In my new work role at the National Development Team for Inclusion (NDTi) (and on which more blogging goodness to come soon), I’m getting right into it with a really interesting piece of work about advocacy and evidence of its impact.
We’re not looking directly at creating new evidence about advocacy: we’re looking to gather and review the evidence that’s already available about the impact of different types of advocacy for people who need support.
What we want to do is:
- Help to understand the impact of advocacy, and the benefits of investing in it against a range of different factors and outcomes
- Describe this in relation to different forms and types of advocacy to help inform decisions about what type of advocacy to invest in for which purpose
- Focus on gathering evidence of economic and financial impact (if such evidence exists), in order to help inform investment decisions in the current financial context.
The purpose of the work is to present the evidence that exists about advocacy in a more comprehensive and robust way than currently exists. It will also help provide evidence for organisations who deliver advocacy services about their existing and potential impact.
Full details of the work we’re doing is available here: the impact of advocacy for people who need support. If you know of evidence that could be useful as part of this review, please do get in touch using the comments below or via Twitter – @rich_w
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We are doing some interesting work under our Advocacy Project at RUILS-early days but would be good to link in as might help us to determine the key ways to measure impact. Have passed your info to Alasdair – who works on the project
Excellent – thanks Cathy. In this work we’re looking at what evidence exists about advocacy’s impact – be it in internal or external docs – and will add your details to our contacts spreadsheet 🙂