Advocacy Challenges — Overcoming Intermediate Success
Along the path to any successful change effort will come a point where it looks like you’ve achieved your goal, but you really haven’t. For me that point initially came in January of 2009 when I was recognized during President Obama’s Inauguration.
It was an amazing once in a lifetime experience. I had spent almost two years working to implement improved mental health screening process for returning service members and to everyone on the outside it looked like that objective had been accomplished.
From reading the newspaper or watching TV, it was logical for those supporters to think that the President or someone in the Department of Defense would take it from here.
The reality was President Obama had inherited a country rocked by a financial collapse and the Great Recession and the Department of Defense was dealing with the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement that called for American servicemembers to be out of the country in 17 months.
It became clear that no one was going to put down the existing problems they were working on to take our issue and run with it.
Moving forward required going back to the original insurgency strategies that helped launch the successful campaign.
Bucket of Cold Water Question - Has Your Objective Been Accomplished?
The most important question to ask yourself after having some success is whether your objective has been accomplished.
Typically, the answer to this is no; because almost every important advocacy effort is a multi-year, multi-step process.
In January of 2009, it was clear that there was no order, regulation or law that was going to improve and systematize the military’s mental health screening processes. Therefore, our objective hadn’t been accomplished.
It was time to go back to work. Senator Jon Tester gave us an opportunity to bring the message to the United State Senate in a committee hearing in February of 2009. That began the next phase of the operation.
In a more recent example, NAMI Montana worked with partners for roughly ten years to develop a national Precision Mental Health Initiative that would improve the process of diagnosing and treating veterans with brain health conditions (post traumatic stress, mild traumatic brain injury, depression, bipolar disorders, etc.)
The Precision Mental Health Initiative was signed into law as part of the Commander John Scott Hannon Act on October 17, 2020. While this was a great intermediate success, the objective was not to pass a law creating the initiative.
The objective was to use that initiative to improve the process of diagnosing and treating veterans brain health conditions.
That meant our work was only beginning. NAMI Montana is now working with the Veteran Administration Office of Research and Development to ensure that program team has everything it needs to begin the project.
We are still years away from completing the final objective. Each stage of improvement should be celebrated, but kept in perspective for the work to come.
Spread the News That Your Objective Has Not Been Accomplished
Once you’ve realized that your objective has not been accomplish, it’s time to spread the word. Remember that the strength of using insurgency strategies to create peaceful change is in harnessing the power of the public for the greater good.
The people that have supported the effort up to this stage need to very clearly know that it’s not over. They need to know that what you’ve achieved together is momentum — not success.
I recommend doing this in multiple forms. I usually rely on a email to our newsletter list and then a blog post shared over social media. The email should lay out your objective, describe this current accomplishment, and then describe what the next step of your campaign is.
This is also a great time to do another Op-Ed in relevant publications that serve your potential supporters and decisionmakers. This Op-Ed should also highlight your objective, describe this current accomplishment, and describe what the next step of your campaign is.
The Strategic Narrative May Have to Be Recrafted
An earlier article described how to use an Op-Ed and One-Pager to build the structure of the narrative describing why you want change and how you want to accomplish it.
Each level of success requires you to re-examine your narrative to ensure that it still fits the tasks at hand and the challenges ahead.
The way that you told the story of your movement before an intermediate success will be different than the way that you will tell your movement’s story going forward.
For example, the story for the push for improved mental health screenings grew in two ways after the Obama Inauguration recommendation. The first was to incorporate the Commander in Chief’s broad, general support for the cause. While President Obama may not have been ready to brawl with the Department of Defense’s mental health team to force this change in screenings, the fact that President Obama recognized the effort in his Inauguration meant that it had his support. That support was important and was incorporated into the new narrative.
The second way the narrative was updated was the realization that we had to get a bill through Congress to change the military’s mental health screening process. That meant that not only did we still need all of the original Montana supporters’ help, but we needed to gather support from across the country.
That was going to be a huge lift, but the foundation for that effort had already been set out. The narrative just needed to be updated to reflect both the initial success and the focus on the new objective.
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