Communicating for advocacy

This comprehensive action guide provides an approach for building people’s participation and collective power that goes beyond influencing policy and politics to transforming public decision-making. It offers easily adaptable 'modules' for NGOs trainers, activists, grass-roots organisations, who wish to develop ideas around advocacy. One of the strengths is that it focuses on peoples participation and explores ideas relating to power and politics in citizen-centred advocacy. It emphasises power and constituency-building discussed through the lens of gender/race/class and is based upon the concrete experiences of social change worldwide
It also offers facilitators tips, sample exercises and easily adaptable handouts, along with core information to support anyone through the learning process. Based on long-term experience of a range of practitioners, the guide provides well-tested methods for promoting citizen participation and practical ways of realising a rights-based approach.
The contents, chapters 1, 3, 5, 10 and 13 can be accessed electronically

A step-by-step guide to advocacy for immunization. Covers preparation (building a plan, gathering information, creating messages and materials), outreach (building a coalition, engaging policymakers, working with the media, involving the public) and monitoring and evaluating. Includes a brief section of further sources of information (manuals, guides and websites) as well as useful examples and case studies

This useful, accessible manual provides an overview of advocacy and describes advocacy processes, methods and approaches in detail, including strategy development, community-based approaches, and working with the media. The final section provides advice on developing arguments and provides a wide range of question-and-answer style stances on controversial issues (eg 'needle programmes send the wrong message'). The final chapter is a comprehensive list of further resources. This focuses mostly on advocacy and HIV, but includes some materials addressing harm reduction and injecting drug users

A basic guide on why NGOs need advocacy, in the field of reproductive rights (but easily applicable to other contexts). Defines advocacy as a process that leads to broader access to services (increased capacity). Describes the components of a succesful advocacy campaign and how to integrate advocacy into your NGO's daily work

This resource kit focuses on campaigns run by organisations of disabled people, which promote independence, equality of opportunity and full participation. It proposes that taking part in campaigns will increase members' skills and confidence and show disabled people as active participants in their communities, who have ideas and abilities that can be of benefit to everyone

This book looks at "...the recent history and the many struggles related to advocacy for access to [antiretroviral] medicines of engaged civil society. Through the experiences of five middle-income countries - Brazil, China, Colombia, India, and Thailand." It presents "...the perspective of local civil society organisations about the national impact of intellectual property protection and access to medications. "These five countries were chosen due to their accumulated experience in this field, their capacity to produce generic medication, their activist efforts, and the exchange of ideas and information that already exists between them"

This comprises of a range of tools that civil society organisations (CSOs) can use to understand and map political context, in order to engage more effectively in policy processes. The tools have been selected because they cover a wide variety of political dimensions. As such, they provide a menu of different approaches to mapping political context; CSOs and others can select from this menu and make use of the tools according to their own needs

This scoping study has attempted to identify and document how various agencies and institutions have approached the assessment of advocacy. It sets out a number of frameworks that look at similar issues from different perspectives and, instead of promoting one framework as the 'correct' one, allows the reader to pick and choose what elements are most useful to them. The work was limited in scale, and focused in particular upon the approaches of NGOs. The insights and ideas from this study will contribute to a three-year action research project to be undertaken by ActionAid and partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This training manual was prepared to help representatives of NGOs and other formal groups of civil society form and maintain advocacy networks and develop effective family planning/reproductive health advocacy skills. The manual's tools and approaches can be used to affect FP/RH policy decisions at the international, national, regional, and local levels. It identifies three building blocks of advocacy: the formation of networks, the identification of political opportunities, and the organisation of campaigns. The manual includes a section on each of these building blocks, with specific subjects presented in individual units. Units within each section contain background notes, learning objectives, and handouts. While the manual can be used in its entirety, it is designed to be used in sections depending on the particular needs of the network

This information was collected for an introduction to advocacy training course. It looks at what, why and where to start and includes sessions on participatory advocacy, and monitoring and evaluation

This issue describes why good communication is important for health workers. Giving advice is key, but finding out information and gaining people's trust has to come first. Unless you have gained people's confidence by communicating well with them, then your advice may not be followed. Articles explain how to select key messages to give people, how to explain points clearly in appropriate language and how to check if people have understood what you have said. This issue also provides ideas and examples for training others in communication skills