Advocacy

Advocacy refers to the totality of an organization's efforts to argue its position and influence the outcome of public policy decisions, through both direct and indirect techniques. A number of the principal ways in which advocacy is undertaken are described in this entry.

Increasingly, organizations employ a variety of new technologies in order to pursue their advocacy efforts. Clearly, most significant groups by now have a presence on the Internet, and most use e-mail to communicate. They are able to research and monitor socioeconomic and political developments online. They can place video or audio files on the Internet, which can then be downloaded by interested individuals (known as “podcasting”). Protest movements and charities have perhaps been more effective than corporations at electronic advocacy to date and have used e-media to compensate for their relative lack of resources; for instance, they have been highly innovative in setting up “copycat websites.” These are sites that are used by critics of an organization to disseminate their particular perspective, and often they have addresses that are very similar to the organization's, which has the effect of ensuring that they are inadvertently accessed by people wanting to open the official site.