148 – Nonprofit Advocacy 101 – Yes You Can!

February 6, 2025

Episode #148: Nonprofit Advocacy 101 – Yes You Can! 

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast, Tobi addresses the critical need for nonprofits to engage in advocacy, especially amidst current uncertainties like federal funding chaos. She explains how advocacy’s role has diminished over the past 20 years and stresses the importance of nonprofit sectors educating legislators, constituents, and communities about their work.  

Offering a basic understanding of nonprofit advocacy versus lobbying, Tobi provides actionable steps and dispels myths around these activities. The episode also highlights the power of engaging volunteers in advocacy and introduces the 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report. Aimed at encouraging nonprofits to take confident advocacy actions, this episode sets the stage for a deeper dive into advocacy tactics in upcoming episodes! 

Nonprofit Advocacy – Episode Highlights

• [00:36] – Current Challenges in the Nonprofit Sector 
• [00:57] – The Importance of Nonprofit Advocacy 
• [03:54] – Engaging Volunteers in Advocacy 
• [17:36] – Navigating Uncertainty in the Nonprofit Sector 
• [23:20] – Understanding Nonprofit Advocacy and Lobbying 
• [24:03] – Nonprofit Advocacy Continuum 
• [26:51] – Nonprofit Advocacy vs. Lobbying 
• [38:21] – Best Practices for Nonprofit Advocacy 

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Impact Lab Membership  
• 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report – The Recruitment Edition 
• Independent Sector, Nonprofit Advocacy & Civic Engagement Research 
• US Internal Revenue Service – Lobbying 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #077 – Engaging Communities in Social Change with Vichi Jagannathan 

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #148 Transcript: Nonprofit Advocacy 101 – Yes You Can!

Tobi: Well, hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and things are crazy over here. It is January and there’s just been a fair amount of chaos. Federal funding is stopped and then getting restarted. All kinds of confusion. It’s been crazy to say the least. And What it’s really called to the foreground is our need to be advocates for our sector. 

Whether you’re here in the U.S. and worried about your future funding, or you’re living in another country and you’re okay right now, it still is a good time. To make sure that our legislators, our lawmakers, our constituents, the people we serve, our volunteers, our communities, that everybody that has a stake in what we do understands the importance of our work. 

 And nonprofit advocacy has been on the downturn lately. In fact, in the last 20 years, it’s pretty much about half of the nonprofits that used to engage in advocacy now engage in advocacy on a regular basis. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about data from the independent sector around this, but I think it’s a wakeup call to us to Start to make sure that people know about our work. 

Sometimes it’s the best kept secret. Only the people that work with us or benefit from our work are people that understand what we do. So, I always like to say, people are down on what they’re not up on. And if we don’t keep people educated and we don’t advocate for our needs as a sector, such an essential sector, I mean, we pick up the pieces when the government can’t step in or won’t step in. We are the safety net.  

And whether you’re working in direct service or working in arts and culture or even in advocacy, your work is so important to building and maintaining a society where we can all have better lives, whatever you do in your nonprofit. I wanted to talk today about a little bit about advocacy, and I call this episode Nonprofit Advocacy 101 Yes You Can, because I think a lot of people think they can’t, and there’s a lot of misinformation about it. 

advocacy and lobbying around the sector that I want to clear up a little bit today. This is sort of part one. I’m going to do multiple; I think I’m going to do at least three episodes on advocacy. This one’s really about what we can do and what we can’t do depending on our organization types to dispel some of the myths and maybe give you a little bit more confidence around launching into some advocacy for your own nonprofit and your own cause impact area. I also think it’s just important to engage our volunteers and advocacy. 

They are the people that know our organizations. the most intimately, aside from the people who work for us. And even the people who receive services from us, our volunteers, really know what’s happening behind the scenes. 

Our volunteers know more than our donors know, for the most part. Our donors, even our major donors, maybe go on a tour from time to time, but they don’t really understand the intimate workings of our organizations. Your volunteers really do, and they are very powerful as advocates. I have worked in organizations where I’ve engaged volunteers as advocates and trained them as advocates. 

I’ve also myself been a volunteer in an organization, an advocacy organization, where I was doing advocacy work. And so, it’s something that’s very natural to engage volunteers in. Now, I think the other thing that happens is organizations think that, well, we’re not an advocacy organization. We’re not a quote unquote advocacy or we’re not here to advocate for a particular policy or legislation. 

But you are here to advocate for the sustainability of the sector. You’re here to advocate for funding. You’re here to advocate for the specific cause impact areas that you know so much about. You’re also here to advocate for the rights of volunteers and your workforce. So, there’s so many areas that even if you’re not or don’t consider yourself a quote unquote advocacy organization, there are things that you need to advocate for. And I would also like to point out, because people often hear the word advocacy and then they think partisanship, advocacy does not necessarily need to be for a certain political party. A point of view is a point of view. 

Now certain parties might support that point of view, others don’t, you don’t know until you get out and start talking to people. You can make some assumptions, but you really, when you’re doing advocacy work, you want to work all sides of the aisle and, or both sides of the aisle, if you’re doing legislative advocacy, but there’s other ways to do advocacy as well. 

So, I’m just trying in this episode, because there’s such a big need for, for us to get out in front of, whether you’re here in the U.S. or in other countries, it’s just so important for us to get out in front of this seeming wave or uncertainty of, and it’s been a while now that the, the, the nonprofit sector has gotten knocked around a bit. 

Whether we’re a political pawn or people are just plain mean and don’t understand us. I’m not sure what it is, but it is up to us to educate others on what we do and the importance of our work. And so, we’ve got to take that seriously. And again, I think volunteers are our greatest asset when it comes to getting out and talking about what we do. 

Volunteers are so credible in their messaging. So, let’s talk about advocacy a little bit, nonprofit advocacy. I’m going to give you some basics so that you can feel confident as well as some resources so that you feel like you can take this forward. So, The other thing I wanted to note before we get into this is our volunteer management progress report for 2025 is now out. 

Thank you to everybody who participated in the survey. Thanks to all our distribution partners. It’s the recruitment edition this year. And it’s ready for primetime, so you can download our free 52-page report. Yes, it is 52 pages this year, to get all the tactics, trends, and challenges facing volunteer involving organizations. 

We also share salary data for leaders of volunteers and I did do a few crosstabs so you can do a little bit more granular analysis of what the salary trends are looking like over and I did some trend work over the last few years when we’ve Asked about salaries, so you’ll be able to see how it’s changed over the last eight years or so to get your complimentary copy go to volpro.net/volunteer-management-progress-report 

There’s so much deep information in that report. It’s so exciting to be able to share this. I don’t know why I didn’t do recruitment earlier. It’s been a perennial challenge for everybody, but I really did enjoy it, and I talked a little bit about it last week on the podcast, so you can listen to that as well. 

If you want to learn more about some of the opportunities and challenges that I noted in detail, check that out. Anyway, 101. Yes, you can. There is nothing prohibiting you. With the recent threats to federal funding, cuts to nonprofits, foreign aid, scientific research, et cetera, people are on edge, and I understand it. 

My husband’s an academic and we’ve had long conversations over the past few weeks about the impact on people’s livelihoods and the impact on science. If we don’t have funding for and the impact on nonprofits and the safety net, the large swath of employees that are employed by nonprofits all over the country, the people who benefit from their work, it’s just a little bit crazy. 

And having run federally funded programs myself in the past, I know that my programs would not be able to continue without that funding if we were to have lost it back then. So. We can stay stressed, and we may end up staying stressed, but we can do more too. We can take positive action. We can advocate for our needs to those who can influence policy, and we can build support in the public. 

And the court of public opinion is still very, very strong. That’s, that’s a strong way to build a point of view, and people, politicians, and people who make policy are influenced by public opinion. And so we want to make sure we’re, uh, educating people and advocating for what our needs are to a wide variety of stakeholders. 

But many nonprofits are hesitant to engage in external advocacy. We talk a lot in VolunteerPro around internal advocacy and buy in and leadership and coworkers and all that change management. But this is external advocacy we’re talking about. And organizations hesitate because they fear, sometimes they fear they’ll break some law or rule, and I’m going to talk about what the laws and rules are today so you’ll know, and I’ll give you a resource so you can do some background checking and fact checking, or they fear they’ll alienate people, some of their followers if they take a specific position. 

And as I mentioned before, some organizations say, will say, well, advocacy isn’t part of our work. But I would argue that advocacy is part of all of our work because we need to make sure that people understand and can support us and can support the points of view, uh, that we hold. Again, your work as people who are working in cause impact areas in a wide variety of organizations, you know better than anybody else why you do what you do in the way you do it, and what the community needs is that you are meeting. 

You are the experts, and so you are best positioned to speak to these things, and we can’t leave it up to People who don’t know your work to interpret your work for you. You need to interpret it for folks and educate them on it. You are uniquely positioned to speak to the needs of your clients, your constituents, your causes, and if you don’t do it, no one will. 

Or as I said before, people are down on what they’re not up on and people will make up stories about what you do, and we can’t have that happening. In fact, according to research conducted by the independent sector, about half as many nonprofits are engaged in advocacy or lobbying as they were 20 years ago. 

So, it’s interesting that in 2023, about 31 percent or a third of nonprofits were reporting engaging in advocacy or lobbying over the last five years. And back in 2000, about three quarters, 74 percent reported that they were engaged in lobbying or advocacy work. So, we’ve seen a major drop, and this is something that is important. 

It’s essential to our work to continue to educate people. Let’s talk about why people aren’t advocating. One reason is they don’t understand the law, which I’m going to talk about in a minute. Another reason is fear, is fear of losing support. And I want to address this fear first off. Yes, your organization needs to find a balance of messaging that aligns with your mission and values, and that appeals to your stakeholders, whether they be your clients or customers, patrons, employees, volunteers, funders, the community, the neighborhood, et cetera. 

But it’s not always easy. And your organization will risk, when you take a stand on something, you will risk alienating one or all these groups, or not the entire group, but people within the group. But think about it this way. Your organization always has a point of view. There was a point of view when it started. 

Now, your point of view may have evolved. You may embrace more diversity and equity in your organization in terms of your workforce, your volunteer base. You may have evolved. your logical model or your strategy for getting something done. So, for example, you might be more focused on harm reduction. Let’s say you’re working in with folks with addiction, you might have been no tolerance, zero tolerance organization, and over the years you might have evolved to be a harm reduction point of view. 

That is a point of view that has evolved in the world of addiction. So, there’s, there’s lots of ways that we’re evolving as organizations, but we do have a point of view. We have a point of view about the need for our services. If we’re volunteer involving organizations, we have a point of view that the community is important in our work. 

So, to say that an organization doesn’t have a point of view is just not correct. So, most of the people that are supporting you already know your point of view and they already agree with it or understand how important you are and are willing to support it, whether they agree with you exactly or not. 

We can’t be afraid to assert our points of view. And in fact, right now, in terms of building community around our organizations, which is important right now. We need advocates of all shapes and sizes and colors and roles, and we need a diverse range of folks that are supporting our organizations. 

It’s important to be able to give folks a touchstone and clarity around what your point of view is, what are your values, what’s your mission, what do you believe, and now’s the time to communicate those things. So, you can bring your supporters closer, you’re, you, a diverse tapestry of people. You want to bring them closer right now because we have strength in numbers. 

And when we’re doing advocacy work, the more people we have working together, the more powerful our advocacy. And so that’s the first thing to draw people to you is to have to express a clear statement about where you stand, what you believe in, what your point of view is. So, it’s important and we can’t be afraid of that because in the end our organizations already have a point of view but we’re just being clearer about it. 

So, that’s the first thing I wanted to talk about. Now, it’s hard to navigate uncertainty, and we are in a very uncertain time right now, I would say, in our sector. I don’t think that is deniable at this point. But there’s a lot of ways to navigate this uncertainty, and I wanted to share some of those with you as well. 

First off, as I’ve kind of just intimated, accept that you will lose some people. Think about it this way. If there is a threat of losing funding, as there was this week, it was a real threat that, um, federal funding was paused for a minute, then there was a lawsuit, and, and now it’s back on. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. 

But you can choose, if you want, to not take a stand and not advocate and risk losing all your funding because you’re afraid to lose a few supporters. That’s the trade off, really. And I know this is kind of a hard truth. People are like, are you kidding me? Well, yeah. Sometimes, you can’t please all people, most of the time, you can’t please all people. 

But if people support your organization and you explain your position and your point of view, and what you’re advocating for, and you make it clear how that is related to your mission, and folks won’t support you on that, then you got to wonder if they ever supported you in the first place. Especially in volunteer services, we work, you know, we, we kind of suffer from people pleasing. 

We are people pleasers. We want to make sure all our volunteers are happy. We want to make sure if we’re in development, we want to make sure all our funders are happy. We want to make sure everybody’s happy, but that’s just not realistic in today’s world. So, the best thing to do is to go back to your touchstone, back to your mission, back to your values, back to your vision of what you think is right and how your organization is aligned and what it plans to do to bring about a better life for people. 

That’s what we’re in it to win it for in the sector. So that’s the first thing to navigate this, is to accept that you’re not going to agree with everybody and you’re not going to be able to please everybody. The second way to navigate uncertainty so that you can build up some courage to advocate is to, again, stay focused on your organization’s mission, vision, and values. 

If they’re not clear, now’s the time to clarify them. If you don’t have a set of value statements, especially around volunteers and those you work with, create them. Anything that’s not clear, refresh it. And this is best done, uh, through work with leadership and boards. So, if you’re not in that position to clarify those things, ask, start asking for clarity. 

So that’s another thing you can do to navigate uncertainty, to make sure you understand these things. The third thing is Take a stand for those you serve. There’s a difference between taking a stand for your organization, which we do need to do, but also taking a stand for those you serve. There’s a subtle difference there. 

And taking a stand for your organization is really making sure you have sustainability, but the goal is transforming the lives of the people you want to serve. And so, it’s better, I think, to talk about those, the impacts you make in the community. That’s the place you want to stay focused. So, take a stand for those people, those communities, those animals, if you’re working in animal welfare, those beings that you help, take a stand for them. 

Focus on your big why of your organization. Why do you exist? Do you exist to help build a better world and a better world for who, right? Or for whom? Stay focused on that. It’s, it’s powerful and when uncertainty comes along, if you just go back to who you’re here to help, it gives you strength and courage to keep going. 

The fourth thing is to join and build coalitions with people who have like interests and invite. others to be part of this process, like your volunteers, for example. There’s strength in numbers. There’s also social proof. It will bring more people to you because people are, are seeing people in action. 

Organizations in the independent research  research, and I’ll, I’ll put some links or a link to the, that research page in the show notes, but the independent sector research also found that organizations that were involved in coalitions were more likely to engage in advocacy and lobbying. And so, again, strengthen numbers, right?

And then the fifth thing is, once you get moving on advocating for something, a certain point of view, a certain action. Keep everybody in the loop. You can keep people in the loop via social media, by offering centralized talking points, by updating your group of advocates, and I will, in a future podcast episode, talk about how to build a volunteer advocacy program. 

So, I’ll get to the practical, but I’m laying the groundwork right now in this episode so that we all understand nonprofit advocacy on the fundamental level. So that’s just a little bit of advice on, and call to action around, we shouldn’t be afraid of getting involved in advocacy. Now let’s talk about the law. 

Let’s talk about the law. There are a variety of ways to get involved and engage in nonprofit advocacy. And you can choose, as an organization, what kinds of activities make sense to you along what I call the nonprofit advocacy continuum. So, again, I’ve done some work back in the day in my career, across my career as a volunteer and as a paid staff person doing advocacy work in organizations that were considered advocacy organizations. 

But again, your organization doesn’t have to be an advocacy organization to engage in advocacy, right? So, on the left-hand side of the continuum is education. So, education is basically engaging in nonpartisan advocacy. analysis, study, or research, and sharing information about a cause, mission, or issue. So, you can engage in research, you can share your research with others, you can share your knowledge with others, that’s what education is all about. 

And if you think about it, the Volunteer Management Progress Report that I mentioned at the top of the podcast, that’s a type of advocacy. When I create that report, I’m hoping people will act because of, considering the questions I ask and the results that we get. So, it’s a way of advocating. And it’s a way of educating. 

This, the sort of middle range of an advocacy continuum is advocacy, right? So, arguing in favor of a cause, idea, policy, or course of action. And advocacy can be internal or external. For our purposes, we’re talking about external advocacy. On the far right of the advocacy continuum is lobbying. And that is attempting to influence specific legislation at the local, state, or federal level via direct asks or grassroots organizing. 

And so, lobbying is about making a specific ask to support a specific piece of legislation. It is very specific to that. So, it’s different in some ways than advocacy, than general advocacy. And across these three levels in the continuum, from education to advocacy to lobbying, there’s public engagement going on. 

So, we are recruiting allies and a base of support to help us with this advocacy. And we’re empowering people to speak on our, our organization or our cause or our mission’s behalf. So, that’s a little bit about what the nonprofit advocacy continuum looks like on a basic level. The point I want to make is that your organization can choose. 

what it wants to do. There are lots of ways to get to a result, and so there’s no one way to do this. And in fact, the more diverse our ways of helping people understand our points of view and what So, let’s talk a little bit more about nonprofit advocacy versus lobbying. I think most of us understand the education piece, but nonprofit advocacy refers to efforts by nonprofits to influence public opinion, policies, and systems to create positive social change. 

So, we’ll include activities such as raising awareness about issues, educating the public and policymakers, mobilizing supporters, conducting research and publishing reports, engaging in grassroots campaigns. So, some of these I would call education, not necessarily advocacy in general. Advocacy is broader and does not necessarily involve influencing legislation directly, and it is unrestricted for 501c3 nonprofits. 

Now, 501c3 is a nonprofit designation in the U.S. Other people in other countries will have different designations and different rules around this. But in the U. S., advocating, advocacy work, is not. restricted. And who is it restricted by; you may wonder. It’s the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS is the organization or department of the U.S. government, the federal government, that decides whether we can hold, our organization can hold a charity status, a tax-exempt charity status. And so, to keep that charity status, we don’t want to get in trouble with the IRS, right? So, let’s talk about lobbying, because lobbying is something that can get you in trouble with the IRS but only in certain circumstances.  

So, let’s look at this. So, a 501c3 organization or nonprofit may engage in some lobbying but not quote unquote too much lobbying activity according to the IRS. If it engages in too much lobbying activity, it risks a loss of tax-exempt status. So, let’s talk about what this means. 

First, lobbying is a type of advocacy that involves attempting to influence legislation. Okay? So, it includes communicating with lawmakers to support or oppose specific bills, encouraging others to contact legislators about proposed laws, providing research or testimony to legislative bodies, and You can as an and 5 0 1 C3 can engage in lobbying but with legal limits. 

Now, there are other types of organizations like 5 0 1 C fours that can do engage in more lobbying. They have less restrictions on lobbying, and some organizations will have two different arms to their organ, two different charities. One’s a 5 0 1 C3, one’s a 5 0 1 C four, so that they have a lobbying arm. 

Now, in terms of what too much lobbying is, and I would note this as well, sometimes people think lobbying is any time you meet with a legislator, a lawmaker, or congressperson, or whether local, state, federal, they think that, well, I can’t, we can’t meet with any of those folks. And that’s just not true. You can meet with legislators to talk about an issue. 

You can meet with legislators to talk about your organization and what it does. You can meet with legislators to talk about general concerns. When it’s defined as lobbying, it’s when you’re talking about a proposed bill and you’re asking them to oppose or support a specific piece of legislation. That’s when it becomes lobbying. 

Okay, so the IRS defines lobbying as direct law. It is communicating with legislators to influence specific legislation or encouraging the public to contact legislators about specific legislation. So 501c3 organizations can engage in lobbying within what they call quote unquote unsubstantial limits. So, this is measured in a couple different ways, and I’m getting really into the weeds. 

I’m going to link to this so you can get way into the weeds if you want too on this. But in general, unsubstantial means less than 5% of your total activities. These total activities will include time, effort, and money spent on lobbying. So there’s, there’s tracking and reporting. If you decide to get involved with logging, you need to track and report it. 

I’m going to link to this in the, um, show notes so you can. Look at all the details in more detail. How about that? It’s one of those days y’all it’s Friday night and I’m here Friday evening recording this podcast and enjoying myself. There you go So let’s take a quick break from my discussion about nonprofit advocacy basics. I’m going to get my head straight We will be right back.  

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Okay, we’re back with my discussion of nonprofit advocacy basics. Gang, like I said before the break, it’s Friday night. I’m a little bit jumbled, but I hope you’ve been finding this helpful and inspirational. 

To know that you don’t have to sit around, and if your organization is not feeling supported, or you feel like there’s the wrong narrative going on about your work in the world at large, it’s time to step up and start doing some advocacy. We can take control of the narrative that’s going on around our organizations. 

So, let’s talk about stuff that’s not considered lobbying. Now again, your organization, if only five percent of everything you do in terms of time, money, effort, and is asking for specific legislation in any given year, then you’re fine. But there’s also plenty of other activities you can get involved in and involved with your volunteers in that are not considered lobbying at all, and so you totally don’t need to worry about it. 

You can do any of these advocacy actions without triggering any lobbying restrictions whatsoever. So, let’s look at these. I’ve got a few here for you. One is public Education. So, publishing research, reports, blog posts, podcasts, interviews. We used to hold conferences and summits all day to educate the public and our volunteers on, on the issues. 

There’s all kinds of ways to engage in public education. So plenty, plenty of ways, infographics, any way you can educate people on a particular topic or issue. The second thing is nonpartisan voter engagement. So, voter registration drives, candidate forums, there’s all kinds of things. Civic engagement is not lobbying. 

It does not trigger lobbying restrictions. So obviously, it’s good to have as many people voting as possible because that’s the way our democracy runs well, right? We want to get as many perspectives as we can. So, voter engagement is not considered lobbying. Another thing that’s not considered lobbying are policy discussions. 

So, meeting with lawmakers to provide neutral information without taking a specific position on specific legislation. So, what does that look like? Well, you’re talking about impact. You’re talking about what’s impacting and what you know about your organization’s way of doing business, about what you’ve learned, about the results you get, about the methods you use. 

You’re speaking about the impact and the needs of the community you serve and the consequences maybe of some, you could even talk about consequences of certain legislation or a certain policy on the people that you serve. So, there’s lots of ways to have these policy discussions. and meetings with lawmakers. 

Litigation and legal advocacy are not considered lobbying. So, filing lawsuits to influence policy like was done this week in terms of the president’s executive orders around, you know, freezing federal funding, et cetera, those lawsuits are not considered lobbying. Their legal advocacy is used to influence policy and to call attention to whether something they believe is legal or illegal. 

Then the fifth thing around what’s not considered lobbying is advocating for regulations or executive actions. Now, executive actions, like executive orders, lobbying only applies to legislation, not administrative policies. So, any executive order that’s put out by a president Is not a piece of legislation and therefore we can advocate, and we can discuss that, and we can engage in advocating for change around any regulation or executive action. 

So that’s interesting because I have a feeling. And we already know, just based on the first few weeks of this year, there are a lot of executive orders coming out. We shouldn’t be afraid to speak up about those if they are helpful to us or not. Right? So, there’s some best practices you can Take to stay compliant and make sure that you’re not triggering those lobbying restrictions and you’re keeping within the letter of the law and the guidelines, or not guidelines, requirements of the IRS to keep your charity status. And one is to track your lobbying expenses and activities. Keeping records of time, money, and resources that are used for lobbying in the way that the IRS Defines lobbying. 

I talked about some organizations that will form a separate type of organization to conduct lobbying, a 501c4. Some organizations will set up a separate entity. But for your purposes, it’s probably not necessary. Another thing you want to do is train your staff, your board members, your volunteers in advocacy versus lobbying rules, just so everybody knows. 

what’s going on. Because you also want to make sure everyone feels comfortable in the direction you’re headed. And you want to make sure that they’re, they’re not doing something they shouldn’t be doing as well. But really, it’s about just helping people feel comfortable and understand. Because most people do not, most people will say nonprofits can’t lobby. 

And you’ll be like, okay, well, do you know what lobbying is defined as? Do you know that there is a certain percentage that nonprofits can engage in lobbying? So, those are things that most people don’t know, so it’s good to educate them on. And then remain nonpartisan. That’s another way to stay compliant. 

501c3s cannot endorse or oppose candidates. Now, you can endorse or oppose policies, and candidates are supporting a range of policies, right? And so, stick to the policy, stick to the issue, stick to the community need, and stay away from endorsing particular political candidates. You can certainly have conversations with political candidates. You can, you can do policy discussions, you can do panels and invite a variety of political candidates or lawmakers to speak on a specific issue and share what their point of view is. There are all kinds of ways to engage in this, but it really is not about endorsing or opposing any candidates. 

Stick to the issues and you’ll be fine. So, I hope that’s given you good grounding in Nonprofit Advocacy 101. Yes, you can. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. You can do this. Now, your organization needs to decide about how it wants to move forward. But again, I would argue that whether you consider yourself an advocacy organization, Every organization, every nonprofit, every volunteering organization. 

Now I know with, it’s a little trickier if you work in a government organization. It’s a lot trickier, actually, having worked for a regulatory organization. I know. But if you’re working for a nonprofit, Start to have the conversation, how are we going to engage our volunteers in advocacy work on behalf of our cause, our mission, our organization, but mostly on behalf of the people we serve, because they are the ones who ultimately will be harmed by a lack of funding or policy decisions that have either unintended or intended consequences. 

And we are the people that know best how these policies are going to play out. And so, it’s important for us to get out in front of things. It’s also important for us to advocate for the sector. And for the fair treatment of our volunteers. Those are other areas of advocacy that I think are really important. 

So, I hope this has been helpful. In my next episode in the series, I’m going to talk about nonprofit advocacy tactics and give you a whole checklist of different things you can do. I talked about a few things. today, but I have a whole laundry list. So, stick with us. I’ll be here next week, same time, same place on The Volunteer Nation, where we’ll talk about nonprofit advocacy again. 

So, I hope this has been helpful. If it has, please share it with a friend and give us a rating. We love five-star ratings. So, all right, take care. Have a fantastic rest of your week, and we’ll see you next week on The Volunteer Nation.