Report Aims to Help Nonprofits Engage in Advocacy Efforts

The Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project has issued a report about how organizations can best leverage their limited financial and staff resources and assets to support nonprofit advocacy efforts.

The Report on the Listening Post Project Chicago Roundtable on Nonprofit Advocacy and Lobbying (9 pages, PDF) is based on a roundtable convened by Johns Hopkins to expand on the results of a 2007 Listening Post Project survey on nonprofit engagement in the public policy process. Conducted in partnership with the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest, the survey found that although nonprofits are widely engaged in efforts to influence public policies affecting them and the individuals they serve, they are often constrained in their advocacy efforts by a lack of adequate resources, including tight budgets and limited staff time and expertise.

In addition, the report found that advocacy efforts must directly involve nonprofits themselves, including the active use and dissemination of real-world stories and increased engagement of patrons in the lobbying process; intermediary organizations should play an active role in supporting the advocacy efforts of nonprofits by engaging members in mission-based advocacy and helping establish long-term funding streams for advocacy efforts; foundations and their boards must be better educated on the relationship between engaging in advocacy and achieving organizational mission; and the policy community needs to be better engaged by nonprofits and their intermediaries and educated about the impact of existing lobbying laws on nonprofit advocacy.

Moreover, concerns over perceived conflicts of interest pose a challenge to getting board members to emphasize advocacy. "There is much more business involvement in order to go after private and corporate funding, and now it's causing some potentially serious dilemmas on the advocacy front," Listening Post board chair Peter Goldberg told the Chronicle of Philanthropy, "because the agencies may want to take advocacy positions with respect to the role of government and government funding that can oftentimes be at variance with the generally held positions of the business community that their board members represent."