Part 4: Allies and partnerships

It is important to form partnerships early in the process of developing an advocacy plan so that you can jointly decide on your targets and your messaging. This ensures that all the members of the alliance have ownership of the advocacy plan, and all commit to it. This step comes soon after deciding on your aim and objectives, as the aim and objectives direct you to who you want or need to work with.

As stated in RNW Media’s Advocacy Framework, RNW Media takes the role of an expert organisation in the field of media and young people, working towards advocacy objectives as a Technical Support Partner (TSP) together with other organisations.

What would be the advantages of working in partnership in general and with RNW media as TSP specifically?

Advantages of working with others in advocacy

• By working together, you build a stronger support base. The bigger your voice and your support base the more reason for the decision maker to listen to you.
• With more resources you can do more.
• By working together, you can bring in a variety of skills and can divide tasks based on who is good at what.
• By working together, you can share resources and responsibilities.

To identify your allies, which could for example be other CSO’s, science institutes, media, individual activists/advocates, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Who could have a positive impact on the advocacy issue?
• Who and what skills are complementary to ours?
• Who is benefiting from the issue?
• Who is already working on the issue?
• Who are our natural allies, and could they be allies for this advocacy issue?

An important ally for RNW Media is youth. Cooperation with youth is key in the work of RNW Media, because they are key participants and key target group and bring forward the issues RNW Media works on. They know best what they need, so they should be involved in driving policy change and have a say around possible actions and solutions. Working with youth, not as target group, but as fellow advocates, also benefits the legitimacy. Having young people involved, the advocacy work is better attuned to the realities of the young people, it enables them to raise their voice and be heard, which is key to RNW Media’s civic engagement objective.

Working with young people, as well as with other allies, requires flexibility and willingness to accept change from both youth and adults. For example, adults may need to change their meetings to the evenings if the young people are at school in daytime, while young people may need to understand better the realities and restrictions that affect an advocacy programme.

To make an inventory, selection and decision on partners to work with (what do they bring, what do they gain, how does it help the partnership) you can make use of the following table.

Ally overview

	Ally 1: ………………	Ally 2: ………………	Ally 3: ………………	Ally 4: ………………	Ally 5: ………………
Contribution
Funding
Human resources
Political connections
Media Connections
Communications
Technical expertise
Other