What we do

Members of the Hub, as individual consultants or working together on large projects, can offer support with organisational strategy and at all stages of the planning and delivery of your advocacy campaigns.

Organisation development and strategic reviews

Hub members can provide expert support to organisations looking to renew their organisational strategies or review their vision, mission and governance arrangements. Assistance ranges from ‘hand-holding’ support where senior managers are given advice and tools to help them through strategic change processes, to full-scale organisational strategic reviews, where Hub members organise and run the process in tandem with senior managers.

For example:

  • Conducting a comprehensive review and mapping of a medium-term strategy and approach for the Bretton Woods Project; making – in tandem with staff and the Board – key recommendations and proposals to help the organisation reorientate its goals and approach in line with a changing external context.
  • Conducting an organisational review of CIVICUS, assessing organisation-wide performance by reviewing programmes, identifying strengths and weaknesses of major interventions, assessing the impact of internal organisational restructuring and changes in human resources, and looking at policies, systems, and structures.
  • Supporting Traidcraft to work through key organisational strategic choices and decisions, as well as facilitating the development of an organisational Theory of Change.
  • Supporting the Jubilee Debt Campaign with their strategic review process; facilitating a series of Board and staff meetings that helped develop a new strategy which was a radical departure for the organisation.
  • Advising Corporate Europe Observatory on systems and process for decision making on traditional management functions in the context of a flat structure.
  • Undertaking a review of TrustAfrica against a set of sustainability criteria which included a scan of the external environment, a comprehensive programme performance review, an organisational capacity assessment and an examination of financial viability.
  • Conducting a review of CAFOD’s advocacy efforts across its portfolio of initiatives and country operations to inform strategic planning and organisational change initiatives.
  • Coaching the AFDI network in the development of its 2015-2020 advocacy strategies, partnership models, and financing plans, providing a prospective study and organising local and national consultation.

Campaign strategy development

We provide support to organisations seeking to review and develop their campaigning and advocacy strategies. We bring a wide range of knowledge across issues and extensive experience – both as practitioners and advisers – of different campaign contexts, the challenges and opportunities they might provide, and what kinds of strategic responses are most likely to be effective.

For example:

  • Working with Hivos in the Netherlands to support their successful development of a lobbying and advocacy-focused strategic partnership proposal with revised strategies for their thematic priorities based on an analysis of previous work and an exploration of their ‘theory of change’.
  • Supporting Care International on advocacy strategy development across a range of issues.
  • Preparing and facilitating advocacy and campaign strategy development workshops for many other organisations including Amnesty International, Article 19, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, CARE, Fairtrade Foundation, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, Oxfam and World Vision; and for coalitions working on climate, the marine environment, trade justice and the UK modern slavery bill.

Campaign management and implementation

Members of the Hub have extensive and recent experience as senior managers, strategists, activists, lobbyists, and spokespeople for successful local and international campaigns and coalitions. In helping deliver your campaign, we’ll always have an eye on lessons learned through our evaluation work, and we use this experience to ensure evaluation recommendations are also grounded in the lived realties of those working for change.

For example:

  • Managing large campaign departments, leading teams and delivering successful campaigns for organisations such as Amnesty International, Action Aid, and Oxfam.
  • Managing a campaign on street design for Guide Dogs for the Blind, working with internal policy and communications teams, and coordinating with other organisations representing blind and partially-sighted people.
  • Managing a coalition of NGOs in advance of a meeting of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to successfully secure ground-breaking protection for commercially traded species of shark, through the development and delivery of a strategy with global advocacy, identifying and working with potential champion governments, bringing in scientists and other experts, managing relationships, and ensuring targeted communications and outreach against intensive opposition.
  • Representing organisations and campaigns to the EU institutions, at intergovernmental fora and to national governments in several countries.

Monitoring and Evaluation

We design and conduct evaluations of advocacy programs, grant-making strategies, projects and campaigns on a range of complex issues and change scenarios. Our evaluation teams combine methodological expertise with issue knowledge and grounding in the cultural and political contexts of the initiatives we are evaluating.

For example:

  • Evaluating major global campaigns including Amnesty International’s campaigns to stop torture and to defend sexual and reproductive rights; and the EU funded Tax Justice Together project spanning 15 countries; assessing 350.org’s public mobilisation during the Paris Climate negotiations.
  • Supporting a large experiment, by the French FE3, to describe and test different tools for planning and monitoring social change including Theory of Change, Outcome Mapping, Most Significant Change, etc. with 30 NGOs and cities in 10 countries.
  • Supporting the development of M&E tools and processes for “Soyons Actifs”, a Tunisian program of advocacy and civil society capacity-building involving 46 associations, with training and facilitating the implementation of M&E tools in each of the program’s projects.
  • Evaluating the extent to which WaterAid, the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, WHO and Unicef successfully influenced the content of the Sustainable Development Goal on water, sanitation and hygiene.
  • Reviewing the outcomes of child protection advocacy and service-delivery grant-making for the Human Dignity Foundation, providing strategy guidance for their sunset planning.

Network development

Advocacy is rarely undertaken by solitary actors. Working with others helps amplify advocates’ voices and make them more influential. At the Advocacy Hub, we have developed expertise in the benefits, and complexity, of building and working in alliances, networks and coalitions. We are familiar with recent thinking about collectives, from tangential partnerships to distributed networks. We regularly survey networks in our evaluation projects and can provide our clients with useful benchmarking.

For example:

  • Developing a barometer to assess collective efforts of partnerships, networks and campaign coalitions. Regular use enables us to analyse key dimensions of collective efforts against a benchmark.
  • Providing strategic support to network secretariats to enhance network performance and deliver added-value, for Ps-Eau and F3E in France and the International Secretariat for Water in Canada among others.
  • Analysing, for Coordination Sud, how participation in international networks impacts French NGOs’ activities, economic and partnership models with a set of case studies following a typology of international networks.
  • Supporting the development of a French Human Rights NGO platform; mapping the main actors in the sector, providing an international perspective, and facilitating each step of the platform’s design.
  • Coordinating successful international coalitions, from five to over a hundred member organisations, working on the marine environment in the EU and at intergovernmental fora for the Pew Charitable Trusts and Oceans 5 funding group.

Research

From blue sky thinking to strategic analyses of the context and capacities in which NGOs operate and studies which drill down into campaign tactics, we have wide research expertise. We have analysed the policy terrain which different campaigns have sought to affect, the dynamics surrounding political processes, and the broad trends affecting the prospects for campaigning in different countries and regions.

For example:

  • Leading ‘state of the sector’ reviews for international NGOs, including how INGOs organise their international advocacy approaches, for CARE International; and assessing how, and how effectively, INGOs organise their MEL functions for Oxfam America.
  • Using campaigning on Darfur – the western Sudanese region subject to a huge international mobilization aimed at resolving conflict – as a lens to test Northern NGOs’ strategic assumptions about the influence of China, the efficacy of inter-governmental mechanisms and the part that religion, ethnicity and climate change play in framing and driving conflict. This analysis encouraged Amnesty Netherlands to deepen its own thinking and invest more in forecasting and scenario mapping.
  • Examining different approaches to working in networks for Transparency International, helping the organisation to think through decisions on how to approach network incubation and support, and learn from similar experiences.
  • Conducting a baseline supporter awareness study for Traidcraft that informed strategies to mobilize consumers to put pressure on supermarkets.

Facilitation

An expert facilitator can make all the difference to the success of a meeting or away-day.  Advocacy Hub members are adept at facilitating a wide range of meetings and workshops.  With the added benefit of a strong background in campaigning, we will facilitate your strategy or coalition planning meeting to ensure you come away with your objectives met while building ownership of the process amongst participants.

For example:

  • Facilitating the first meeting of a new coalition around the UK Modern Slavery Bill, bringing together many organisations which had not worked together previously, resulting in a clear action plan which catalyzed a successful coalition campaign for an amendment to the Bill.
  • Supporting CARE in developing a strategy to multiply impact on their Women’s Economic Empowerment work; developing the agenda with a steering group and facilitating a three-day workshop with 25 senior staff from across the CARE federation, including via skype.
  • Facilitating an annual planning day for members of the Climate Coalition; and helping Christian Aid develop a new climate justice advocacy and campaign strategy, advising on preparation, developing the agendas and facilitating meetings.
  • Chairing stakeholder discussions and facilitating conservation planning workshops with scientists, NGOs, politicians, and industry for IUCN and UN FAO groups.
  • Coordinating a dialogue for the French Ministry of Sustainable Development around its Research strategy. Conducted over three years, the process included citizens, researchers, associations, and the private sector.

Training and mentoring

Advocacy Hub members have developed and delivered capacity-building sessions on topics such as campaign strategy development, power analysis & theory of change, human rights and policy advocacy evaluation. Effective trainings build on staff knowledge and experience, use real-world examples, and are highly participatory and generative bringing the best of current thinking with practical guidance. We understand the importance of using different training modes to engage diverse participants. We also undertake campaign coaching and mentoring of staff.  Hub members bring language fluency in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.

For example:

  • Developing and running training workshops and materials for organisations in several world regions including for Oxfam International’s Latin America Region on the evaluation of policy advocacy and social change programming.
  • Developing and running workshops on advocacy and campaign strategy development for Crisis, Care International and Corporate Europe Observatory.
  • Mentoring senior staff with responsibility for managing campaigners; and mentoring a campaigner over the first six months of a new role by a Hub member with experience of running similar international coalitions.
  • Teaching at the Public School of International Affairs of Sciences Po Paris, La Sorbonne, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; giving guest classes in the University of London, and New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service; and sitting on the advisory panel for a course at the University of Westminster.