- While advocacy is achieved step-by-step, persistent, and long-term commitment to the advocacy goal, success should be celebrated along the way with supporters. Advocates should actively disseminate information about the change in law or policy to the public.
- At the same time, advocates should reassess the initial strategy to decide next steps, evaluate the efforts, monitor the implementation of the new legislation or policy, and document the results of the monitoring to identify issues that still need to be address or outcomes not anticipated.
Example: Evaluating advocacy efforts is a critical and often overlooked aspect of advocacy. Evaluation information should feed back into the advocacy process so as to provide renewed and more effective future efforts. Evaluation also helps a group determine whether the advocacy effort has achieved the desired results. Evaluation information can be gathered throughout the advocacy effort as well as at the end of the process. Evaluation experts identify the following as the most common methods for gathering information about the effectiveness of advocacy efforts: surveys, case studies, focus groups, media tracking, media content analysis, participant observation, policy tracking and public polling. However, advocates may wish to try these alternative methods to gather unique data suited to their evaluation needs: Bellwether interviews assess the opinion of highly influential policy-makers about the advocacy topic; developing rating scales for policy makers to quantify how supportive they have been of the advocacy issue; intense periodic debriefs during which evaluators document the experiences and ideas of advocates after especially intense work-periods; system mapping to develop a visual picture of how a system needs to change. (See: Coffman, Julia and Reed, Ehren, Unique Methods in Advocacy Evaluation)