For Funders

Winning lasting change necessitates building the capacity of groups across a movement or issue sector. Building the capacity of one set of organizations is inadequate as no single set of organizations can win and defend a policy victory. Instead, invest in resources, tools, and training that are made available to a sector as a whole. Support collaborative strategies beyond your grantees. And help build person-to-person networks across movements.

Ensuring a deep bench of diverse and trained spokespeople across a sector is critical to developing new leadership and ensuring that our organizations and our issues remain relevant to new generations and fights in the work ahead. Challenge the status quo of spokesperson roles being held tightly by the most senior leadership. Champion the voices of those most impacted by the issues and policies you are working to advance. Invest in a diversity of spokespeople at both the local and national levels who will, in turn, appeal to a broader spectrum of journalists and news outlets.

Mapping the media and opinion landscape on an issue lets groups see where there are opportunities and where threats exist and whether our messages are resonating or not. These findings shouldn’t belong to any single organization, they belong to the movement—with different organizations discussing shared challenges and insights that require shared strategies and responses. Therefore, stop funding proprietary messaging and opinion research.

With limited resources, we have to look for “economies of scale” that eliminate redundancies and lift all ships, whether those are well-resourced organizations or not. For example, when we provide media and opinion tracking, press lists, and rapid response support for a movement, we save every organization staff time.

Winning lasting change is a team effort. Every organization has its unique brand, constituency, and role to play, but harnessing those strengths in concert with one another builds the most power. Ensure that your measurements of success and reporting guidelines don’t inadvertently reinforce competition across movements. Instead, invest in collaborative strategies and practices that focus on impacts, eliminate redundancies, and don’t inadvertently promote unhelpful competition.

Today’s media environment requires fielding urgent requests and managing crisis communications scenarios. It means monitoring the issues 24/7 and helping organizations and community members respond quickly. We respond immediately or we miss the news cycle and the opportunity to shape the narrative altogether. Movements need dedicated communications capacity steeped in an in- depth knowledge of the issues, the groups, and the media landscape that they are operating in.

Policy gains are won much more efficiently with strategic communications plans. Those plans are the glue that binds efforts across a sector together. The process of sharing what is working and what isn’t, reaching agreement on messages and opinion research, and coordinating responses during a crisis are the means to building shared ownership and fully realizing networked power. It’s not just about sending out a press release or penning an op-ed; it is about driving a powerful and compelling narrative.