of view, the case looks fairly clear. From there it is a short step to thinking: surely everyone benefits.
The company's commercial interest does not yet justify adding the vaccine to the programme. The evidence of efficacy and need already provides societal grounds, but the decision-maker must also weigh, among other things, the costs and the alternative ways of using the same funds and resources.
The issue starts to look different when the perspective is widened step by step:
Let us further assume that the vaccine is shown to reduce outpatient and emergency visits and the need for hospital care. The grounds for adopting it then extend to smarter use of healthcare capacity: a fall in the need for treatment would free up professionals' time for other work. The effects on waiting lists and total costs still have to be demonstrated separately.
The decision-maker's question is therefore wider than one vaccine. They are not assessing only the vaccine to be added to the programme, its costs and its effectiveness. They have to consider how scarce resources are divided between treating illness and preventing it. Regrettably often, longer-term benefits are trampled by the "pressing needs" of the short term.
The chain could be extended further still, all the way to the sustainability of public finances. That can be tempting, and sometimes justified. But lengthening the chain carries a danger.
Every additional step and claim must be defensible. Where the link between illness and healthcare resources and capacity is real and demonstrable, the argument holds. Where the chain is stretched all the way to the national economy without solid grounds for the next steps, it is, regrettably, mere rhetoric. Experienced decision-makers tend to recognise this quickly.
The task, however, is not to build the biggest possible societal narrative. It is also worth remembering that the case has to be presentable with clarity. Not an entirely simple job, then.
In any event, the strategic question is more important and more difficult:
To which societal development larger than ourselves is the change we seek genuinely connected — and how far can we substantiate that connection?
This framing changes the starting point of advocacy, because we are no longer asking only what we need. We are asking what is happening around us and how the change we seek relates to that surrounding reality.
Decision-makers do not live in your organisation's world
This is where organisations easily fall into what I have started to call organisational bias.
Organisations inevitably look at the world from their own position and their own premises. That is natural, and there is nothing wrong with it in itself. A company sees the market and its customers, a patient organisation sees patients' experience, a regulator sees the rules, a regional health authority sees the service system. The Ministry of Finance is often a chapter of its own: to an advocate it can look like a brake. From its own vantage point, however, the question may be what the proposal costs, where the money comes from, and what else could be done with the same funds.
The decision-maker's problem is that they have to see all of these at once. That is why an organisation's own interest is not yet enough to justify the change.
If a company says: Regulation places an unnecessary administrative burden on us.
it is saying something perfectly valid about the company's world.
But if the same phenomenon can be shown like this: Current regulation shifts healthcare professionals' time from patient care to administrative tasks without a corresponding benefit to patient safety.
the conversation changes.
The organisation's own interest has not disappeared; we are simply closer to the concrete effects of the change. Nor should objectives be hidden — quite the opposite. No decision-maker imagines, say, that a company is acting out of pure selflessness. Decision-makers know that everyone seeking to influence them has objectives of their own, and trust is not built by concealing them.
By thinking more broadly, you can find, alongside your own objective, a connection to the world that decision-makers are responsible for. The distinction matters: the issue under discussion, the organisation's own interest and the societal change being sought are not the same thing. I will return to this later in the series.
Being right is not enough
This brings us to a still harder problem: an organisation can be entirely right. It can have research evidence, sound analysis and a societally justified solution.
And still nothing happens. One reason may be that no one else has yet taken ownership of the issue. Societal change is not achieved alone. At some point another actor or decision-maker has to take it up.
A minister must be willing to advance it. A civil servant must be able to justify it in preparation. A Member of Parliament must be able to defend it to their parliamentary group and their voters. Another organisation must see in it something meaningful for its own mission.
Here is perhaps one of the hardest tests in advocacy:
Does anyone speak for your issue when you are not in the room?
If no one does, the issue probably still matters only to you, and it has not yet become something others are advancing.
If someone does — and argues for it from their own premises — something significant has happened. The issue has begun to become shared.
An advocate's own conviction, then, is not enough. What is decisive is whether others are ready to take ownership of the change being sought.
This does not mean inventing a different story for every stakeholder. The same change can matter to a minister, a civil servant and another organisation for very different reasons, but it is still the same change and the same reality. The angle changes. The truth does not.
This is where the Case for Strategic Change begins
I have been using the concept of a Case for Strategic Change.
By it I do not mean an elevator pitch, a key message or the first slide of a PowerPoint. I mean an argument base that is built through a process:
Progress along this path is not automatic. At every stage, the original observation or proposal may itself change. A shared cause does not come about simply because others accept our starting point.
A good Case for Strategic Change should ultimately pass three tests.
Necessity. Why should this change — and, in particular, why should it change from perspectives other than our own? What is wrong with the current state, for whom, and why now?
Justification. Why should our view, of all views, be taken seriously? An objective by itself does not create justification or credibility. What do we know or see that helps decision-making succeed? A justified reason to take part in the conversation does not yet mean that others recognise it. We need to find out who considers our participation justified, who questions it, and why.
Justifiability. Can someone else credibly take ownership of this change and argue for it from their own role: an MP to their parliamentary group, a civil servant at the different stages of preparation, another organisation to its members?
These are not three separate things but three angles on the same question: can others take ownership of the change being sought? And if the third question is hard to answer, your issue may not yet have become a shared one.
Perhaps the first question of advocacy is this
The next time an organisation launches an important advocacy effort, I would not start by asking:
What is our message?
Not even:
How do we justify our objective?
I would start further back: To which larger societal development is the issue connected? Why would the change we seek matter to people who have no particular reason to advance our interest?
And finally:
Why should anyone else care about your issue?
If there is a good, honest answer grounded in reality, the building of the advocacy strategy can continue.
If there is not, I would not think about the message yet.
I would think about the issue again.
In this post I looked at how your own issue becomes a shared one. Two questions remain open: how the same need for change is made meaningful in very different worlds without distorting the truth, and what, in the end, makes someone else speak for your issue when you are not in the room. I will return to both later in the series.