Open Educational Resources Advocacy Toolkit

Advocacy is a distinctly iterative cycle where it is commonplace to encounter barriers such as stakeholder indifference, disagreement, administrative or policy blocks, and lack of understanding. It's important for advocates to continuously debrief amongst themselves about these common barriers to develop the right solutions.

This method of collective debriefing can be thought of as incremental advocacy evaluation. It's a continuous social learning process of planning, reflecting, sharing and acting.

These debriefs can be more effective when you:

• create an informal and welcoming meeting environment that lends itself to honesty and frankness
• focus on identifying barriers
• commit to understanding stakeholder indifference/disagreement (in order to overcome it), rather than just rejecting it
• reflect on successful advocacy, why it worked and how to further leverage this influence
• reflect on ineffective advocacy, why it didn’t work and how to do this differently
• develop solutions creatively, rather than in a linear or conventional way.

Documenting these changes becomes an important part of defining workflows and processes. This will mature your advocacy from a single instance ad hoc activity, to one that is ready for repeatable and transferable applications across your institution.