Drawing Attention to Pandemic Influenza through Advocacy

This guide is written to provide an overview of the advocacy process and its components along with strategic activities and messages that can be used to reach different audiences. It is intended for use regardless of the issue, the size of the organisation, or the resources available. The guide was prepared by the Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness (H2P) Initiative partnership - the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the CORE Group, AI.COMM (a project managed by AED), InterAction, and several United Nations agencies - and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

According to the document: “Advocacy is the effort to change public perception and influence policy decisions and funding priorities. Advocates raise awareness about issues and propose specific solutions among different publics, including policy-makers, experts, the media, and affected communities. Advocacy involves making a case in favour of a particular issue, using skilful persuasion, and strategic action.”

The steps involved include the following:

1. Identify the issue and potential solutions: Correct information can be gathered in several ways, such as:
   • Participating in public meetings
   • Viewing credible websites
   • Reading the newspaper, hearing speeches, or listening to radio and television reports
   • Meeting one-on-one with decision makers
2. Select advocacy audiences who make decisions that can affect laws and regulations (primary audiences). Reaching them may mean choosing to advocate with influencers: staff, advisors, influential elders, the media, and the public (secondary audiences).
3. Gather information on what your advocacy audience thinks, using research studies, media reports, surveys, and informal information gathered from talking with other advocates and colleagues or by reading speeches or other documents written by the organisation or individuals.
   
4. Develop advocacy messages to frame actions. Messages should state what action needs to be taken and should motivate audiences. Effective advocacy messages need to state the case in terms that will motivate decision-makers to respond and act.
5. Select advocacy tactics and tools. The presentation of the argument may take many forms, including briefing documents, presentations, fact sheets with new data, editorials in newspapers, or radio discussion programmes.
6. Develop alliances and partnerships with people and groups representing diverse interests. Diverse partnerships communicate to policy makers, opinion leaders, and the public at large that an issue is so important that a wide range of interests - who may otherwise have little in common - have come together to promote change. Partnerships also allow smaller organisations to pool their resources and take on projects and initiatives that are too large for small individual groups to address.
   
7. Mobilise human and financial resources. Advocacy campaigns with minimal resources have options such as letter writing campaigns.
8. Monitor and evaluate for effectiveness in order to adapt the advocacy campaign, and be creative and persistent.

The guide recommends addressing: opinion leaders for their influence; the public for its support; and the media for its education potential.

1. Opinion leaders - It may be useful to identify a champion for the issue. The steps recommended here are: find the previous statements of the opinion leader on the issue; make visits to talk about only one subject (per visit ) involving the issue , while trying to get a commitment to action from the proposed champion; then follow up to see if the action has been taken.
   
2. Public education is most effective when specific audiences hear tailored messages and information. This means that message creation must be done for each group. Message presentation can include: organising community events, distributing materials at others' meetings, organising presentations, asking opinion leaders to talk to their social and business networks, go to public places with information - bus tops, markets, community centres, for example.
   
3. Working with the media can be done through the following:
   • Build relationships with journalists and meet their needs for timely information.
     
   • Approach journalists with news, not a story to cover.
     
   • Organise visits with people who have been working on pandemic influenza issues internationally, nationally, or locally. This gives the story a human face and ensures that the real issues are kept at the forefront of attention.
     
   • Work internally to ensure that any person who may interact with the media is equipped to handle any questions that may come their way.
     
   • Identify one or two key messages for the spokesperson and add to this any additional background information on the issue and recent events that may be touched upon by the media.
     
   • Develop materials that support the issue. Fact sheets, briefing kits, reports, charts, and graphs offer the media useful information to finish a story. Make sure these materials reinforce the key messages and provide the technical content for these messages.