Advocacy as a Way to Promote Organization's Goal

Advocacy is creating a case in support of a particular activity or cause and trying to rally other behind the idea by convincing that it’s a good idea. It is a process of collecting and organizing information to be passed on to decision makers in an attempt to influence decisions. Advocacy is the deliberate process of influencing decision makers about making, changing, and implementation of policies. This mean for policies that are outdated, nonexistent will have to be changed in order to realize a goal. In some scenarios, the policies may be well written on the paper but not implemented. In this instance advocacy will play a significant role in trying to ensure that the policies are enacted. Advocacy is speaking up to and drawing policy makers and community attention to an important issue affecting the people. Advocacy aims to influence decision makers at various levels – at federal, regional, and local levels. Advocacy can be done by writing comment letters and articles, attending meetings with standard setters and ensuring your membership voice is heard.Advocacy, therefore, demonstrates an organization’s loyalty , dedication and passion for a cause that may be at the center of the interests of the members. The goals of advocacy are meant to facilitate change and the development of new areas of policy, in order to tackle and address unmet needs or deal with emerging needs in a given society.A desired result of any advocacy activity is known as a goal. An advocacy goal can be a long-term result, and it may take more than three years of advocacy work to bring about the desired result. Advocacy network alone cannot achieve a goal on its own; it will probably require other allies to bring about the required change. It is important to know what you want to achieve before you start your advocacy work and this may require developing goals that applies to the situation that needs to change. It’s true that advocacy can help an organization to meet its goals and therefore is beneficial to organizations.Advocacy can help an organization to protect its member’s interests whereby the interests of the stake holders are protected and thus, in turn, creating trust. For instance, if an organization is advocating use research surveys to fetch feedback, the organization will be able to get a glimpse of the members needs and requirement and will therefore realign and provide appropriate products and services to specific individuals. This also helps the organization to expand its reach and open up new market base.Moreover, if organization creates committees dedicated to advocating for its cause, the committees will be able to obtain the stake holders interests through meetings and will be able to relay those opinions to standard setters. This will help an organization to develop an environment of trust among its members and members become loyal and productive. Advocacy can help an organization to expand its market reach, and enhance value of authenticity and credibility of its products and services. This can be done through employee advocacy which is defined as promotion of a company’s message by its employees through online channels with the social media as main medium of the brand ambassadors.Employees have vast networks of friends, followers and connections in the social media who can easily reached and influenced by a click of a button. By dispensing valuable content of a company to their networks, the employees can generate meaningful conversations about the business thus increasing the company’s reach and credibility. Employee advocacy is therefore considered a word of mouth marketing where people create conversations around a particular brand and thus somehow boosts the authenticity and trust because the messages are passed on by people. Employee advocacy helps the employees to align with a company mission. It can also increase a company’s sales as social networks helps in identifying potential buyers and developing revenue generating relationships.Advocacy in the health sector is geared towards bringing positive changes to the health of a population. Advocacy can address health issues through the implementation of public health policy or through implementation of a national health policy. It can also address health issues related to harmful traditional practices. Moreover, advocacy could help to meet the goals of health extension programme policies, where specific resource allocation and service delivery models are formulated for advocacy campaigns.Advocacy is the process of supporting people to solve health issues. It includes single issues and time-limited campaigns, as well as ongoing, long-term work undertaken to tackle a range of health issues or health problems. Advocacy may be able to offer a solution to specific health problems, and build support and networks that can tackle health issues that are affecting the health of a certain community.For instance, if a community experiences a low immunization coverage due to inaccessible services for mothers with young children, then the advocacy goal would be to gain commitment of the a community leaders that they will ensure good access to immunization for people in their areas. The advocates for this agenda will conduct meetings with community leaders to discuss this issue and –come with proper solutions on how immunization can be well administered.If the goal is to combat stomach upsets and other infections, the advocates would the conduct meetings with residents of a community and sensitize them on the need of washing hands always with disinfectants before partaking any meals. The advocates can even campaign and push for the enactment of a law by the county government to facilitate the free issuance of disinfectants and hand wash to its residents.Media advocacy is the use of any form of media to help promote an organization's goals, which come from the group's mission and vision. For instance, a media advocate for a non-profit agency working to reduce gang violence in your community you would try to present community issues related to gang violence and the changes you want to make in such a way that you: Change the way community members look at gang violence. The advocate might want to make it clear who it affects and why or why youngsters get involved in gangs.An advocate can also motivate community members and policy makers to get involved by coming up with ideas about what could be done with government policies that that can address gang violence. An advocate might want to publicize a city- or state-sponsored initiative that needs public input and support. In all these, the media can help if they are well utilized.Media advocate use the media to get a public or social policy message across to the largest audience possible in the least amount of time. For instance, the media can be used to inform the public about what really causes or contributes to public health and development issues, and educate them about the concept of a healthy community. It can also be used to encourage professionals and community members to find out more about public health and development issues in general, and to get involved.Moreover, it can be used to cast problems such as gang violence and drug abuse as public health concerns that affect everyone, not just individuals. For instance, majority of the people would want gang violence to stop but they really do not know how to go about it. The media therefore can be used as an important channel to address this issue by framing it as everyone’s problem and thus call for relevant stakeholders to act in provision of a solution. However, advocacy itself is not a goal of an organization. This is because advocacy works rely on other factors for it to fruitful and if any of these factors does not appear, then advocacy works will not be able to achieve its goals in an organization. Relation building is one of the factor that is key for the success of advocacy works. Advocates need to know and successfully make relationships with policy-makers and influencer and should be done in a constructive and energetic way. However, if there are challenges in meeting and building relations and increased constraints on public sectors, then advocates will not be able to achieve their agenda in an organization and , thus, not meet their goals.Moreover, lack of dedicated funding and resources can hamper advocacy from achieving its goals. For instance, advocates need to collect hard evidence and relevant data and present to the policy makers in order to support their cases and this would require dedicated funding. If the resources are limited then advocacy goals will not be realized.

In addition, building strategic alliances and collaboration with relevant organizations can help to give weight to arguments, develop relevant solutions and seek change in relation to the main policy objectives. Alliances are helpful to policy makers as it reduces the number of groups they are supposed to meet on the ground. If communities together with other relevant stakeholders will not be able to build strategic alliances and collaborations, then advocacy works will not achieve its goals in an organization.