The Three Stages Of NGO Advocacy

For NGOs in general, advocacy is the term that describes their effort to influence public opinion and policy. In most cases, this effort entails their purposeful communication with various stakeholders, from the beneficiaries, businesses to the government actors. The need for NGOs to engage in advocacy is often implied by their stated missions and underpinning organizational values. NGOs as social actors have both instrumental and expressive dimensions. Advocacy has been understood by NGO scholars as a necessary step for NGOs to scale up their social impact and to sustain organizational development. (Korten, 1990; Uvin and Miller, 1996; Pearce, 2010). For development NGOs, delivering service and materials is only working on the “surface”

This is achieved either through direct interpersonal interaction with government officials, as illustrated by Batley and Rose, or through public communication and engagement with public media. NGO public communication serves the purpose of raising public awareness and shifting public opinion around the issue of their focuses. Rogers and Dearing (1996) identify three stages in agenda setting: media agenda, public agenda, and policy agenda. The ordering of the three stages highlights the immediate influence of media on public agenda. This model is useful in analyzing the advocacy process that involves tradition media, including print and broadcast media, where NGOs rely on the mass media’s portrayal of issues and organizations to influence public opinion. Bail (2012) has a similar understanding of the role of media in NGO advocacy. His finding suggests that the popularity of an organization in a discursive field is determined by the extent that its issue framing resonates with the ones of the mainstream media. These theories suggest that NGOs have indirect control in constructing the issue and organizational representation in their engagement with traditional

Compared to traditional media, social media has the advantages of being low-cost, fast and interactive, and has been employed by NGOs as a cost-effective means of social mobilization. (Guo and Saxton, 2014). The internet has sped up the process of issue emergence and the aggregation of opinions. According to Ferrera and Yang (2005), individuals are more likely to adopt positive or negative emotions which they see overly expressed in their social network. Through direct interaction with the social media users, NGOs directly control the representation of the issues and are able to pass on meaning immediately. Yet, it is also argued that social media is not enough for advocacy, since participant commitment in virtual mobilization is less sustainable. This is precisely because virtual participation requires low emotional, biological and material cost, and that it is harder to invoke strong movement community attachment than in face-to-face mobilization. (Juris, 2012). Nonetheless, NGOs today now widely uses social media as one but may not the only channel of public communication in the daily work