Late in 2003, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation asked the GII to gather together a panel of experts and start some serious thinking about the factors that make advocacy successful. At the time, the foundation was engaged in very little advocacy funding, and they were hoping to identify something like a formula -- the foundation in those days was still closer to its roots as a project of Microsoft's founders than now -- for making the very risky business of advocacy philanthropy a little more of a sure thing.

We made it clear that there isn't a magic formula for success. This holy grail of advocacy simply didn't exist. What we did find in conversations with foundation program officers, media experts, communications specialists and others was a few factors that increased the chances of success for an organization and its grantmakers.

These key factors went through a lot of conversations and a good deal of rigorous editing and became the DNA of Continuous Progress, the GII's two-track guides to planning and evaluating advocacy campaigns to give them the best chance at success.

The foreign policy advocacy guides were launched last year and were quickly followed by a domestic version. Then, we decided to launch an initiative to help organizations and grantmakers better understand and implement the lessons and advice found in Continuous Progress.

Throughout this time, the idea of evaluation -- and a whole constellation of ideas around using our advocacy as a learning, building and growing enterprise -- has itself grown. More organizations and their foundation partners are talking about changing the way they do traditional advocacy, and including key concepts like capacity-building goals (instead of just policy goals), open lines of communication between grantmakers and grantees, agreed-upon benchmarks, indicators and evaluation plans, and more.

The latest evidence of this comes from an op-ed published last week in the Chronicle of Philanthropy by William and Flora Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest and James Irvine Foundation President James Canales. Reviewing two recent, very frank reports about large efforts by the two foundations that had not reached their goals, the presidents offered a rundown of lessons that, frankly, sound like they come from Continuous Progress. Here are the lessons from the Hewlett project, annotated with links to our guides:

• All participants must be clear from the outset about goals, strategies, and indicators of progress. The neighborhood improvement project was started without a clear definition of what success would look like.

• Foundations must work hard to establish candid and respectful relationships with the diverse people and organizations that are essential to achieving community change. When tensions arose in this project, participants often couldn't find a way to talk productively about their differences and work through them together.

• Everyone can gain by committing to learn throughout the entire project. While the effort was infused with evaluations of the process to bring about change from the start, tools to evaluate results were added only toward the end, when it was too late to affect the course of the effort.

The op-ed by Hewlett and Canales is titled "Let's Stop Reinventing Potholes." That is the philosophy behind Continuous Progress, and much of the work that has informed the GII throughout its life. Nothing can guarantee success, but it doesn't take a foundation president to figure out that we have a better chance of gaining something from our advocacy -- our policy goal, critical increases in capacity, or at least valuable knowledge -- if we work together, and commit to learning along the way.