The three biggest networking mistakes of advocacy groups

That’s one way of getting your message accross – just throw it at them… (picture copyright by Emily Layla)

A member of our new Net-Map LinkedIn Group asked about how Net-Map can be used to improve the effectiveness of advocacy groups. So here are three things that advocacy groups often do that hampers their success and where Net-Map can help them understand these limitation better:

1. Develop homogeneous networks: They just hang out with their own kind of people. Let’s say your a health advocacy group. You tend to network with other health groups, the ministry of health etc. But it might be that the Ministry of Education or Agriculture, or the farmers associations or a cell phone company can contribute things that you don’t have and make you much stronger. By putting up the influence towers in you Net-Map you might understand that there are other powerful actors that you want to relate to.

2. You focus on the “advocacy” link: Many advocacy groups see the world structured by the “advocacy” link and often overestimate the influence of advocacy as compared to other forces. By Net-Mapping and including links such as flows of funds, conflict, family relations, formal hierarchy, bribes etc. and then seeing these links in relation to the influence towers, they can see that advocacy is just one part of the puzzle. And there might be areas of the network where pure advocacy is a waste of time and resources, because the incentives are stacked so strongly against you that just repeating “But it would be better to did it differently” will get you nowhere. Mapping links that are very different from advocacy might also help the group to become more creative in what they can do to further their cause – or what their coalition partners can do to further their cause.

3. You focus on your own message only: The ultimate goal of advocacy is to change what people do. But often advocates also want to make others believers in their cause. This leaves them to talk about their own message all the time. Instead of thinking about what drives the other network members. One example how Net-Map helps break up that thinking pattern is the Nigeria Newborn Survival Case here. A colleague from Safe the Children told me a story about the power of framing the message for your audience instead of for your own ears that goes along the same lines: It’s about improving the healthiness of school feeding in the US: To convince conservative congressmen to do something about this, they went through senior army people, who turned it into a national security case – unfit young soldiers being unable to defend the country. I’d love to Net-Map that.

Talk to the Emir to save new-born chilrden

If you want to protect new-born babies from dying of preventable cause, who do you talk to? The Ministry of Health, right? Because it is their mandate. And their expertise. And they get the funding to do it. Well, do they?

Nigeria has the highest number of maternal and newborn deaths of all African countries, with 33,000 women dying during pregnancy and childbirth every year and 251,000 babies dying in their first month of life – often due to preventable and treatable causes. Katsina State in the North is one of the states where the situation is especially dire, because on average people are poorer and because the state is mainly rural, so hospitals and health centers are few and far between.

My colleagues at Save the Children wondered: Is it really enough to speak to the Ministry of Health? In the past they had observed that making a good plan, submitting a solid budget is one thing, whether or not the funding actually gets released to the agencies is a completely different story. So they asked me to map out: “Who influences the budgeting and the release of funds for newborn survival activities in Katsina state?” I am lucky to have well trained Net-Mappers on the ground, Amina Yauri Mustapha and Haj. Amina Lawan interviewed a whole range of people in Katsina, and this is what we found out:

 

Links: Black - Hierarchy, Red - Funding, Actors: Yellow - Government, Red - Donors, NGOs, Projects, Grey - Others, size of actor - influence

Two completely different sets of actors influence making the plan on the one hand and disbursing the money on the other. The size of the dots indicates the influence of actors on the specific issue (on planning/budgeting in map 1 and on disbursing in map 2). As you can see on the second map, the governor, executive council and political associates of the governor have a stronger influence than the Ministry of Health. And the Ministrie’s influence is on par with that of the governor’s wife. And even the Emir (here called “religious leaders”) has far more influence on the disbursement of funds than the front line health providers – the people who do the job (State Primary Health Care Development Agency – SPHealthDevA and Health Services Management Board – HealthSMBoard).

What does this mean for a successful advocacy strategy aimed at getting the money to implementing agencies? Read the full case study here (1845 KB).