HANO: NCNA suggests resources, reasons for nonprofit advocacy

NCNA suggests resources, reasons for nonprofit advocacy

Tim Delaney, the new president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, recently sent members, including HANO, suggestions for resources that nonprofits can tap for doing advocacy work on behalf of their organizations, the nonprofit sector and clients.

Have you thought about turning to the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest, he asked. CLPI maintains a stable of some ten practitioners in the field, known as National Training Fellows, scattered across the country, who can visit to provide training on a broad range of topics to different audiences -- all for dirt cheap. The range of topics can be from basic legalities to developing a public policy agenda. Fellows will present audiences of whoever shows up or work with individual nonprofits. In addition, CLPI provides wonderful and FREE resources on their web site -- from how-to guides to short success stories and lessons learned that show how easy and fun nonprofit advocacy can be.

Must-Read Resources

All nonprofit leaders, Delaney says, should read and promote among our colleagues two new publications. The first is “Nonprofit America: A Force for Democracy?” Communiqué No. 9 of the Listening Post Project of John Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies, by Lester M. Salamon and Stephanie Lessans Geller. Click here to download. This report includes two summary findings that are critically important:

"Taken together, these findings suggest the pressures that increased public funding and the increased relevance of public policy are placing on the nation’s nonprofit organizations. On the one side, this increased funding and policy relevance have added important business reasons to the long-standing mission and moral reasons for nonprofit lobbying. … At the same time, the resources organizations have available to devote to this increasingly important function remain highly limited. Even among large organizations, policy advocacy and lobbying remain largely solo operations of already over-worked [nonprofit chief] executives. Few organizations have other staff significantly involved in this function, almost none have an advocacy or policy director, and only a handful have been able to mobilize significant involvement on the part of their boards. Nonprofit organizations are entering the policy realm with one hand tied behind their backs." (at page 12)
"Associations and coalitions are now playing a considerable role in nonprofit lobbying and advocacy, both as a substitute for the involvement of some organizations and as a spur to involvement by others." (at page ii) "Membership or affiliation with an intermediary group at the state or national level … seems to be associated with greater advocacy or lobbying involvement. Among the organizations reporting such an affiliation, nearly 80 percent reported involvement in some type of policy advocacy or lobbying. By contrast, among the unaffiliated organizations, only 31 percent reported such involvement. … [This] evidence suggests that the intermediaries and coalitions play a meaningful role in helping to encourage and facilitate lobbying and advocacy." (at page 4)

In other words, nonprofit advocacy is becoming much more important to our sector, yet there are no more resources, thus making the role of intermediaries like state associations even more important to the health of our sector.

The second must-read resource is Forces for Good, the recent book by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant. In their research about what made some nonprofits just limp along in survival mode while others had meaningful impact, they found that “high-impact nonprofits understand that they cannot achieve maximum results without advocating for policy reform or without accessing the power and resources of government. To achieve large-scale change, government needs to be part of the solution.” (at page 53) “Policy advocacy alone is a powerful force for good, because it leverages the enormous resources of government.” (at page 213) Again, the entire book is terrific – the equivalent to Good to Great for the nonprofit sector – but, if nothing else, read the chapter on advocacy.