Placing A Value on Advocacy Work

Notes prepared for the July 1997 DSA NGO Study Group meeting on "Impact Assessment and Value", in Oxford. By Rick Davies, CDS Swansea, 28 July 1997. Phone/fax 44 (0)1223 841367 E-mail rick@shimbir.demon.co.uk WWW at http://www.swan.ac.uk/cds/rd1.htm

Some definitions:

I don't like the word impact, I prefer the word value. Impact is something that happens to physical objects, value is something that people do.

Advocacy is defined by the Oxford Modern English Dictionary, as "Verbal support or argument for a cause" An advocate is a broker, mediating between two parties. If we are talking about assessing the value of advocacy work then perhaps we need to look at the advocate's relationship with both parties.



Relationship 1: The advocate's co mmunications and marketing to the audience.

Here we could be asking the following sorts of questions:

  • Who was supposed to hear the message
  • Who has heard the message,
  • How did they interpret the message
  • How was it different from other messages
  • What did they do in response.
  • Have they heard of the sender
  • How do they differentiate the sender from others who might be sending similar messages

There are plenty of problems here to focus on, especially when advocacy is targeted at very large audiences.



Relationship 2: The advocates accountability to the client, the party on whose behalf the advocate is working.

I think this is the more difficult task, and perhaps the more neglected of the two. There are at least four sources of difficulty:

  • In many cases the intended beneficiaries of advocacy activities do not know they are the intended beneficiaries.
  • In many cases they do not have choice about who will undertake this role.
  • Poor people do not normally pay for advocacy work. In many cases they will not have any significant influence over their advocates.
  • The structure of power in the relationship between audience, advocate and client is not in favour of the poor. Talking to powerful people can be seductively attractive. Talking to poor people is less so. The target audience are generally the rich and powerful (if only in relative terms), but the clients are poor.



Some questions for discussion today:

(concrete examples of positive answers to each question would be specially valuable)

  • If the clients of the advocacy work are not those the NGO is working with via development projects how are they regularly making contact with them, in order to ensure they are acting appropriately on their behalf ?
  • To what extent have NGOs who are involved development projects explained their advocacy activities to the poor people they are working with in those projects ?
  • Where this has been done, has there been any attempt to get those people's views of the rank order of importance of those advocacy activities, versus others that they might see as relevant to their welfare ? NGOs have finite resources.
  • What effort has there been made to provide feedback to the same people about the results of advocacy work ?
  • What effort has there been made to seek their assessment of those results ?



A final question:

If poor people have not been told about advocacy work on their behalf, kept informed about that work, and been asked for their views about it, is there another more appropriate word which should be used to describe such activities, valuable as they may be ?

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