Section 4: Advocacy considerations for more and better evaluation

4.1 Identify the critical stakeholders you want to influence

When planning advocacy strategies for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) Evaluation work, start by mapping the direct and indirect stakeholders you are trying to influence:

• Direct stakeholders: are stakeholders directly related to the evaluation processes. They can be the subjects of the evaluation, the beneficiaries, the team that demanded the evaluation, and/or the team or actors that expect to use the results of the evaluation, evaluation service providers and those related to its use.
• Indirect stakeholders: The general key actors mentioned in 2 that are the most influential in terms of supporting or blocking the advancement of democracy, human rights and governance.

We recommend considering doing advocacy with strategies that involve both direct and indirect stakeholders. The indirect stakeholders can help you be more powerful with your advocacy process by reinforcing messages, setting agenda, creating momentum, forming a coalition for change to influence your direct stakeholders.

Another important segmentation to consider is your stakeholders’ capacities with regard to evaluation whether they are:

• Users familiarized with evaluation: it can include program managers, leaders of your organizations, researchers, strategic planning and evaluation experts, evaluation commissioners, among others.
• Non-traditional users of evaluation: grass-roots organizations, political authorities, parliamentarians, beneficiaries of programs, among others. 

 4.2 Traditional and modern strategies for advocacy

To be effective at influencing different types of stakeholders, it is important to consider a wide set of advocacy strategies. Below a list of traditional and more modern advocacy methods that can help you engage your audience in a powerful way:

•  Traditional Strategies for advocacy
• Discussion meetings with critical stakeholders
• Conferences
• Workshops
• Forming coalitions
•  Modern Advocacy Strategies

The use of technology and digital tools in your advocacy strategies can help you reach a wider audience or specific segments faster and more easily.

• Blogging about your work (in sources like Medium or Linkedin, among others).
• Using social media to meet your target audience where they are (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, among others) with
• short messages,
• catchy titles,
• images, and
• Call To Actions.
• Text Messages Campaigns, to reach different segments of your audience via Text messages.
• Ideation Workshop to discuss insights from the evaluation and co-create the potential use of the findings from the evaluation.
• Instant polling, to ask different segments of your audience about their feedback or opinions.
• Intercepts, that allow you to approach people in real time (either online or in-person) to get their feedback.
•  Online Tactical Mapping Tool (TMT) to equip Human Rights Activists to Take Strategic Action

The TMT is an interactive tool developed as part of the Rawabet Initiative to support activists in working collaboratively on a secure platform to:

• assemble a database of key actors;
• assess where those actors sit on a spectrum from ally to opponent;
• analyze targets for effective intervention; and track and plan direct action.

Since users and teams can also input background information on individuals and relationships intersecting with their issue, and save reports to log a “tactical history”. This can support to build the learning organization capacities and eliminate the risk of loss of knowledge when a member of a team departs. More details available here. 

4.3 Customize your strategies based on your target audience

It is important to customize your strategies depending on your audience.

• The traditional strategies for advocacy tend to work best with stakeholders that are familiarized with evaluations.
• The modern advocacy strategies tend to work best for stakeholders that are not familiarized with evaluation but are also very powerful for any type of audience.

  4.4 Indicators to track progress of your advocacy efforts

The table below contains indicators that can help your VOPE set advocacy metrics and track progress. For the full article visit this link.