Sheldon Gen and Amy Conley Wright: Nonprofits in Policy Advocacy

In Nonprofits in Policy Advocacy, Sheldon Gen and Amy Conley Wright have written both a solid academic work, which includes a great deal of original research, and a valuable supplementary text for classroom use. While Jeffrey M. Berry’s (2005) A Voice for Nonprofits, and Seen But not Heard (Bass et al. 2007) gave us broad overviews of the extent to which U.S. nonprofits were engaged in advocacy and lobbying, Gen and Wright take a deep dive into that behavior. Focusing on nonprofits that regularly engage in advocacy, they provide both a qualitative and quantitative examination of the strategies and tactics used by organizations in their attempts to affect public policy. Importantly, they also frame advocacy behavior within the theories of public policy scholarship, making Nonprofits in Policy Advocacy a useful supplementary text for graduate classes in nonprofit management or advocacy, but equally valuable for graduate or upper level undergraduate public policy classes, as well as political science classes that focus on interest groups, lobbying, and advocacy.

Gen and Wright begin by setting the context for policy advocacy in the U.S., including the multiple venues that federalism and separation of powers provide advocates as they pursue policy change. Included is a useful overview of the roles played by nonprofit organizations in each step of the policy process, from problem recognition to policy evaluation. Chapter 2 explains their empirical research which uses both policy scholarship as well as practitioner literature to identify a series of 24 tactics used by advocacy organizations as they pursue policy change. These tactics include coalition building, direct lobbying, media campaigns, research, pilot projects, litigation, and grassroots public mobilization. This aspect of their research involved creation of a composite logic model of policy advocacy, detailed in Appendix A. The bulk of their data comes from two sources, interviews with a purposive sample of 31 individuals in advocacy nonprofits in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Washington, DC, and a national survey completed by 821^[1] advocacy organizations. Their research methods are detailed in Appendix B.

Using Q-methodology, individuals in the purposive sample were asked to identify which of 24 tactics, described as “specific advocacy activities,” their organizations were most likely to use (p. 23). Analysis of these data using PQMethod software, which they describe as a “by-person” factor analysis, revealed six distinct advocacy strategies for policy change. These six strategies fall along a continuum from most reliant on institutional policy actors to least (p. 39). The national survey of advocacy nonprofits allows Gen and Wright to provide generalizations about the number and characteristics of nonprofits using each of the different advocacy strategies. Through case studies written from their interviews and archival research, they provide examples of the ways in which nonprofit advocacy organizations use each strategy.

The middle six chapters are in-depth discussions of each of the six advocacy strategies. Each chapter illustrates a different strategy, bringing together the empirical findings with case studies, and tying each to one or more policy theories. For class use, each chapter ends with discussion questions. Gen and Wright order the chapters along the continuum identified in Chapter 2: Public Lobbying Strategy, Institutional Partnership Strategy, Inside/Outside Strategy, Direct Reform Strategy, Indirect Pressure Strategy, and Popular Power Strategy.

Chapter 3 highlights the public lobbying strategy, in which organizations use the tactics of lobbying, framing and messaging, media campaigns, and research and analysis as their tools of persuasion. Seeing themselves as “champions of public interest issues” (p. 46), when organizations use this strategy, they provide decision makers with information and gain public support to complement their own lobbying efforts. The theoretical foundations of the public lobbying strategy are institutionalism, which assumes that responsibility for policymaking is in the hands of government; relatedly, these organizations use the insider strategy of relationship building to gain the trust of institutional decision makers; finally, the public support tactics are rooted in civic engagement theory, in which public involvement is assumed as part of the democratic policy process.

The public lobbying strategy is very popular; among organizations that see advocacy as core to their missions, nearly all consider this an extremely important strategy. This is the top strategy used by organizations with over $500,000 in income.^[2] The policy areas in which organizations are most likely to use this strategy include health, education, social welfare, and civil rights, as well as issues considered complex but not well organized such as criminal justice, housing, and immigration.

This chapter ends with two case studies, first, the Books not Bars campaign of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which seeks to shift resources from the California youth prison system to local alternatives. Their public lobbying strategy primarily involves educating policymakers and drafting legislation. The second case describes The Utility Reform Network (TURN) efforts to fight a “Power Grab” by California’s major private, for-profit energy company, Pacific Gas & Electric, which spent $46 million on a ballot initiative that would have made it nearly impossible to form new public utility providers. This case provides a lesson in direct democracy for those unfamiliar with the process, as the objects of the public lobbying strategy in this case were the voters of California.

The subject of chapter 4 is the institutional partnership strategy, which includes the tactics of organizing public support, framing and messaging, providing research to partners, and piloting programs and demonstration projects. These last three tactics are unique to the institutional partnership strategy, as nonprofits “view themselves as partners with government institutions” (p. 75). This strategy aligns with the theoretical literature on civic engagement which expects that services and programs will improve through partnerships and democratic participation.

Gen and Wright find that organizations using this strategy are almost universal in their opinion that advocacy is important to fulfilling their missions. Nonprofits using institutional partnerships often target bureaucratic agencies when they engage in pilot and demonstration projects. The policy areas in which advocates are most likely to use this strategy are health, education, social welfare, and civil rights.

The chapter concludes with two cases. First, the Healing Justice program of the American Friends Service Committee, which has sought a number of policy changes to California’s prison system. Their tactics have included authoring reports on overcrowding, and writing amici curiae briefs in court cases that challenge California’s prison practices. The second is the California Youth Connection, a foster youth advocacy organization which has used its partnerships with state and county agencies to provide feedback on services and agency practices.

The inside/outside strategy is detailed in Chapter 5. This strategy focuses on “a champion on the inside of the policymaking body…and demonstrated outside support from the public, to apply pressure for change” (p. 99). Tactics include framing, media campaigns, public pressure, coalition building, dissemination of research, and presentations. With this strategy organizations often use individuals or firms skilled in public relations. The inside component of this strategy focuses on building relationships with a key insider (or insiders), rather than on lobbying the entire body. The outside tactics involve media and information campaigns to build public support, which in turn puts pressure on the decision-making body. Gen and Wright note the theoretical foundations of this strategy as the interest group literature, as well as streams theory of the policy process, which often includes policy entrepreneurs on the inside, who help advance the policy cause.

Organizations engaging the inside/outside strategy are likely to consider advocacy a very important part of their work, and often work with a wide group of government entities. The policy issues most commonly advanced using the inside/outside strategy include education, health, social welfare, and civil rights.

This chapter includes three case studies including Save the Bay’s successful efforts to ban single-use plastic bags; this first involved passing a local ordinance in San Francisco, and then building a coalition that resulted in a successful California state-wide ballot proposition. The second case highlights StudentsFirst, which concentrated on an insider strategy in Georgia that involved contract lobbyists, and an outside strategy involving an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, which galvanized public support. Finally, they describe the American Lung Association (ALA) of California’s efforts to use a ballot initiative to raise the tobacco tax. This case is interesting as it involves lessons about a failed first attempt at policy change, and subsequent adjustments made by ALA that eventually led to success at the ballot box.

Chapter 6 discusses the fourth strategy, direct reform, which bypasses legislative bodies and focuses on the executive branch agencies that implement policy, as well as using courts as venues to achieve direct policy reform. The tactics used in this strategy include creating public awareness through media campaigns, issue framing, disseminating research, and serving as litigants by seeking direct relief for those whose interests they represent. The direct reform strategy “recognizes that how policies are implemented and evaluated are just as impactful as getting them adopted” (p. 123). The theoretical foundations for this strategy come from adversarial legalism, and incrementalism, whereby advocates monitor bureaucratic implementation and program outcomes. While litigation and monitoring are core tactics for organizations using the direct reform strategy, they were not common tactics for organizations in the national survey.

Organizations that use this strategy most often are more likely to be large membership organizations and to be those with more than $500,000 in income. Direct reform is most likely undertaken in the policy areas of social welfare, civil rights, economy/jobs/business, and public safety and disaster preparedness.

Both case studies in chapter 6 include use of litigation. First, is the case of Ban-transfats.com, in which a policy entrepreneur creates a nonprofit with the express purpose of banning trans-fats in food through a lawsuit against Nabisco’s sale of Oreos to children. In the second case, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), founded by a policy entrepreneur who is a former high-ranking official at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), uses lawsuits against polluters, EPA, and other agencies to press for better regulation and eventual closures of coal-fired power plants.

The fifth strategy, indirect pressure, is the subject of Chapter 7. Organizations using this strategy believe that public pressure is what changes policy, therefore their influence on policymakers is indirect. While their tactics are quite varied, the commonality for those using indirect pressure is their expected “pathway of change, from the public to policymakers, to policy, and finally to social and physical conditions” (p. 155). The theoretical foundations of this strategy include institutionalism, and the outsider approach to interest group politics; the intention is to build public support that will last longer than any individual elected official’s term in office.

Indirect pressure is used in many issue areas including education, social welfare, civil rights, criminal justice, taxes and monetary policy, and defense and national security. The strategy is most often undertaken by wealthy organizations, those in the $1–50 million range in annual income.

The indirect pressure strategy is illustrated by the case of San Francisco’s Neighborhood Parks Council, whose charge was “empowering communities to keep 220 local parks well maintained, and encouraging volunteers to take ownership of the city’s open spaces” (p. 165). Its tactics included creation of a report card for neighborhood playgrounds and coalition building to create a grassroots network which was mobilized to pass a local bond measure raising funds for community parks.

The popular power strategy is the subject of chapter 8. This strategy seeks to “harness the power of the public to affect social change” (p. 171), and is where advocacy and activism most clearly intersect in Gen and Wright’s typology. I particularly like the inclusion of this strategy because efforts of this type are not always considered in the policy process, but are of increasing importance. Organizations engaging popular power expect policymakers to follow the will of the people and/or are fighting against policy preferences of formal decisionmakers. This strategy involves coalition building, media campaigns, framing, public mobilization, rebuttals, and debates, preferring to use persuasion and argumentation to sway public opinion. Not surprisingly, organizations using the popular power strategy have little regard for the formal players in the policy process, instead seeking to build more responsive and democratic systems for policy change.

The theoretical foundations of popular power are the grassroots and outside interest group theories, resource mobilization, and the Advocacy Coalition Framework. These organizations devote fewer staff and financial resources to advocacy, are less likely to be membership organizations, and are those with less than $500,000 in income.

The chapter’s first case study is Codepink’s Bring our War $$ Home campaign, which used the tactics of “satire, street theatre, creative visuals, civil resistance, and directly challenging powerful decision-makers in government and corporations” (p. 181). The second case involves the San Francisco chapter of Parents for Public Schools, which used the popular power strategy “to bring real stories of public education to life for policymakers” (p. 188).

Gen and Wright conclude the book with a summary of their six strategies and a fairly lengthy discussion of the next step for advocates: measuring the results of their efforts. Evaluation is a perennial problem for nonprofits due to the lack time and resources, yet funders and other stakeholders expect to see results for their support. The many difficulties involved in measuring outcomes are exacerbated in assessing nonprofit effects on public policy, especially when policy change can take decades, and “causality is difficult to establish” (p. 196). They end the book with examples and brief discussions of several innovative approaches to advocacy evaluation including systems mapping, social network analysis, and bellwether methodology.

My primary criticism of Nonprofits in Policy Advocacy is that the original 31 purposive interviews may have been too narrowly drawn. This limited the case studies to mostly nonprofits in California, a state with unique politics, including heavy use of direct democracy in policymaking. Overall, however, the six advocacy strategies developed by Gen and Wright offer an important contribution to our understanding of how advocacy organizations in the U.S. undertake their policy work. Their typology and method provide scholars with future research avenues, and the accessible nature of the book make it valuable to both students and those engaging in the important work of policy advocacy.