No More Half Measures: Supporting Advocacy Capacity and Policy Campaigns

Five Ways Foundations Can Better Support Policy Campaigns and Build Lasting Advocacy Capacity

This research brief explores the challenges facing grantmakers who fund policy campaigns without simultaneously considering how their funding choices affect long-term advocacy capacity. Failure to consider that risk leaves policy wins vulnerable and defenseless to oppositional interests, or leaves the field of advocates no better prepared for the next policy battles.

The authors argue that funders, no matter their size or appetite for long term funding commitments, have to get better at designing grantmaking strategies that meet the dual demands of advocacy capacity needs and the realities of the policy and political landscape.

“Half measures result in actions that only achieve part of what was intended. This is exactly the predicament in which too many foundations find themselves. And it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Atlantic commissioned this brief. Center for Evaluation Innovation is an Atlantic grantee.