Lisa Hazirjian, Ph.D., Win Together Consulting
Back in November, I published this blog encouraging nonprofit leaders to begin building relationships with elected officials by sending an email congratulating them on their victory. I was surprised and delighted by how much traffic and praise the blog generated. Yet the response I found myself thinking about the most was this question left on LinkedIn by my colleague Veronica LaFemina:
Whether you’re applying for funding, pitching a new program initiative, lobbying for a policy solution, or asking for a raise, your success hinges upon your ability to make your case. In this session, you'll get back to the basics of how to get what you need and want for your nonprofit. Using real-world examples shared by participants, we’ll walk through the steps of clarifying your goals and desired outcomes, understanding your audiences, mapping your resources, and choosing the strategy and tactics that make sense for your organization.
The Opportunity Agenda designed the Vision, Values, and Voice: A Communications Toolkit to help organizations "be effective in moving hearts, minds and policy over the long term...[by] integrated messaging
In this critical moment of recovery with the persistence of barriers to resiliency, public funding for the public good can provide a critical support to protecting families and communities and advancing more equitable outcomes by laying the foundation for a better North Carolina. Essential to making progress in the long-term towards our shared goals is the ability of the state to raise the funds needed and the important role we all can play in making the case for public investments.
Venable LLP, a private law firm, produced a free video Lobbying Considerations for Nonprofits: What Your Organization Needs to Know, which gives a good overview of acceptable and prohibited activities for nonprofits who have or have not taken the 501(h) election, as well as reporting lobbying-related expenses in Schedule C of Form 990.
Whether through traditional or digital mediums, nonprofits must tell their stories effectively to garner attention in a crowded media landscape.
How to Tell Stories
Nonprofits must be conscious of the ways they represent the populations they serve, being careful to respect the individual or group's agency, empower rather than victimize or exploit, avoid re-traumatization, and think ahead about the way presenting that story to the world will affect the storyteller's life in the future.
Introduction to Ethical Storytelling
It's through continued effort that policy changes to promote equity are implemented and imbedded into practice. Tracking the progress of equity advocacy is important and does not need to be complex or daunting. Getting Equity Advocacy Results (GEAR) from PolicyLink is a suite of benchmarks, methods, and tools for advocates, organizers, and their allies to track the results of their equity campaigns to:
The Racial Equity Message Guide grew out of a request from advocates to advance both equitable policies and conversations about structural racism with decisionmakers. The guide includes tested messages to secure racial equity language in public policy. (American Heart Association's Voices for Healthy Kids, 2021)
While written to help nonprofit leaders think strategically about public policy advocacy, these seven steps are useful to follow when developing fundraising asks, internal programmatic or organizational policy proposals, or other kinds of requests. (Shared with permission by Lisa Hazirjian, Ph.D., Win Together Consulting)