How to Expand Your Advocacy Network
In advocacy, it’s critical to keep your movement growing and evolving. Even amid victories, it’s important to constantly be expanding your network. It helps ensure long-term sustainability of your organization and your efforts – the more partnerships the better. This article will outline how to expand your advocacy or grassroots network to include more people, organizations, and leaders.
Offer mutual partnership
Highlight to a potential partner organization the benefits of working together – the increased resources, amplified message, and complementary way in which working together could help you both accomplish more and reach additional people or elected leaders.
Social media and email marketing will continue to be some of the most powerful tools to galvanize support – when you partner with others you can leverage those connections as well. Perhaps one of the organizations has a larger email list or social media following – offering this in exchange for something is another way to highlight the benefit of partnership.
Combining forces increases manpower and allows organizations to broaden their reach. Often, partnerships can be like a megaphone, getting you in front of more like-minded people who are open to your message.
Be helpful
If one or several of your capabilities are less expansive, make sure you are able to extend an offer that could be helpful to your potential partner. Perhaps it’s a connection to a lawmaker or manpower via your support or volunteer network. Or maybe your email list is much larger than theirs. Offer to send several emails to help grow their list or offer to deliver volunteers to help on the ground if you’re running a campaign effort.
Knowing how you complement another organization is important so you can frame the potential cooperation as a mutual benefit. In advocacy, strength in numbers is almost always beneficial. It’s a show of force to potential targets – like elected officials – and illustrates a growing surge of people in support or opposition to something.
Assess your strengths (and weaknesses) and then offer support to other organizations. It could be that you bring name recognition and gravitas – sometimes that’s all it takes to help advance a cause.
Consider unlikely partners
Another powerful way to grow your network is to consider unlikely partners. Rather than working with an organization in your policy space, consider one outside that would benefit from the same outcome or that shares the same values.
This puts your message and your work in front of a segment of people you might otherwise be unable to reach. It allows you to reach a new, untapped market of people outside your network with some efficiency. If your message comes from a trusted organization in a different policy space, it can be a fast and effective boost for your effort.
Furthermore, as you strengthen and grow your organization, finding new supporters can become harder, which is why working with organizations outside of your network can be so effective and help you build lasting impact.
Prioritize social media & email marketing
One of the fastest ways to grow is a robust social media and email marketing strategy. Social media builds brand awareness and can help you get on the screens of people thousands of miles away. This is helpful for branding and if and when you want to fundraise. Email marketing similarly creates a personal connection with subscribers. In both cases, regular content creation is key.
Work to create valuable, informative, and/or entertaining content – like blogs and videos – and tailor that content to each medium. Social media users often prefer short and captivating content while email newsletters are a great place to provide valuable information and resources. Make sure you are engaging regularly and providing value.
If you are an organization that hosts events or has experts on-staff, you can leverage them to create your own content and repurpose it across your platforms to drive engagement and boost subscribers or followers. In business, email marketing is a top tool business owners use to see or purchase their products or services. In the case of advocacy, you can use email marketing to raise money, collect signatures, activate members to attend an in-person event, or simply cultivate a connection that you can call on in the future. An engaged email list is worth a lot over time – make it a priority to cultivate the list as you grow.
Create leadership opportunities
Creating opportunities for people to lead or contribute is a great way to both expand your reach and build awareness. You can create volunteer or unpaid leadership positions that provide committed supporters with an opportunity to serve in a leadership role and learn. This creates buy-in within the organization and is a good way to attract people to your organization or effort. Many people are looking for learning or service opportunities and by offering this kind of capacity-building training, you could help attract more people to your effort.
Similarly, investing in future leaders is always beneficial. Giving committed supporters some freedom to build within the movement is a valuable and empowering action that will create stronger connections between members of your movement.
Conclusion
Once you’ve created momentum in your movement it’s equally important to maintain it. This article outlined some of the top strategies to build and grow the network you’ve built for your advocacy efforts.
Make sure to offer mutual partnership opportunities to other organizations to help expand your reach and highlight how you can benefit the efforts of potential partners. This helps create a sense of mutual support. Consider partnering with organizations that are outside your policy space but have a shared goal. Prioritize social media and email marketing to develop a large and engaged list of supporters ready to take action for the cause, and finally create learning opportunities to foster greater buy-in within members of your organization.
Using these tools will help you strengthen and grow your movement over time.
