If you’ve ever said to yourself, “If only I had a paid advocacy person/team, everything would be great,” you’re in good company. But you might be surprised by the path you need to take to get there. It’s not as intuitive as it might seem, and there are some common mistakes that often block that path.

Here’s the thing. Even if a funder dropped a ton of money on you today to go do advocacy work, and you went out and hired a policy and advocacy staffperson. We can't just say to that person, “go do advocacy. Get the decisionmakers excited about investing in our work and creating policies that will benefit the people we serve.” It doesn't work that way. There's really no scenario in which you can hire the advocacy people, turn them loose and then the rest of us can just get back what we do every day.

I get it. We all go there from time to time. When we're feeling overwhelmed and we're feeling like, ah, how do we fit advocacy and strategic relationship building into all the other work that we have to do? It is tempting to say things like, gosh, if I only had an advocacy person or an advocacy staff, that would be so much better. And it could be.

But only with the right combination of factors in place. So let’s talk about how we can actually prepare and set ourselves up for the day when we do get to have those dedicated paid positions that can take a chunk of the work and really focus on it. And take out advocacy game to the next level.

In this episode, we share:

• The three things you must already have in order for paid advocacy staff to succeed
• What funders look for when deciding whether to invest in your advocacy work
• The biggest mistake that will block you from getting funding to do advocacy work
• The most strategic (and practical) way to begin growing your advocacy capacity right now
• Unexpected benefits of growing the advocacy capacity of your existing staff

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Thanks!