One of the key requests from our community is help in making the case for open contracting. Over the past year we’ve been getting feedback on what partners and allies most need and how we can help.

This short guide is designed to walk you through the steps of developing an advocacy approach for open contracting. These insights, tools and suggestions can be used by civil society activists as well as reformers within government and the private sector who would like to champion open contracting principles. We’ll take a look at how we define advocacy, the four essential steps to creating your own open contracting advocacy plan, and finally share our team’s tips for what to do when your advocacy work faces barriers and challenges.

Advocacy is how we make the case for change to the people who have power to make change happen. Typically, we think of advocates as civil society organizations who can influence and persuade decision-makers using evidence, arguments, and case studies around legislation. But in practice, anyone can be an advocate: businesses, government and multilateral institution employees can all persuade internal and external stakeholders of the benefits of open contracting, and update formal and informal rules, regulations and ways of working to improve procurement.

This Open Contracting Advocacy Toolkit will walk you through the main approaches to open contracting reform, explaining the typical steps of the advocacy planning process with tools, evidence and stories. It is written with civil society in mind, but anyone looking to improve procurement can find useful tips and information to support you.

While there are many general advocacy resources already out there (for example, this guidance from Hivos), this guide pulls together and adjusts the most recent and relevant approaches and arguments for open contracting reforms, incorporating the feedback we’ve received from you.

Before creating your strategic framework and implementation plan for advocacy work, it is important to look at your specific context and identify your strongest advocacy opportunity so you can choose your approach with intention. Consider creating an internal document for your team to add notes and opinions on the best advocacy opportunities and how strong each opportunity is. You will use this contextual information as a basis for developing your advocacy strategy in Step 2.

Four primary advocacy approaches align to the most common opportunities we’ve come across in the field. In some cases you may use a combination of more than one, depending on the landscape and how the political climate evolves, but think carefully about your time and resources to avoid spreading your team too thin!

Once you’ve established a strong sense of the context and most promising route for pushing open contracting reform, the temptation to charge ahead enthusiastically with tactical ideas is very real. But to go the distance, you need a roadmap, which includes making sure you’ve chosen the right vehicle for the journey. Just like a fancy boat will not be much use if your route is landlocked, an advocacy program targeting regulators isn’t suitable when your opportunity is a new piece of legislation where you should prioritize engaging elected officials.

Advocacy is about identifying and building or neutralizing centers of power – those that advance your cause, and those that hold it back. This is where taking a brief pause to set your strategic framework comes in handy. Analyzing your opportunities and stakeholders through the lens of power – who has it, how do they use it, and how can you build it so that momentum gathers towards change – is critical.

Sometimes we avoid strategic frameworks for fear that they can become time-consuming thought exercises with no action or impact – but when done well, this is not the case. That’s why the word framework is critical. Your strategy is not the end all be all of foreseeing every potential problem or resolving every detailed question that could hypothetically arise, it is a decision-making and prioritization aid.

A good advocacy strategy can be discussed and agreed in a few days. It doesn’t need to be long, and it doesn’t need to be complicated. Our strategic framework discussion guide looks at power in more detail, and walks you through a series of questions that can help your team orient the approach.

At its core, your strategy must include five things:

1. Objectives – What do we want? Where are we going?
2. Approach – How do we get there? 
3. Targets – Who can give us what we want?
4. Allies & influencers – Who can help us get there?
5. Barriers – Why hasn’t it been done already?

Once you have your strategic framework, you unlock a special power: the power to say ‘no’ with confidence. Every organization knows the challenges of stretched resources, we only have so much time, money and staff. So whenever we are asked if we can speak at an event, arrange a meeting with a stakeholder, monitor a new piece of legislation or regulation that’s just come up, we can go back to our five questions and ask if the proposed activity will be critical to implementing the strategy.

A common mistake at this stage is to draft a pitch that says what we as advocates want to say. But what we really need is a pitch that is what our advocacy targets need to hear. The two are not always the same.

A good messaging framework has a short core pitch, and includes arguments, examples and evidence to support your case for change. It’s most effective to find examples and evidence from cities, regions or countries that share similarities, or from reforms that addressed the same theme or sector (medical procurement, infrastructure, etc.) as you are looking to work on. If you don’t find examples at the ready here, don’t hesitate to reach out to your peers in other cities and countries and ask directly in case they have more to share. We’re always happy to put our partners in touch for peer learning!

An advocacy program, on the other hand, is your ongoing strategy to keep beating the drum for open contracting in what might be a variety of stakeholder groups and spaces. You may not always have a live campaign, but you will always have an ongoing advocacy program.

Once you know which advocacy approach(es) you are using for the upcoming 6, 12, or 18 months you can decide what your advocacy program looks like, and if any of its goals would benefit from a concerted campaign around specific moments.

Meaningful, sustainable reform takes time, and progress is rarely linear. One of the challenges of advocacy work is that so much is outside of our control: political dynamics, economic pressures, competing issues that take priority, change in personnel, and the myriad ways reform can be blocked or go wrong along the way.

But we are all here because we know our cause is worthwhile, and we want to make a positive impact that leads to more open, fair and equitable societies, so we are not the type of person to give up at the first sign of difficulty.

Over the years, our team and our community have all come across barriers to securing open contracting reform opportunities and then ensuring those reforms are implemented well. We are familiar with many of the concerns, questions or objections some stakeholders might have regarding opening contracting: the cost, the time and resources, the technical requirements, fears about sensitive information, and so on.

While our first course of action is to develop a strong advocacy strategy with solid messaging, evidence and activities to make a compelling case for change, often we need to address potential objections or concerns head-on, or re-ignite energy after it has stalled because of a particular sticking point.