In New Jersey, schools gained new access to facilities. In Minnesota, educators adopted new annual reports that track student achievement. In North Carolina, teacher evaluations now take student performance into account. What ties these education policy victories together is effective advocacy, spearheaded by Marc Porter Magee, the founder and CEO of the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now (50CAN).
“America needs a great education system, but we’re only going to get there with states leading, learning and growing from — and with — each other,” Magee said. “What we believe is not just that everyone has the right to an education, but that everyone has a right to a high-quality education.”
Magee shared some of the strategies and tactics that he’s discovered over more than a decade of experience building and running advocacy campaigns in his recently published Guide to Building Advocacy Campaigns. He argues that there are three vital steps for launching a successful effort:
1. Clarify Your Goals
“Every advocate knows that the worst outcome is not that the campaign fails, but that it succeeds and then it turns out that the policy goal doesn’t accomplish the outcome you’re trying to achieve. In complicated systems like education, that happens all the time. And unfortunately, right now it’s very common to hear that the problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do, it’s that we don’t have the political power to achieve it. Yes, we need more political power, but we also need to be smarter about setting the right goals.”
2. Match Your Strategy to the Environment
“Getting to your destination isn’t just about going fast and going far; it’s about going on the right road in the right direction. To do that, before you start driving, you have to stop and orient yourself with a road map. You’re much more likely to think smartly about strategy if you take the time to evaluate the different pathways to get to your goal and then make a deliberate choice about the best approach.”
3. Select Winning Tactics
“Don’t inadvertently make a tactic into a goal. Tactics are the means to a larger end that you’re trying to achieve. Advocacy campaigns are much more likely to be effective if they have a lot of tactics in their toolbox and can make smart decisions about which ones are appropriate for the job. If you are good at two or three tactics in each strategy, that can be enough to be really effective.”
Magee said he hopes the guidebook gives fellow advocates a headstart and saves them from reinventing the basics of advocacy strategy, putting them closer to achieving — and sustaining — high-quality education for all children.
“There are a lot of pathways to get you from where you are to your goal,” he said. “A lot of our work has been learning those different strategies and becoming masters of the different toolkits you can use. The impetus behind the guidebook was wanting to share what we learned from that process.”
