IMPLEMENTING YOUR ADVOCACY PROGRAM

Developing Your Advocacy Program Strategies

What Strategies Will Help You Meet Your Objectives?

Objectives determine what you will accomplish. Strategies determine how you will accomplish it. A single strategy can (and usually should) help to achieve more than one objective. You will want to limit the number of strategies in order to avoid over-extending limited resources. It is more effective to do a few things well than many things incompletely.

For the objectives stated previously you might develop the following strategies:

• Create opportunities to involve spokespeople from the community with first-hand experience of fire loss. This testimony conveys the need for strong fire prevention (such as a burn survivor speaking to a group or a media story about a worker who lost his job due to fire shutting down a local business).
• Network to distribute key fire safety materials to target audiences.
• Develop relationships with community leaders who are involved in fiscal planning.

Each strategy will require the development of tactics (actions or materials) that can also help achieve more than one strategy and objective. On the following pages we will look at what some of your target audiences might be and what tactics can be developed to reach them.

For more information read:
The U.S. Center for Disease Control's (CDC) article, Writing S.M.A.R.T. Objectives

Building Blocks of Advocacy by Jim Crawford in FireRescue Magazine.

The section on Evaluation in this Guide