149 – Nonprofit Advocacy Strategies – A Checklist

February 13, 2025

Episode #149: Nonprofit Advocacy Strategies – A Checklist 

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast, host Tobi Johnson provides an in-depth discussion on nonprofit advocacy strategies. Tobi talks about the immediate need for nonprofit advocacy and shares five key strategies to effectively engage in advocacy efforts. These strategies include public awareness and education, media and digital advocacy, grassroots mobilization, engaging policymakers without lobbying, and legal and policy advocacy.  

The episode emphasizes the importance of involving volunteers in advocacy efforts and provides practical tips on how to engage and train volunteers as advocates! 

Advocacy Strategies – Episode Highlights

• [00:32] – The Importance of Nonprofit Advocacy 
• [01:12] – Nonprofit Advocacy Tactics and Strategies 
• [06:28] – Public Awareness and Education 
• [12:48] – Media and Digital Advocacy 
• [19:21] – Grassroots Mobilization 
• [26:13] – Engaging Policymakers Without Lobbying 
• [30:41] – Legal and Policy Advocacy 

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Impact Lab Membership 
• 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report – The Recruitment Edition 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #148 – Nonprofit Advocacy – Yes You Can! 
• 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 #149 Transcript: Nonprofit Advocacy Strategies – A Checklist 

Tobi: Welcome everybody to another episode of the volunteer nation podcast. Tobi Johnson here to talk more about nonprofit advocacy. There is so much need for it right now. Our sector absolutely needs some champions to step up and talk about what we do, advocate for funding, sustainability, policies that are pro volunteer and pro nonprofit. And just to make sure that we are Being able to influence the narrative around our sector. 

I think it’s important that we are out there, absolutely, because we are the experts in what we do. And so, today I want to talk about nonprofit advocacy tactics and strategies. There’s basically five nonprofit advocacy strategies that I want to share today, along with some tactics under each. So it’s kind of like a checklist, is what I’m sharing today. 

I’ll give you some ideas about things you might want to do and take on, particularly with your volunteers. And remember, during last week’s episode 148 of the Volunteer Nation podcast, I talked about Nonprofit Advocacy 101, Yes You Can. And I gave you. the definitions of advocacy versus lobbying. And if you’re in the U S I’ll link to it again in the show notes here, but I offered some information from the IRS about what lobbying and advocacy is considered and how to stay compliant and not lose your tax exempt status. 

You can engage in a limited amount of advocacy 501 C three. So there’s lots of detail. In that basics episode that I shared last week. So check that out. I’ll link to it in the show notes Just to give you a grounding in what we’re talking about. I talk about my non profit advocacy continuum of education Advocacy and then lobbying and remember I’ll just repeat it here. 

Just remember your organization gets to choose how it wants to influence others, how it wants to educate others, and how it wants to advocate for particular policies and issues and approaches and actions around what you know best. And there are so many different ways. to help influence as well as educate the public and lawmakers and the media, et cetera, about your key issues. 

And today, I hope I can share some really interesting ideas, some things that you may not have thought of. I also want to Reiterate as I talked about in the last episode that want to put a plug in for volunteers because Volunteers are some of our best advocates. They are so intimately Involved with what we do, especially our regular volunteers that are coming in each month Or even each week. 

They know so much about what we do. They are so credible as ambassadors and spokespeople That we would be remiss in our organizations to not invite them to be part of our advocacy efforts I have been working in advocacy both as an employee in an advocacy organization, but also as a volunteer myself. 

And it was a joy to be able to speak to legislators, to be able to speak to the media, be able to speak at house parties about my own experiences and why the cause meant so much to me and why I wanted to support a specific course of action. And this is something that many volunteers are proud to do, especially those that are most passionate about what you do. 

So it, we would be remiss if we did not involve and invite volunteers to become some of our best advocates. And in my next episode, I’m going to talk about how to set up an advocacy program with our volunteers. So I’ll get down to that, the brass tacks on that next week. But this week, I just wanted to give you a laundry list of different ideas for how you might advocate. 

So today we’re going to talk about non profit advocacy strategies. And as I said, there’s about five different buckets of strategies that you might think about. I’ll tell you about those right now so we can get a kind of a preview of what we’re going to be talking about. One obviously is public awareness and education. 

We talked about that last week. A second is media and digital advocacy. That’s an area to shape public perception and public, the court of public opinion is strong. Our legislators listen to what the public says sometimes. But if there’s a broad feeling around something, often they may change their position on things. 

So we need to make sure we’re advocating within the public. Grassroots mobilization, we’ll talk about that. And then engaging policy makers. Without lobbying and legal and policy advocacy. So those are the five areas, strategies of nonprofit advocacy that we’re going to talk about today. So, again, you have so many, such a wide variety of advocacy strategies to raise awareness. 

to influence policy and to drive social change. I would not say that all of them are activists. I, sometimes people think advocacy and activism are the same thing. Not necessarily. They are not. Advocacy is not the same thing as lobbying. Although they are similar, as we talked about last week, so there’s a lot of misinformation about what these activities are. 

And so I want to make sure we all understand what they are. So let’s talk about public awareness and education as a non profit advocacy. strategy. First off, and I mentioned this last week, is publishing reports and research. So providing data to support policy recommendations. It’s so important to speak the language of whoever’s mind you’re trying to change. 

We can either create our own industry reports, like we do with the Volunteer Management a progress report, or we can synthesize others research, academic research, for example, research to practice briefs we can create, or just research briefs. So there’s a lot of ways to publish reports and research, but that’s something that volunteers can get involved with helping you. 

Hosting webinars or panels, so educating the public and stakeholders on key issues. If you are an expert in your field cause, impact area, and either the public, legislators, volunteers, the people you serve, any of your stakeholder group, your funders, they may be interested in what are the upcoming trends, what are the changes, what is research saying, but also why are the issues the important issues? 

What’s behind them? What are the impacts you’re seeing and why have these evolved into an issue or what, what is happening in the trend line of that issue? These are all things you can share on a webinar or panel in person or an online webinar. Storytelling and case studies. is another way to raise public awareness and educate sharing real life examples to highlight the impact of policies. 

Now next week, I’m going to talk a little bit more on messaging and give you a framework on messaging and how you can train volunteers to tell their story. But I can share that back in the day I was working, I was volunteering for a healthcare advocacy organization and at one point became a part of their board. 

And when I would go to house parties where we would share, you know, we’d have a big potluck, we’d invite people, we’d invite people to make a donation, we’d also talk about the issues and educate people about the issues. And I would often share my story, which was about a time when I did not have health insurance. 

And we were a healthcare advocacy organization, so I did not have health insurance and I ended up in the hospital because I didn’t have, I had a kidney infection that could have been taken care of with a simple 5 bottle of an antibiotic. And I never would have been in the hospital, it, you know, the amount of that hospital stay was ridiculous, how expensive hospital stays can be. 

So all of that could have been prevented if I would have had health insurance. and could have gone to see a doctor. And that’s something that I, that story I would share and talk about why health insurance is so important to so many people. And then I would start to talk about other people who had more intense things happen to them. 

Then I would talk about the greater impact on society, on the impact on health insurance rates, on because of uncompensated care, et cetera, et cetera. So I would weave my story into the larger, Issue area which was let’s make sure everybody has some affordable health care and everybody needs health care And it also helps our greater society. 

So that’s an example of storytelling is so important in advocacy work because we We don’t want to just listen to numbers, we want to hear people’s stories. And when we connect story to story, person to person, people can start to see the human side of the issue that we’re promoting or the solution that we’re promoting to an issue. 

Another area of public awareness and education is creating fact sheets and infographics that where we simplify complex problems into a simpler way of understanding them so that A broader and wider range of people can really understand what we’re talking about. And I’ve seen advocacy groups do coloring books, and cartoons, and posters, and I have a poster that’s from way back in the early 90s, late 80s, during the AIDS, beginning of the AIDS epidemic. 

And it was a poster that was done with like a screen print. So it’s a piece of art. So some people will do advocacy campaigns with art. Any kind of signage, even when we’re doing grassroots activism, signage is another way of creating art and sharing our message. So there’s a ton of different posters. 

There’s just a ton of different ways to educate the public. But the important thing is that we are helping people understand the issue more than they did before they spoke with us or before they encountered our information. So that’s one way. So that that’s the first bucket is public awareness and education. 

An example might be that a healthcare nonprofit publishes a report on food insecurity and its impact on children’s health. So that might be an example of public awareness and education. So you can see how sometimes we think when you use the word advocacy, it seems controversial in so many organizations. 

But it really should be part of what we do on an everyday basis, no? And Right now, we really need to have a more purposeful and, and, and with good intent advocacy efforts because basically, we are not doing well when it comes to the battle in the court of public opinion. We have legislators who, or, or politicians who are interested in taking our funding away. 

And so, we’ve got to strengthen our advocacy efforts. But there, again, is a wide range of what you can choose to do. And some of it we should be doing anyway, but I’m hoping this will encourage you to do some more, and do some with your volunteers. All right, let’s look at the second bucket for non profit advocacy strategies, and that is media and digital advocacy. 

So, clearly, probably the first thing that comes to mind is social media campaigns. You can create a hashtag for your issue or campaign. You can do live streams. You can do challenges to, let’s say you have a group of volunteers and you’re asking everybody to post on a certain day, to mobilize support. You can send out petitions via social, there’s lots of ways to use social media. 

You can ask people to share different creative graphics that you’ve created or messaging. So social media is a great way to do digital advocacy. Another way to engage the media and the press is through op eds and letters to the editor. So if you can write a persuasive article to a newspaper or a magazine and get it published, sometimes you can build public influence that way. 

Interestingly enough, you don’t necessarily have to be the person writing the op ed. I actually coordinated four op eds for when I was working in healthcare advocacy right after the Affordable Care Act was passed, and I worked with the mayors of all four cities, the big cities in Tennessee, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis, and I met with each of the mayors. 

And asked them, or with their staff, actually I didn’t meet with the mayor of Chattanooga because the mayor of Knoxville and their staff already did it for me. But once I started meeting with staff and asking, hey, I have an idea, I’m wondering if we could all print, if you would be interested in printing joint op eds where you print your own op ed in your local newspaper and if we can get the newspapers to print them on the same day. 

And it actually worked. Each of those four mayors and each of those key city newspapers were interested in printing those op eds and the op eds were about in support of the Affordable Care Act and educating the public on a particular, uh, on their opportunity to get access to affordable health care and health, health insurance in this case. 

And so that was a, uh, that was a, an example of. using the media and working with the media to share an idea. That’s what op eds are for, is for people to share ideas. Now, the, the newspaper doesn’t necessarily need to endorse your idea. They’re not, they’re just sharing. They’re, they’re using the medium of their, their media. 

They’re usually it’s newspaper or a magazine to, to share. different perspectives from the community that they serve. You can also do public service announcements or PSAs. That could be videos, radio messages, etc. I’ve also gone on radio shows and on TV shows and been interviewed. And so outreach to the media, it’s not dead. 

We think social media is everything, but people watch traditional media still. I remember going in Memphis. I went on the TV show there. It’s very nerve wracking. I don’t recommend it to everybody, but you’ve got to have your talking points. down and you’ve got to be able to speak clearly and you’ve got to look at that camera and you’ve got to be okay with that. 

But also radio interviews. I’ve had folks show up at events I’ve been at and, and they come over and interview me. I’ve also gone on radio shows where it’s pre scheduled. So it’s important if you’re involving your volunteers and you, you are preparing to do advocacy work that you understand and are able to communicate well the key issues. 

And so we’ll talk next week about that and how to build that program and how to build messaging. But your messaging has to be super clear and you have to be able to do it on the fly. I remember I was doing a training once, I think it was in Flint, Michigan, and I flew in and I get airsick easily. So I have to take Dramamine every time I fly. 

And when I land, I’m usually a little bit groggy. And this day, I did not get to fly in the night before so I didn’t get to rest and I was still kind of groggy from Dramamine and I showed up and the, um, media was there at that moment and immediately came over to me and, and there was a microphone in my face and I had to say something. 

So, it’s important that we are trained really well if we’re going to be speaking to the media. That we’re authorized, obviously, to speak to the media. But our volunteers can be really powerful and credible spokespeople if we’re willing to train them and get them trained up. But, be that as it may, PSAs, but also media interviews, and also sometimes on the fly. 

You can also do email and text action alerts, sending messages to supporters urging them to take action. So you’ve probably seen a lot of this if you’re following different organizations. You’ll get action alerts. The only thing I would recommend on this one is to not overburden some organizations and some politicians. 

They send a little too much, I think, too many text messages, too many emails. Don’t do that with your nonprofit. Don’t become that organization that people just can’t stand because they’ll just unfollow you. But if there’s something legitimate that you want to share with people, and if they opt in, then, um, it’s a great way. 

The other thing you can do is, Set up a WhatsApp or a Slack channel for your volunteers and anybody who’s in your action network and when action needs to be taken, you can, Hey, we’re going to write, we’re going to do a letter writing campaign, or we’ve got a petition going and you can alert people through your Slack channel or through your WhatsApp group. 

So those are different ways to do digital and media advocacy as well as mobilize your supporters to do that as well. Okay. Have Third bucket of nonprofit advocacy strategies in our checklist. Oh, let me give an example of media and digital advocacy as well. An environmental nonprofit launches a Twitter campaign with a viral, or X campaign, with a viral hashtag to raise awareness about climate change policies. 

Now, I’m pretty sure that’s probably not going to happen on X, but it might happen on Facebook. I don’t know. Y’all, y’all think, think of which channel you want to use. But, all right, let’s talk about grassroots, grassroots mobilization. So grassroots mobilization is, are, could be petitions and pledge campaigns, so gathering signatures to show community support for an issue. 

It could be community forums and town halls where you’re just hosting discussions to engage local stakeholders. So these are great. If you. Follow or check out, and I’m going to put a link to this in the show notes, Volunteer Nation, episode 77, Engaging Communities in Social Change with Vichy Jagannathan. 

Vichy talks about how they did community work and community grassroots work to build some of the programs that she was developing. So, check that out. It’s a really inspirational interview about how They designed their solutions to help the community strengthen and thrive by and finding those solutions through community forums.

So, the solutions came from the community, extremely grassroots to grass tops. Really interesting. So check that out. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Obviously, when people think of grassroots, they also think of protests, marches, rallies, organizing in person or virtual demonstrations. Certainly that’s something you can do. 

I would say, having done some of that in my younger years, you want to be super organized. You want to be super organized. Safety is always a little bit of an issue. And we used to have people who were just observers who were part of our group. And if anybody in our case, it was during the early days of the AIDS epidemic and we went to the CDC and marched on the CDC because the definition for the way women AIDS was impacting women was not considered part of the definition of what AIDS the AIDS syndrome was, which it is now, because, I think, partly because of the work we did. 

Folks, we needed to have the definition of AIDS expanded to include all these things like pelvic inflammatory disease and chronic yeast infections and things women were getting that men weren’t getting, obviously. Or, Not so much, but we did protest and, and we made sure that anybody who was arrested that we would go down and wait for them outside the, the police station. 

So there’s, when you’re getting involved with protests, marches, and rallies, you just want to be a little bit careful about safety. You want to make sure that if you’re the organizer, you understand that there’s certain places where you are doing protests, marches, and rallies that you need to have permits. 

There’s a whole thing to it. So, I won’t go into all the detail, but just to say that that is an option. If your organization decides that’s what it wants to do, if it matches The, the culture of your organization and of course, these things have to be approved from the top. That’s one way of grassroots mobilization. 

There’s also grassroots mobilization that some people think maybe that’s the most extreme, but if you think about grassroots mobilization, it’s also simply training volunteers on advocacy because your volunteers are your grassroots. So if you can equip your supporters with tools and, um, training to speak on issues. 

You want to help them share their own stories and their own connection to the issues. You want to make sure that they understand what’s accurate. Right? And that they’re prepared. So, it’s really important. And not everybody’s going to be a spokesperson and, and stand in front of the media. Sometimes it’s just about sharing ideas and issues via social, or with friends, or having house parties. 

There’s all kinds of ways to do this, or working at a table at an event, all kinds of situations and contexts where your volunteers might want to, or you might want to have your volunteers understand the issue better and be able to. Speak to it with confidence. An example might be a nonprofit organizes a march to demand better funding for public schools. 

Now, I would say a nonprofit coalition. ’cause most, most often when you’re doing protest marches and rallies, it’s a coalition of organizations that are coordinating. So let’s take a quick break from my checklist of nonprofit advocacy strategies and when we get back, I’ve got a few more areas. to share with you. 

So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.  

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Hey everybody, welcome to part two of this particular episode where I’m talking about nonprofit advocacy strategies and giving you a checklist. And I have two more buckets I want to talk about. One is engaging with policymakers without lobbying and legal and public policy advocacy. So let’s start with engaging policymakers without lobbying. 

And you’ll remember from the last episode, episode 148 on Nonprofit Advocacy 101, I talked about lobbying as requesting that a legislator support a specific piece of legislation. It has to be around lawmaking or organizing a group of people to make that request. to write in letters, to make phone calls, to request that that lawmaker, um, support or oppose a particular piece of legislation. 

Curiously enough, this does not, so opposing or supporting a particular executive order from whoever’s in the office of president is not considered lobbying, which is really interesting. So, I just thought I’d throw that out there. Again, I’ll link to last week’s episode where I talk in much more detail about the differences between advocacy, general advocacy, and lobbying, and I’ll, in this show notes, I’ll also link to the IRS website where you can learn more. 

The reason it’s important is because you don’t want to fall out of compliance with the IRS because you can lose your charity, your 501c3 status and you don’t want to do that because then you are not tax exempt anymore. So, it’s important that we not, that we stay in compliance with the IRS guidelines or laws around lobbying. 

Does it mean, again, does it mean, as I said last week, that you can’t lobby at all? You can only lobby really about five percent of your work, which is your time, your budget, etc. So, check that out. Let’s talk about engaging policymakers though. So first off, meeting with legislators, so providing non partisan information on issues. 

Again, you know the issues of the people you serve, those issues better than anybody else. And so who best to explain this to lawmakers? They generally do not understand the issue. at the level of detail you do, but you’ve got to boil it down and to give them the takeaways. So they walk away educated and understanding why it’s important, why the course of action you’re advocating is the best one. 

And you do want to back it up with data. Testifying at public hearings. Sometimes we’re invited to share expert opinions at government meetings. And so that’s another way of engaging with policymakers. That’s not considered lobbying. Candidate, as long as you’re not advocating for a specific piece of legislation, you’re just talking about the issue or a policy. 

Candidate questionnaires and forums. So educating voters on candidates positions, so you can invite a wide range of candidates. If you’re working, let’s say you’re working in child care, and you want to make sure that the voters understand each candidate’s specific position on getting. Access to child care, that would, might be something you do. 

Coalition building is partnering with other organizations to amplify impact. Always important when you’re trying to do something big, but, you know, again, strength in numbers, as I mentioned last week, coalitions, if you can find other organizations, often they’re already existing coalitions. Often, you might be in partnership with other organizations and you haven’t done advocacy work together in the past, but maybe now’s the time. 

Or you can find coalitions of others that, or build coalitions of others, of people who want to take action. So an example might be a disability rights nonprofit meets with local officials to discuss access, accessibility improvements. So that’s a great example of engaging a lawmaker or lawmakers. Um, sometimes groups will take, this is a great job, thing to do with volunteers is to do just a legislative day where you go to Capitol Hill or you go to your state, state house and set up a bunch of meetings and just throughout the day meet with folks and share your perspectives. Okay, final bucket of non profit advocacy strategies on our checklist is legal and policy advocacy.  

If you have the resources or you’re, you have people who are willing to come up with the resources, you can file lawsuits and legal briefs to challenge unjust, just policies through the courts. 

That’s what happened this week with the executive order that stopped federal funding to nonprofits. Regulatory advocacy, so pushing for better enforcement of existing laws. So, that often re, uh, you’re speaking to legislators, but you’re also speaking to regulatory agencies. I used to work for the insurance commissioner in Washington State, and that’s a regulatory body. 

And if folks weren’t happy with how insurance was being run in the state, they could meet with the insurance commissioner or one of his aides and, and have a conversation. So, Regulatory advocacy can happen with, at the legislative level, it can also happen with regulatory agencies, like States Attorney General, that’s another, another group. 

You can support ballot initiatives, advocating for policies via direct voter action. So ballot initiatives are putting something on the ballot, so it’s not legislative per se, so it is not considered lobbying, but if it is being put on as a something to be a law to be passed that you’re going to oppose or support then it becomes lobbying and then corporate social responsibility or CSR campaigns where you’re urging businesses to adopt ethical practices or a certain approach or to support especially if that corporation is working in a field that’s related to yours or adjacent to yours. 

When we think about CSR and as volunteer managers we think of CSR or volunteer involving organizations. We think of CSR as the employee volunteers that come and help us out. But in this case, you can also go to corporations in your community and advocate that they support and get in coalition with you around a specific action, like, and maybe it’s around supporting non profits and being champions of non profits and non profit funding. 

If you have corporate partners, they should be stepping up and speaking, uh, about you in positive ways. So an example might be a civil rights non profit files a lawsuit to challenge discriminatory housing policies. That gives you an idea of a broad range of things you might do. Again, You choose things that make the most sense. 

The best advocacy pro approach really depends on the audience. Who needs to be influenced? Is it the public? Is it policy makers? Is it corporations? Who is it? You’re trying to really change their behavior or at least influence the way they’re thinking about an issue. The other thing that can impact, which. 

avenues you choose, or activities or strategies you choose, are your goals. What are you aiming at? Awareness, policy change, or public action? And so when you’re choosing strategies, you want to think kind of clearly, what will this get us? You’re not just doing it to do it, right? What will, what will this result in and, and how will it benefit the people we’re advocating for or the issue we’re advocating for? 

And then the third area is resources. We have to be clear about the capacity. What capacity does our nonprofit have in terms of staff, budget, volunteers to do any of these things? Launching a large demonstration or march can be very expensive in a lot of ways. You got transportation, sometimes you need, like, bottles of water, you need signage, there’s just a lot, sometimes you need permits, sometimes you need lodging for folks, there’s a lot, a lot to think about. 

You also need to think about what, what you have the capacity to do. And then the fourth thing is the culture of your organization and what your organization really wants, wants to step up and take part in and be a part of. Not all organizations are created the same, and some people, some organizations have a long history of civil disobedience, for example. 

Others do not. Others are more education type organizations, and that’s the way they’re comfortable doing their advocacy. I don’t think there’s a wrong or right way, but I do think it’s important right now that we do something. This series of podcasts is my little bit of advocacy. I’m educating you so that we can strengthen our sector, because if we’re not going to champion ourselves, no one else will. 

And so we’ve really got to step up. We’ve got to get good at this. And as I said in the last episode, non profits used to be two thirds of all non profits would engage in some kind of advocacy and lobbying. And now we’re down to about a third. And I think that it’s showing we’ve got to step up and be our best champions. 

And I do think volunteers are important players in our advocacy efforts. So I hope this episode has inspired you to think about, oh, okay, we, there’s some things we can do here. And next week, I’m going to talk in detail about how to set up a volunteer advocacy program. Because I bet that there are some passionate volunteers at your organization right now. 

Who would love to step up and speak on your behalf? So let’s talk about that next week join me next week. Same time same place on the volunteer nation and Don’t forget that the volunteer Management progress report is now up ready for prime time You can download your free copy of our 52 page report to get all the tactics trends and challenges facing volunteer involving organizations around volunteer recruitment. 

We also share a little bit of salary information for leaders of volunteers. Just go to volpro. net, V O L P R O dot net. I’ll link to it in the show notes, but go to volpro. net and just click on research in the menu bar at the top. And that’ll take you over to the page where you can order up your copy. 

All right, everybody, I’ll see you next week. Same time, same place. I’m the volunteer nation.