The Advocacy Side of Network-Centric Advocacy: Action of Delivering an Argument

I ran across a reference to the following in an email from The Communications Initiative. I thought that it was worth riffing on over here because I seem to spend lots of time digging around the concepts of Network-Centric but very little time talking about Advocacy theory. I assumed that the advocacy component is kind of self-explanatory.

However, it is neat to play around with the theory and definition of advocacy to see if there is really a unique "network-centric" vs. traditional approach to advocacy. Surprisingly, in the pure theory world the difference is not distinct since all the nonprofit and campaign structures are all attempting advocacy and social mobilization.

Advocacy is the action of delivering an argument to gain commitment from political and social leaders and to prepare a society for a particular issue. Advocacy involves the selection and organisation of information to create a convincing argument, and its delivery through various interpersonal and media channels. Advocacy includes organising and building alliances across various stakeholders.

The idea is that network-centric approach might typically differinciate the strategy used to form and deliver an argument as well as the methodology used to building alliances across stakeholders.

Traditional approach builds an organization and organizational governance structure to pick the arguments and "package arguments. Network-approaches ask the network to find, package and select the arguments (think MoveOn Bushin30Seconsds example). The network picks the message.

The traditional approach typically might use a core communications team at the "center" to manage the communications effort and distribution strategy. (NET or NRDC communications team) whereas a distributed network approach might be more like the Environmental Defense (Justundoit) campaign or Resource media working with and training many spokespeople to speak their own voice.

The goal and output is the same "advocacy". It is the strategy of management and approach to problems that differs.