There’s never been a more critical time to craft and grow an advocacy agenda

What’s your moonshot?

In modern media, the CEOs and founders with the greatest personal brand and societal impact are those who have taken a firm stand for a greater good. And those who engage their employees, creating ecosystems full of employee advocates, are leading the advance towards genuine diversity and inclusion.

The first step, however, is knowing your “Why”. Having a clear vision of what you, your organization and your brand stand for and want to accomplish is essential. It will inform your action plan: everything from government communications to stakeholder relations to the daily interactions of team members. Just as importantly, it will help you set and achieve diversity and inclusion goals and metrics. After all, you can’t shoot for the moon if you don’t know where you’re going, whether that’s an advocacy agenda for your industry, at your own boardroom table and even sometimes at your own AGM.

At Town Advocacy, we spent the pandemic creating the ultimate two-part advocacy education program: one is a series singularly focused on the must-know advocacy trends for the leadership of any organization, in any industry. The other is a Canada-first bootcamp focused on training employees to be change advocates.

HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED:

Advocacy Moonshot
Target the unattainable. With every decision you make and every goal you set as a team, find alignment with your impact on something bigger. We’ve found ours and we’d love to help you define yours.

Beyond government relations
Advocacy is sometimes part of an informed, compliant government relations plan, but not always. Advocacy goals can be directed internally at your own organization, your industry or at society generally. Remember, change starts with you.

Advocates are everywhere
Team members can be your best advocates for change on social, environmental and inclusion goals. Provide them with the skills needed to be critical, passionate advocates for change.

Listen and learn
As companies tackle social issues, from climate change to doing a better job of reporting diversity metrics publicly, empower your employees to talk about these issues openly.

Failure
Sometimes you’ll fail or miss the mark in your advocacy efforts. We get better when we share what worked and didn’t, important lessons that will collectively move us forward. Embrace and applaud failure (it’s actually progress and action in disguise).

These dynamics are a powerful diversity and inclusion motivator: Our path ahead is faster, stronger and smarter when everyone is at the table.

Advocacy as a guide to economic and social progress benefits us all. Training, teaching and coaching can only expedite that journey.

We’d love to help you define your “why” and chart the advocacy road to tackling the big problems facing your part of our country.

Town Advocacy offers training, consulting and advisory solutions focused on public affairs, government relations, ESG and related strategy at home in Canada and around the world.

Book your team advocacy agenda day at townadvocacy.com.