This brief is a good starting off point for sketching out a public advocacy campaign. It covers seven building blocks:
- Finding your North Star
- Knowing your audience
- Developing an elevator pitch (a story)
- Choosing the best messengers
- Using the megaphone
- Managing the opposition
- Minding the optics
Introduction
The end goal with strategic communications in any industry is to encourage an audience to do something— vote, donate money, buy a product or service. On public affairs and policy issues, it’s about shifting the public sentiment and influencing behavior, which can be voting, supporting legislation, holding officials accountable. It’s about selling ideas in the public marketplace.
Below are basic– repeat very basic– elements I use when developing a communications strategy. Any well-thought-out strategy always changes once you’re in the thick of the work. Still, I need a blueprint, and my version here is somewhat turbocharged, though still simplified, for outcomes in policy and social impact work. The communicator's triangle requires clarity, connection, and community.
For now, I have written this brief in vacuum, focusing on the research-message-media pieces. But direct lobbying of lawmakers, significant fundraising, and a field program are essential elements to implementing any aggressive advocacy campaign. A future brief will address these components.
1. Big picture strategy: Knowing your overall objective and how you’ll get there.
What are you using strategic communications for? What’s the larger objective? Is it to win an election? Pass new voting rights legislation? Sell the benefits of scientific research? Promote the good parts of AI? Get people off social media? Evacuate a skeptical city from a barreling hurricane? Got to start here before you go any further.
Knowing where you want to end up allows you to work backwards on using strategic communications to get you there. Message and megaphone are a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
I can tell you what a strong comms operation is not for: to “raise awareness.” Awareness is a precondition but it’s not the goal. The end point is some policy, political, or public opinion shift with action. People can be aware of a lot of things. But in a civic context, messaging and media work leads to a tangible result.
At the beginning of an advocacy campaign, it’s vital to ask yourself three questions:
Why am I doing this work?
The first question is about making sure you’re doing public affairs work for the right reasons and have the appropriate expectations. You have to be able to put your ego aside and do what’s best for the success of the issue you’re working on. In How Change Happens, Georgetown University professor Leslie Crutchfield found that putting “cause and mission ahead of personal or organizational power” is the main reason why movements succeed. Even if you’re not interested in a movement, her point, broadly, still holds.
What is the end goal? Is it cultural, policy-related, or electoral?
Knowing the end game with clarity helps you work backwards on the plan to get there. It helps you make decisions and avoids going down rabbit holes. And having some ballpark idea of the cost of the endeavour and how the money is raised should always factor into early planning.
What’s the path to victory, or the method to achieve the goal above?
The path to victory is, essentially, the strategy — the levers of power realistically available to you. Levers of power for civic work include legislation, ballot initiatives, legal cases, elections, media, regulatory measures, public protest and pressure, philanthropy, for-profit ventures, and entrepreneurship.
When things do go off track, as they inevitably will, the North Star helps you find your way back.
2. Know your audience(s) like your family.
Public communications isn’t about you; it’s about your audience — the people who need to listen to you, be persuaded, and then act. It’s actual public service, not self-service. What does your audience need to hear to get them to do X in step 1?
The first iteration of the anti-litter campaign in Texas decades ago fell flat at first because its message didn’t resonate with the people doing the littering. The campaign changed to the now famous “Don’t Mess with Texas” slogan, appealing to younger white men who had pride in their state—who were also the biggest litter bugs.
Not really knowing your audience, or forgetting your audience, is the biggest pitfall I’ve seen senior leaders and Boards make. Do the serious research.
Scientific polling
Quantitative research through scientific surveys allows us to hear what a representative demographic sample of the audience thinks. Qualitative research, or focus groups, does the same, diving more into why people feel the way they do and how to change their minds.
Public opinion research enables advocacy pros, despite the cliche, to meet people where they are in their thinking. That’s the starting off point for any advocacy effort. Also helpful is message testing, with traditional or AI methods.
Research is critical because we may think we know how other people think. That doesn’t mean it’s correct. So many of us are stuck in silos–in person and on social media—we can have tunnel vision. We forget sometimes there’s a whole other world of people who disagree with us or who have never heard of “health equity” or some political news event. Most people don’t follow the news. (Only 36% of U.S. adults say they follow the news all or most of the time.)
3. The elevator pitch: Finding your story and messaging
The fundamentals of effective public communication outlined by Aristotle haven’t changed in 2,000 years. The most effective arguments come from a credible speaker (ethos) telling a compelling story (pathos) and backing it up with evidence (logos).
Story over data
The human brain is wired to listen to and retain stories–not facts and stats. People often remember stories and are moved by them. Data is generally less memorable and less moving.
Presidents Biden and Trump have relied on economic data and stats to make their case the economy is better than people think it is. But people’s own lived experiences with inflation triumph over someone saying some version of “oh, all is fine. The economy is getting better.”
Story elements
What’s the authentic elevator pitch for your advocacy issue in 30 seconds? How would you describe something over dinner with friends? It’s two or three short bullets that speak to a storyline or theme.
- Person [or issue] → Obstacle or Problem → Values— (re)Solution
- Must haves: Credibility, emotional tie, evidence
4. Choose the right messenger(s).
What kind of person will your audience listen to/ have trust in? An oil executive would probably rather listen to another oil exec about climate change than an environmental activist. Perhaps a cultural influencer is better to deliver your message than you, even if your subject matter is science or tax policy.
Remember, TV and social video are discriminating mediums. What you as the spokesperson look like, how you sound, and your facial expressions are at least 60% of the message. The other 40% are the words you use.
A note on the authenticity of the messenger. Whoever is the messenger must have authenticity in what is said and how it’s said. People can smell a phony today a mile away.
Many different kinds of people, especially unexpected champions, must be disseminating your message. Ideally, you put together a deafening chorus of strange bedfellows and social proof, i.e., traditional coalition-building. If a Fortune 500 business, the NAACP, AARP, or NASCAR supports an issue, that lends credibility. Expand your sphere of influence by getting other-liked minded individuals or institutions on board with what you’re doing. Even give them an amount of buy-in you feel comfortable with. Just don’t be an island.
5. Using the megaphone and finding right media channels
Once you figure out your core message and messenger, creative content production begins. Whether the content is a social media video, podcast, YouTube show, news interview, digital ads, or a live speech before an audience, how the information is packaged helps determine its traction.
Megaphone is more important today, given how many places online and off your target audience gets their information. You’re not going to advertise on Facebook if your audience, in their 20s, is on TikTok. Business leaders are reading the Wall Street Journal or The Information--not doomscrolling (hopefully). The energy now is in (video) podcasting. Mainstream media coverage, while not as influential as it once was, can be helpful on AI platforms like OpenAI and Claude. Being “everywhere” or even dominating a niche sector isn’t easy in a media landscape shattered into a 1,000 chards of glass.
6. Must have: a campaign plan against the opposition and disinformation
It’s wise to anticipate the forces —opponents, disinformation manufacturers, reporters, information fatigue– that will try to yank you and your message off track. When it comes to public affairs and issue advocacy, it can be helpful to define your opposition early and often.
Find your opponent or competitor’s vulnerabilities. Do internet scrubs, on-the-ground investigations, speak to people where the opposition lives. Decide which vulnerabilities to take advantage of.
Disinformation management
Fact-checking is still perceived as the antidote to misinformation. But in today’s fractured media ecosystem, it’s more of an intellectual exercise than a meaningful intervention.
Cognitive science shows that people don’t change their minds based on facts alone. We cling to narratives that reinforce our identities, not ones that challenge them. A correction inserted three days after a false claim rarely penetrates as deeply as the original lie — especially when that lie confirms someone’s worldview.
Build counter-narratives of your own early — stories that are emotionally resonant but also — and this is key— that can define an issue first. Speed matters. This is about cutting a lie off at the knees before it can take hold. Defang it. Once you alert people that is coming, the weaponized story loses some of its power (i.e., believability).
7. Optics matter.
The ivory tower and intellectual crowd may roll their eyes at optics. But, like it or not, optics also communicate meaning beyond words. Body language, tone, props all matter. These non-verbal cues factor into public perception. And for all intents and purposes, perception is reality.
Good optics reinforce trust and legitimacy. Bad optics create mixed messages, backlash, or ridicule—even when the policy or cause is defensible on the merits.
A president plays golf while his country is at war. Terrible optics.
Same goes for the ubiquitous Mexican flag at an immigration/ anti-ICE rally in Los Angeles in 2025. That’s not the best way to win the U.S. immigration debate—using another country’s flag. One of the issues here is not about identity and pride in Mexican heritage, which was why protestors used that flag. That’s understandable and laudable. But the audience is the tens of millions of Americans not from Mexico watching across the country.
Additional note
Don’t be partisan. Find common ground, not for kumbaya but as a strategy. In 2018, healthcare drove a wave election, powered in part by a concerted, on-message campaign to protect the Affordable Care Act. The campaign included moderate-to-conservative voters. All of us had to—have to— deal with pre-existing conditions, premiums, and prescription costs. A majority of enrollees in the ACA marketplace live in congressional districts represented by a Republican.
Similarly, in the years since Roe vs. Wade fell, abortion rights have prevailed at the ballot box across multiple states, including in red states like Kentucky and Kansas. The advocates’ message was about the freedom for women to make their own decisions and not have the government telling them what to do.