Defending Dignity A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions on Monitoring Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 16.3. STRATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE ADVOCACY Advocacy involves talking, explaining, following up and persuading. For this reason, it is important to think creatively about your audiences and how to engage with them in different ways. • One size does not fit all: The formats used to package your research have to be right for your different audiences, so it is important to be creative. Additional advocacy materials such as onepage key points, eye-catching working papers, or online videos are all formats that can appeal to policymakers, for example. • Be serious but not dull: It is right to be serious about the purpose, the importance and the “game-changing” nature of your findings and conclusions. However, communicating this in a dull way will fail to engage your audiences. • Think about intermediaries or “knowledge brokers”: These are the people who can take your conclusions and findings and repackage and present them to others that your NHRI may not be able reach as effectively. • The media is a key intermediary but require “newsworthy” information: What do journalists need in order to write accurate and powerful articles that can influence government officials, for example? A 50-page report on their desk is not going to do it. However, an executive summary, selected graphs, personal stories and a press release with strong quotes from the NHRI will better meet their needs. Left by Asian Development Bank, reproduced under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license; top right by UN Women, reproduced under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license; bottom right by World Bank, reproduced under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. 156