Advocacy Research

Advocacy research is a specialized research tailored for crafting effective advocacy strategies. Quality research is paramount to developing a comprehensive plan to advocate for issues or policy changes. Defining and segmenting the base, swing and reach audiences, crafting the strongest messages and creative outputs and leveraging them to reach the right audiences is crucial in a successful advocacy strategy.

We work to thoroughly investigate the attitudes, opinions, and behaviors of your target demographic concerning your issues. Understanding these elements, we help organizations tailor advocacy efforts so they resonate more deeply with their audience, increasing the likelihood of achieving the desired outcome.

Whether you need to influence and activate the general public, key groups of voters or directly impact key opinion leaders, winning strategies are based on a foundation of research.

Why Conduct Advocacy Research?

Ensures advocacy efforts are informed, strategic, and effective. Key reasons advocacy research helps you win:

• Gain Allies: Demonstrate to key stakeholders and potential supporters, such as public officials, their constituents are behind your cause. Showing others your issue is safe to support or salient with voters is critical to garnering additional support for action.
  
  
• Informed Approach: Provide a foundation of knowledge to guide strategy, ensuring messages are aligned with your target audience's values and beliefs. Alignment increases the likelihood of messages being received positively and acted upon.
  
  
• Message and Creative Optimization: Different messages and creative pieces may be more effective when delivered by different messengers or channels. Determine whether specific collateral or messages are best conveyed by a CEO, through a press release, via commercial advertising, or by partnering with other groups. It further enables messaging refinement to maximize potential among key audiences so you maximize impact with targeted efforts.
  
  
• Risk Mitigation: Identify potential pitfalls in messaging that could alienate your audience, activate your detractors and ultimately harm the cause — before these groups take action. Understand sentiment and craft persuasive messages without being divisive to build the broadest and most robust base of support.
  
  

Echelon's Approach to Advocacy Research

Echelon employs a comprehensive and iterative approach to advocacy research; combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies ensures that advocacy efforts are effective, efficient and resonate. We go a step farther and give you the ability to monitor digital conversations among the groups most important to your cause so you know when things are going well–and when they aren't.

• Quantitative and Qualitative: Research often begins with qualitative research to gauge general sentiment and understand nuanced perspectives around your issues. This informs preliminary strategy and identifies key messages and themes. Those insights are used to inform a quantitative study, deployed to a broader audience. This validates insights from the qualitative research, ensures they hold across a larger population and exposes more information about your base, swing and reach audiences.
  
  
• Repeated Testing with Creative Optimizer: Echelon emphasizes the importance of perfecting advocacy messages and creative materials through repeated testing and iteration. Our Creative Optimizer tool is instrumental for refining messaging, ads, and other creative outputs to ensure they are as impactful as possible.
  
  
• Digital Conversation Monitoring and Reporting: Throughout advocacy campaigns, stay on top of what key groups are saying about your issues. Continual monitoring ensures messages and outreach are landing the right way and lets you know when things aren't working. Knowing how the conversation is evolving online is critical to staying ahead and responding quickly to issues in your campaign.
  
  
• Survey Credits: Even the best plans and strategies encounter hiccups; an unexpected news event, missing a key endorsement or more can impact planning. Echelon offers the ability to purchase survey credits that can be used at any time for a stand-alone study or with our on-demand omnibus offering. When something happens, our team is ready to get the insights you need to keep things on track.