Just in time for Christmas, two of our favorite colleague organizations in the advocacy planning and evaluation field -- Asibey Consulting and Spitfire Strategies -- have released complementary resources; both are available online to the public.

Asibey Associates' new offering, Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide (image above is excerpted), is designed to help nonprofits and foundations determine whether their communications are effective. Most seasoned advocates have seen plenty of communications guides come across their desk -- both from within and from outside their organization. But Are We There Yet? positions itself (see below) as an "evaluation strategy tool - not a communication planning tool." In other words, you may have a excellent idea of what you need to say, but you still must figure out what effect your communications are having on your audience -- are they moving you toward your objectives and toward your ultimate goal? How do you know?

Of course, it's much easier to pursue the continuous evaluate-and-correct method of advocacy that Asibey Associates champions -- as do we at Continuous Progress -- once you have planned your effort carefully. Spitfire Strategies, authors of the hit Smart Chart, have taken a minimalist approach to communications planning with their new tool, The Just Enough Planning Guide. The guide walks the user through an online, interactive planning process. As you work your way through the tool, you'll encounter several gut checks; these help you evaluate your answers and ensure well-reasoned choices.

To my mind the real value of both of these resources -- and of our own Advocacy Progress Planner, which offers advocates a customizable menu of planning and evaluation choices -- is their practicality and usability. These are true tools in that they link worksheets (in the case of Are We There Yet?) and online input (Just Enough Planning Guide) to concepts. As a result, advocates can spend less time digesting "the literature" and more time applying it. Time to roll up your sleeves!

Following are excerpts from both tools that give a flavor of what each is trying to do and how it proposes to help you with your communications.

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From Are We There Yet?:

When to use this guide
This guide helps you gather input at the beginning of your activities to shape your communication strategy. It also gives you the tools to monitor progress and make corrections during implementation. It was not designed as a means for looking back on past work to determine if it was successful. Instead, the idea is to prepare up front and evaluate as you go along, so that you may adjust your tactics to ensure success.

This guide is an evaluation strategy tool - not a communication planning tool. It will be most useful for those who already have a communication plan in place with clear objectives, messages, strategies and tactics. However, even if you are still in the beginning stages of designing a communication plan, it is never too early to start thinking about evaluation.

How this guide works
This guide presents a step-by-step process for developing an evaluation strategy. After reading each section, you will be directed to the Evaluation Strategy Worksheet at the back of this guide, where you will complete the corresponding step. We recommend that you fill out each section of the worksheet as you go through the guide and, when possible, share your thoughts with colleagues for immediate feedback. After you've completed all the steps, you will have an evaluation strategy that you can begin implementing immediately.

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Here are the Just Enough Planning Guide's nine stages to successful campaign planning. These provide the framework for the interactive tool:

1. Confirm That a Campaign Is Possible. This is the time to step back and assess the viability of a campaign. Are the stars aligned for this effort to be successful?

2. Set a Clear, Measurable Goal That Is Achievable. Your plan needs to be focused on achieving a very specific goal. Your goal is your raison d'être. Are you trying to make something happen or stop something from happening? There is a difference.

3. Chart Your Course. Much like a road trip, there are likely many ways to get to your goal. You will use your knowledge of the field and the external environment to determine the best steps to your goal.

4. Anticipate Conditions. Visualize all possible scenarios - the good, the bad and the ugly - so your plan includes strategies for leveraging opportunities and mitigating challenges, including identifying your opposition.

5. Know How to Make Headway. What will propel you down your path? What major campaign activities can help you get from point A to point B?

6. Prioritize Your Target Audiences. Now that you have a strategy, stay focused by prioritizing who you need to engage to win, and when.

7. Put a Public Face on Your Campaign. Give the effort a name and a personality that is memorable and easily understood. You want people to recognize what you are about and not have to guess.

8. Operationalize Your Campaign. Based on the activities you think will help you make headway, determine which campaign tactics you will need: from intellectual knowledge to government relations to public mobilization to communications to coalition building to fundraising.

9. Stay on Track. Build evaluation mechanisms into your plan that will tell you when you are making progress and when you need to stop and make a mid-course correction. Meet regularly with your team to discuss your progress.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:33 AM | Permalink

And what have we got to show? Not much according to critiques at the recent 30th anniversary of the World Development Report. The report focuses on two items identified by the World Bank as significant priorities: increasing growth and decreasing poverty. There were a few key questions asked at the anniversary event of the report's achievements over the years:

1. Has it succeeded in shaping policy tools?
2. Has it led to more efficient and successful poverty alleviation techniques?

Among the great achievements of the WDR is the emergence of development indicators -- geared towards creating tools for evaluating development and accessible for public use. The best-known of these is the poverty indicator which defines the "poorest of the poor" as those living at or below one dollar per day. This metric contributed to the creation of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which in turn have encouraged countries and organizations to set benchmarks (some useful, some not) in their efforts to achieve these goals.

But aside from the standard-setting that the WDR has encouraged, the consensus (among panelists at the 30th anniversary of the World Development Report) was that it has failed on many accounts. One of the inherent problems with the World Bank's attempts to evaluate progress on growth is that there are simply too many unpredictable variables involved. Development economists have only managed to succeed at the first half of their task: analyzing past events to understand successes and failures. They have not yet managed to create accurate policy suggestions based on data that tends to be short-term therefore biased. Noted aid critic William Easterly addressed the audience with examples of reworked WDR data showing that only 1.8% of countries that experienced transitory or short-term growth actually progressed towards permanent growth.

Easterly argued that the WDR has evolved into a monster, not a practical tool. The report increases in page number each year; it is now more cumbersome than ever -- which is one reason why it fails to link up with real policy considerations as it could and should. Instead, the WDR tends to cater to the academic and research crowd, leaving truly thorny implementation decisions to policymakers.

For example, Easterly cited a particularly useless measurement that the WDR created to measure quantitative progress toward health standards by arbitrarily assigning numbers to different physical disabilities based on their perceived severity. These numbers were then plugged into equations to generate a (by-and-large meaningless) statistic that ranks health standards in developing countries. The truly difficult health-related policy decisions and tradeoffs were left to policymakers.

Easterly probably lost the few friends he still has at the World Bank after his scathing critique (not to mention two scathing books). But he continues to make important critiques in the development debate. In this case, he made the point that development must be evaluated with care, particularly when quantitative measures are invoked. Errors in methodology and in the data itself can have drastic implications; policy makers often lean heavily on numbers -- whether or not they are as solid as they seem.

Posted by Lisa Molinaro at 2:55 PM | Permalink

A recent gathering of academics, development practitioners, and policy experts ("The Future of Foreign Aid in the Obama Administration," courtesy of the Society for International Development - Washington) provided useful insight into what we should expect and prepare for in the years to come.

The most pressing concern is that domestic needs will be prioritized over international development assistance. Considering the current economic crisis, the U.S. must first keep its citizens out of relative poverty before looking to help other countries. Getting Congress's attention on foreign aid in the next few years will be hard.

Despite a grim outlook, there are still options for moving forward on foreign aid through current institutions such as USAID and the State Department. Carol Lancaster of Georgetown University (and a former Deputy USAID Administrator) suggested shifting aid institutions away from state dependence, which might lead to increased impact and efficiency in alleviating poverty. And what conversation about public sector development would be complete without criticism of the Department of Defense's initiatives to alleviate poverty as a tool to fight terrorism? While DOD is moving in the right direction by taking on a more interdisciplinary national security approach, said Lancaster, many development practitioners remain wary. Efforts to integrate military objectives with poverty alleviation goals are bound to get messy. Lancaster asserted that the government should leave development to those who are properly trained and turn DOD 's strategy to one of collaboration and support instead of direct involvement.

Against the backdrop of this debate there was talk of rewriting the aging Foreign Assistance Act. While such a change has been on the agenda for some time now, discussants were skeptical about embarking on the lengthy process needed to amend this legislation. Addressing tangible goals, they said, is more productive given the current political context; legislators and the new administration have a lot on their plates right now.

Asif Shaikh suggested the U.S. look, first and foremost, at foreign aid strategies that demonstrably affect the three billion people living under the poverty line. Shared global challenges such as the impacts of climate change, environmental degradation, the economic depression, etc. should thus be at the forefront when considering where to allocate funds.

The panel generally agreed that U.S. foreign aid only exerts lasting impact where both a functional government and stable economy create conditions conducive to implementing foreign aid projects. And of course, to the extent that measurement and evaluation take a backseat in the decision to allocate aid funds, the true impact of these projects will remain unknown. (Shaikh suggested setting long term goals with daily benchmarks to assess progress.)

More than ever, foreign aid will have to satisfy a range of objectives and expectations to evolve beyond its current state. Now we just need to get clear on what those objectives and expectations are...

To see Oxfam's evaluation of the Foreign Assistance Act, click here

Posted by Lisa Molinaro at 3:50 PM | Permalink

I was chagrined to learn a few weeks ago that the Washington City Paper, a stalwart source of in-depth local reportage, will have to shutter its print operation. The City Paper ran the sorts of neighborhood stories that the Washington Post and Washington Times don't have time for. Local blogs like DCist report on the local gossip and neighborhood news, but they normally lack the kind of in-depth investigative reporting that a print paper traditionally excels at. Small-town Americans, without the federal newshole that Washington enjoys, face the complete extinction of their local papers.

It's all very distressing for newspapers as they have been conceived for the past century. But people still want to read the local news, and that's unlikely to change. They're just doing it in a more scattered media landscape now. In July I wrote about a digital silver lining for journalists in the form of Demotix (which enlists wannabe journalists all over the world to upload their photos and articles for publication in local papers) and Verve Wireless (which furnishes local papers with the technology to offer their content on mobile devices).

Now comes Outside.In, perhaps the most promising piece of digital silver lining yet. This from the The New York Times BITS blog:

Outside.In labels information from across the Web with geographical tags, categorizing it by city, neighborhood, intersection or street address. The site can then provide readers with "hyper-local" news from news outlets, blogs and even Twitter. It helps small publishers find an audience and helps big publishers find local stories. By serving up all this local content, it hopes to help advertisers target the reader on precise streets.

Outside.In can tell advertisers where a reader is and affirm that they are reading about their neighborhood. That means an ad for a bookstore that is 50 feet from the reader will be more useful for the advertiser and the reader.

"Our whole premise is that these traditional media companies need to evolve to something that's more sustainable," said Mark Josephson, Outside.In's chief executive officer. "They're getting squeezed at the top by the national news organizations, and their customers are expecting really granular, specific, local information, but you can't put a reporter on every corner."

Why should we global issues people care about the fate of local news? Well, because we all wonder why that local coffee shop we've frequented for years suddenly disappeared from around the corner (here's looking at you, Murky Coffee of Capitol Hill). But even more because the sooner local news outlets find a way to attract readers and revenue, the sooner Americans far outside the Beltway will have a shared news source that reports on and enables discussion around issues both local and global. When local newspapers go under, the readership fragments and turns to the Internet, cable and other disparate sources that make it difficult to have a shared conversation about current events. Local and global news are interconnected; the context that a shared source provides enables us to understand that relationship.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether The Economist is now doing product placement for BlackBerry (see image to the right), the editors put together an insightful letter to the President-elect on the tradeoffs facing him as he ponders his policy choices with respect to the environment.

On the one hand, Obama has great leeway to push ahead with the aggressive climate-related measures he laid out during his campaign, casting them as a means to generate new jobs and jump-start pieces of the U.S. economy that are ailing and in need of fresh direction. Obama has already taken clear steps toward this approach.

On the other hand, The Economist notes:

You may create some green jobs, but you will destroy a lot of existing dirty ones. (Detroit is sure to squeal, for starters.) Worse, you may not actually manage to bring Congress around; even our newly expanded Democratic majority is twitchy about placing extra burdens on the economy just now. Climate change could become your version of health-care reform under Bill Clinton: an overambitious policy that dissipates your political capital early on.

The European Union has already begun to retrench on its climate commitments and benchmarks as its economic outlook worsens and businesses get squeezed. In a related article this week, The Economist argues that political leaders in the U.S. and abroad both face a similar challenge as they try for economic recovery plans that aim for a greener economy:

To get meaningful, lasting laws on climate change passed and implemented, industry must be reassured, not alienated.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:30 PM | Permalink

In 1980, Bill Drayton established Ashoka, one of the first "social venture-capital" organizations, designed to provide support for promising innovators. A pioneer in global philanthropy, Ashoka has been an inspiration for new philanthropists, particularly young ones, who want to do more -- and different -- than make a conventional donation.

The rest of the field is finally catching up. Barron's deems the new wave of philanthropists: Generous Gen-Xers. This generation has tossed aside the old lines that clearly delineated the realm of philanthropic giving; instead they are investing both funds and time, taking an active role in their philanthropic work, integrating giving into their existing business practices, and choosing meaningful causes that inspire them to do more.

These young philanthropists see no reason to wait until they are retired to give back; they are now placing giving at the forefront of their business plans:

"We don't call what we are doing philanthropy; we call it having an impact," says Peter Kellner, 39, managing partner of Uhuru Capital Management.
The new firm is about to launch a fund-of-hedge-funds that will turn over 25% of its partnership-incentive fees, or potentially as much as 5% of profits, to entrepreneurial ventures in developing markets, where it also will invest. "This is a model that combines the desire to achieve and the desire to do good," says Kellner. "Why should we artificially separate these two drives in our everyday lives?"

Changing business standards to allow for philanthropic ends goes hand-in-hand with a critical examination of nonprofits' needs. This could help philanthropists identify how to best contribute to public sector results. Michael Idinopulos points out that philanthropists are the natural hosts to create dialogue among the nonprofits who are calling out for an increase in connections with others -- be they businesses or nonprofits -- doing similar work. With newly popular social networking sites come technological opportunities for philanthropists to facilitate progressive interaction between their grantees. To read more, click here.

Posted by Lisa Molinaro at 12:35 PM | Permalink

Wording can be everything, especially in the case of the South Dakota abortion debate. With two consecutive defeats at the ballots of a bill to ban abortion, South Dakota (widely known as the most pro-life state in the country) astonishingly proved again its ability to maintain a pro-choice majority. Lawmakers pushing the abortion ban have thrown in the towel, claiming it to be a waste of resources. But the question many have asked is this: how did a state like South Dakota manage to uphold a pro-choice public consensus?

One answer is to examine advocacy groups such as Planned Parenthood that took a uniquely adapted approach to the specific social climate of South Dakota.

Sarah Stoesz, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota, credits the win to a well-run campaign with broad grassroots support. But it wasn't a strategy run only by outside consultants, with slick advertisements and catch phrases like "My Body, My Choice" or "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries." In fact, the word "choice" was abandoned by the coalition fighting the abortion ban in South Dakota altogether. Instead, the coalition took a pro-family approach, using the word "baby" where mainstream pro-choice groups would have used the word "fetus." One Healthy Families ad featured a woman named Tiffany Campbell, who appeared with her husband and son. In the television ad, Campbell explained that during her pregnancy they discovered twin-to-twin syndrome, a condition in which one fetus would need to be terminated for the other to survive. Campbell phrased it this way, "I would have buried two babies." Much of the language in the ads talked about families making decisions without government interference.

In line with understanding the South Dakota context, Planned Parenthood was careful not to make a black and white argument - standard practice in abortion debate. Because each attempted piece of legislation had different subtleties, voters became more and more familiar with the implication of each nuance. Planned Parenthood adapted, thus creating a less polarizing approach.

Volunteers who canvassed in the state didn't simply find that people were pro- or anti-choice. "When we were training our volunteers and when we were training our staff we knew that we could knock on five different doors and find five different points of view on this issue. It wasn't going to serve us well to take one particular stance on abortion and try to convince those five people that they should think the exact same way," he said.

Planned Parenthood's campaign furnishes several valuable take-aways for advocacy groups:

1. In-depth analysis of the specific political and social context generates innovation in outreach.
2. Unlikely audiences -- in this case strong and publically pro-life constituents -- can become allies...
3. ...If you craft audience-specific messages
4. Real-life advertisements -- stories -- can raise awareness and foster solidarity if treated respectfully.

Some pro-life groups maintain that the fight in South Dakota is not over. But Planned Parenthood has established a rapport with voters that will be tough to overcome now that they are accustomed to paying attention to the nuances of this debate before casting their the ballots.

Posted by Lisa Molinaro at 3:45 PM | Permalink

Yesterday The New York Times ran a fascinating piece about the "Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb." The story explores two new books about nuclear proliferation that give pause to the "sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, [which] grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile."

The authors of these new books -- Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force, and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, co-wrote The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation; Stephen M. Younger, the former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos and former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon wrote The Bomb: A New History -- all agree that there is nothing inevitable about nuclear proliferation. In fact, Reed and Stillman write that "Since the birth of the nuclear age, no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise." The spread of nuclear weapons has proven to depend almost entirely on the willingness of politicians to divulge state secrets. (Click through the helpful NYT graphic above to see this mapped out.)

What does this mean to anti-proliferation advocates? In short, "Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman see politics -- not spies or military ambitions -- as the primary force in the development and spread of nuclear arms. States repeatedly stole and leaked secrets because they saw such action as in their geopolitical interest."

In other words, smart policymaking isn't an exercise in futility; rather, it makes all the difference on this issue. Last week my colleague Lisa Molinaro wrote about moving past shadowy prognostications of inevitable nuclear terrorism in favor of "rationalizing the nuclear debate." The evidence continues to mount that this is a mental and messaging shift worth making.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:19 PM | Permalink

Updated 12/12/08: In the last minutes of the House session on Wednesday evening, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a key advocacy objective for advocates against human trafficking in the United States, passed. The Senate passed TVPRA by unanimous consent 45 minutes later. It's now ready for signature from by the President. This is a remarkable, hard-fought legislative victory -- and a testimony to the persistence and skill of lobbyists, citizen advocates and just plain caring folks around the country who kept the issue in front of Members of Congress.

Advocates for policy change face a complex task. We at CPSS often urge those who work through the Advocacy Progress Planner to revisit and remind themselves of their desired impact. It's easy to get caught up in pursuing a specific goal, legislative or otherwise. (You'll notice that goals come under desired impact if you click through to view the image above.) But advocacy success stories usually have many moving pieces: public perception and interest feeds political will, which in turn creates the environment in which policymakers make decisions in response to advocates' calls for policy change. Impact results from changes throughout this cycle. What was a good advocacy goal in years past may, with new information, turn out to be flawed -- or even counterproductive. Advocates should be open to shift their strategy along the cycle as new opportunities present themselves.

For example, Ambassador Swanee Hunt and Linda Sidrys Nealon argue on The Huffington Post that advocates to end human trafficking should look hard at the way Sweden attacked this problem. Rather than making the act of selling sex illegal, Sweden turned the tables on the "demand side" to punish buyers. As a result, a cultural shift is underway in Sweden, which has sharply driven down the market for prostitution. Hunt and Nealon elaborate:

Despite admirable efforts [in the US], compared to several European nations, the US is far behind the curve in fighting demand. We traveled to Stockholm and Oslo to meet with government officials, researchers, members of parliament, police, and even Queen Silvia to examine how Sweden has forged the way. After years of parliamentary debate, in 1999 Swedes passed the Sex Purchase Law, which criminalized buying and decriminalized selling sex. This placed the emphasis on the buyers, while allowing women to seek help without being fined or deported. In five years, the number of prostituted women in Sweden dropped 40%. Today, the government estimates that less than 400 women are trafficked into the country, while in neighboring Finland it's 17,000.

The law and its accompanying measures are credited with shifting the entire social mindset to one where buying another human being is simply unacceptable. Today, Swedes consider prostitution inherently violent and harmful to society: Even when it's seemingly consensual, they say, the act is built on and reinforces an oppressive power imbalance between the user and the used. Although there's a very small percentage of women who freely choose to sell their bodies, they are the well-publicized exceptions. Swedes don't build public policy around protecting them when the damage to the large majority is so great. We were told that when young men from around the world were asked in a survey whether they had or would be willing to buy sex, only 11 percent of the Swedes said "yes," compared to 60 percent of Dutch men.

This change in strategy not only reduced the number of women subject to the sex trade (and thus the demand for trafficked people), it has also served human trafficking advocates well in their efforts to build a permanent constituency sympathetic to the cause.

Returning to the image above, the desired impact, in this case "positive social and physical conditions" for victims of trafficking, called for less for strengthening (implementing, monitoring, maintaining, etc.) ineffective anti-prostitution policies already in place. Rather, the development, placement and adoption of a new policy was a far more effective route to impact.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:03 PM | Permalink

When the Obama team announced its vice presidential selection to 13 million supporters via text message, it became clear that we are not in Technicolor Kansas anymore; the language and medium of politics has moved on from the TV-centric days of yore. When Former senator, Thomas A. Daschle, invited 1,000 supporters with health care concerns to weigh in via conference call, it was another sign that top-down constituent engagement is on the wane.

Dialogue is the theme in a new era of social-networking technologies, as we recently observed, from the State Department's fight against terrorism to NGOs who are seeking alternatives to expensive outreach tactics.
The Obama team ushers in a new type of politics by pioneering innovative grassroots communication techniques such as conference calls, YouTube videos, Word Clouds, interactive cyber-conversations, etc. And along with innovation come setbacks as Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post writes:

"This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the center-left think tank NDN. "This will reinvent the relationship of the president to the American people in a way we probably haven't seen since FDR's use of radio in the 1930s."

In seeking to translate its political skills to policymaking, the incoming administration faces potential legal and political pitfalls. It is not clear, for instance, whether Obama can legally use his list of campaign supporters in the White House; the database would probably become government property. So far, the transition team has gotten around that issue by encouraging people to register on its Web site, Change.gov. Those names and e-mail addresses go into a new database, which can be tapped to generate activities such as house parties, YouTube videos and viral discussions to rally support.

However fascinating it may be that our President-elect uses YouTube to share his views, more intriguing still is the Obama team's use of online dialogue to generate new ideas. Change.gov viewers can let the transition team know what their latest economic crisis was or how the current health care system is treating them -- and suggest how they would like to see the new administration actually pursue change. New levels of accessibility to government officials and opportunities for the public to voice concerns provide a window into what grassroots policy - making actually looks like.

The Post article continues:

"The Obama administration has learned that listening may be even more important than talking, because it diffuses opposition," said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan Web site focused on the intersection of politics and technology.

Obama used the same strategy during the campaign, Rasiej said. When many of his most liberal supporters became enraged that he voted in favor of a surveillance law, Obama assigned staffers to monitor and respond to comments posted on the campaign's Web site. After a sort of cyber-catharsis of complaints, the controversy died down, Rasiej observed.

"It will be a lot easier to get the American public to adopt any new health-care system if they were a part of the process of crafting it," he said.

But there are potential pitfalls. Good policies are sometimes not the most popular policies. The new administration may find it hard to deny its super-engaged constituents when the right policy is unpopular. Obama is taking advantage of his current safe space: listening to Americans while the pressure to act remains off until January 20th. The question is: can he maintain such transparency with the American public once the "change" is implemented and the critics go to work?

Posted by Lisa Molinaro at 5:26 PM | Permalink

A recent study by Michael Shellenberger and others from American Environics proposes that rationalizing the nuclear weapons debate and weaning Americans off of fear imagery will lead to increasing interest in nuclear disarmament.

According to Shellenberger, there are psychological and values drivers that shape Americans' opinions on nuclear and national security policy. Focus groups found that when nuclear weapons and terrorism are discussed in the same framework, Americans experience a heightened sense of fear and are thus more prone to favor a preemptive strike on perceived terrorist nations, such as Iran. Discussing nuclear weapons in connection to rational actors such as India or Russia does not evoke such feelings of imminent danger.

What can advocates do with this call for de-linking nuclear and terrorist issues? One option offered is to tell a more rational and grounded story of increased global security as a result of nuclear nonproliferation. Another option is to shift American perceptions of terrorist states such as Iran by shining a light on its highly educated, modernizing population, which is not necessarily in lock-step with its government's policies.

Advocates are often tempted to employ tactics that command the most attention, invoking images of fear and death. But this survey suggests that appealing to the practical positive effects of nuclear disarmament could potentially be a more successful strategy than reminding the public yet again of impending nuclear apocalypse.

Posted by Lisa Molinaro at 7:25 PM | Permalink

Here at the Switchblog we encourage candor about the challenge of changing policy and behavior, especially when the challenges are global in scope or desperately urgent. Presentations this morning on the new Rockefeller Foundation report, Century of the City: No Time to Lose, and on the options for ending the violence in Eastern Congo offered plenty of candor. And plenty of potential to overwhelm us with discouraging statistics and analysis. The presenters chose a different path.

Neal Peirce, co-author of the surprisingly lively and accessible RF publication, talked candidly about the downside of candor at a book launch event sponsored by the International Housing Coalition. A litany of grim statistics about the extraordinary health,environmental and housing challenges posed by the growth of mega-cities in the global South could grab the attention of policymakers and lay readers. But as Neal and colleagues realized, that approach risked paralyzing decisionmakers just when action is needed most: "No time to lose!"

And so the book (and his presentation) leads with the equally extraordinary potential that cities offer as engines of economic growth and cultural vitality. As important, Neal sought to shrink the emotional distance between his (relatively wealthy and powerful) audience from the slum dwellers at the heart of the most desperate urban challenges. "These are organized, vibrant beehives of small entrepreneurs. These are people doing their best to house and educate and raise their kids. They are more like us than not."

Mauro de Lorenzo of the American Enterprise Institute, Colin Thomas-Jensen of ENOUGH, and independent consultant Tony Gambino had a topic whose grim realities could reduce the most Panglossian optimist to a quivering mass of despondency. Their discussion of current prospects for ending the longstanding crisis in the Eastern Congo was brutally honest and tough to hear. But perhaps belatedly sensing the same home truth about effective advocacy messaging that moved Neal Peirce to accentuate the positive, Mauro sent us off with a brief and heartening closing homily: "Discussions of the Eastern Congo often leave people depressed. But there are things we can do. Creativity is possible."

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 4:26 PM | Permalink

Effective advocacy is all about working with people where they are, so to speak -- even if they would prefer to stay in bed. GlobalGiving, an organization that allows people to embrace their philanthropist by reviewing projects all over the world, selecting one or more and funding those specifically, made good use of this recent Black Friday with its Great American Sleep-In Challenge.

That this particular "challenge" is has a certain tongue-in-cheek quality makes it no less worthy. After all, Kohl's urged shoppers to appear at 4am on Friday to help themselves to steeply discounted merchandise; that makes GlobalGiving wise to position its call to help others as an alternative to a hectic day of shopping.

Often, advocates need supporters and constituents to sacrifice for a cause. But breaking out of that mold is memorable. The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure has been doing this for several years now, offering non-racers the chance to "Sleep-in for the Cure."

Amidst frequent calls to "take action" from nonprofits, an occasional call to sleep in is probably warranted. All the more so if that, too, is a form of constructive action.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:07 PM | Permalink

Independent Institute scholar Ivan Eland picks up where Joseph Nye leaves off in the latter's exploration of how the traits required of successful leaders are changing (we blogged about this last week). While Nye suggests that we ought to expect our leaders to be better at navigating complex relationships and decisions than fighting bravely, Eland's new book, Recarving Rushmore, ranks past U.S. presidents, suggesting that we should re-appraise their success or failure in terms of how well their policies "contributed to peace, prosperity, and liberty."

It's not surprising that the presidents who deserve the highest praise -- John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, and Rutherford B. Hayes -- are among the least known today, Eland suggests. "Most of the 'excellent' presidents," he writes, "are remembered as bland men with gray personalities, but they largely respected the Constitution's intention of limiting government and restraining executive power, especially in regard to war."

If you peek under the hood of Eland's libertarian-speak about successful presidents past, it's actually not too far from Nye's recommendation to presidents future.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:12 PM | Permalink

I was encouraged by the talk that James Glassman, Karen Hughes' successor to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, gave yesterday (video above) at the New America Foundation. It was a big step forward from what I'd heard and read of Karen Hughes' approach, who by all reports brought a lot of charisma as a spokesperson for the administration but really confined herself to the role of official apologist (for a deeply unpopular set of policies, to boot). Glassman, on the other hand, emphasized repeatedly that diffuse, indirect public diplomacy channels reach farther and convince more effectively than direct talking points from the State Department or anyone else in government.

Glassman focused, during this discussion, on the possibilities that technology -- and specifically social networking -- present in making headway against violent extremism in the struggle of ideas. These technologies are not in and of themselves answers, Glassman argued; they are rather platforms that are built on lively debate and dissension, something that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups that convince by isolating and insulating adherents, cannot tolerate. He calls this strategy of many voices "public diplomacy 2.0" -- an acknowledgment of the fact that the strength of America's democratic ideals lies in our ability to foster and tolerate vigorous debate, debate that the government cannot and should not try to control.

Al Qaeda may have run circles around the U.S. during the Internet's web 1.0 phase, but Glassman sees that gap closing as the Internet becomes less a static mouthpiece for organizations and more a dynamic place to exchange ideas and information among users. The party line isn't enough anymore; people only take you seriously if you're open to public comment.

But there are useful things that America's public diplomats can do: they can touch off and inform discussions all around the world in diverse fora. Glassman is keen to employ the private sector to multiply the public diplomacy efforts of his office. In fact, his office at the State Department is helping to convene a remarkable gathering of pro-peace online civic organizations from around the world in New York, beginning tomorrow.

The Alliance of Youth Movements Summit is definitely an innovative departure from past wooden attempts at connecting with politically-active youth around the world:

Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, Howcast, Columbia Law School, the U.S. Department of State and Access 360 Media are bringing leaders of 17 pioneering organizations from 15 countries together with technology experts next month in New York for the first-ever conclave to empower youth against violence and oppression through the use of the latest online tools.

These young leaders will form a new group, the Alliance of Youth Movements, which will produce a field manual for youth empowerment. The field manual will stand in stark contrast to the Al Qaeda manual on the basics of terrorism, found by Coalition Forces in Iraq.

The gathering was inspired by the success of One Million Voices Against the FARC, a group started on Facebook.com by young people in Bogota. Aided by social networking technologies, the organization inspired 12 million people in 190 cities around the world to take to the streets in protest against the FARC, an extremist group that has been terrorizing Colombia for more than 40 years. The magnitude of the marches illustrated once and for all that the FARC lacked a strong support base. Within days of the protests, the FARC witnessed massive desertions from their ranks. The Colombian group will share their ideas with leaders of other groups using social and mobile technologies to promote freedom and justice and oppose violence, extremism and oppression.

Glassman seems well-positioned to carry President-elect Obama's smart power vision forward. If he is replaced, I hope that his successor will continue the innovation around public diplomacy that Glassman has begun.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)