Measuring Advocacy: Is Anyone Listening?

In a rapidly changing policy world, how can organizations know if their advocacy is reaching their target audience and having an impact? How can they measure whether their theory of change is working? 

Nine organizations, mostly InterAction members and led by Oxfam America, joined together to evaluate how they conduct monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) in their advocacy work. They presented the results of their study on the first day of the 2013 InterAction Forum at a workshop entitled "Policy Advocacy Evaluation in Practice: Comparative Review of Nine Advocacy Organizations."

Their research found that advocacy professionals increasingly want to measure how successful their work is. They want to formally set out objectives for their advocacy work and then measure their results against those objectives. How successful were we in achieving the goals we set out to achieve? Did we influence the policymakers we set out to reach? Did they adopt our policies or at least adjust their policies based on our recommendations?

Those questions can be very tricky to answer. The measurements are often inherently subjective: One advocate may report that a Congressman has finally become engaged and helpful, while another may find the same politician to be only paying lip service to the issue without really engaging. Another challenge is that of attribution: When a policy does change, who’s responsible for that change? So, when Congress agreed to higher-than-expected funding levels for global health and humanitarian aid in fiscal year 2013, was it the result of advocacy by organizations like InterAction and its members? Or was it from some unrelated source? 

Regardless of the pitfalls, advocacy professionals want the answers and are increasingly engaging in MEL, while asking for senior management’s support for more of it. However, that support has sometimes been slow in coming. As panelist David Ray, Head of Policy and Advocacy at CARE USA, said: "What surprised me was the lack of senior management support for evaluation. If senior management isn’t engaged, I question whether you believe evaluation is really part of your model."

Besides Oxfam, the other organizations involved in the study were ActionAid International, Amnesty International, Bread for the World, CARE USA, Greenpeace International, ONE, and Sierra Club.

Submitted by Jeremy Kadden