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Problem Statement Template :EIPR:@personal:

• Problem Statement Template
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Problem Statement Template   EIPR @personal

:CREATED: [2012-05-18 Fri 21:12] :MODIFIED: [2012-05-18 Fri 21:13] :IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]

You should produce and agree a short Position Paper that sets out your understanding of the problem and your recommendations for its solution

Use internally to obtain agreement and common understanding and ensure the consistency and coherence of external messages

Use with potential alliance partners to get agreement around a common position

Use with targets as a back up document to summarise your position

Phase 1: Know what you want to change

Identify the problem or issue to be addressed

This is a two stage process:

1. Recognising potential problems and issues that could be addressed through advocacy and campaigning
2. Selecting the actual problem/issue that you will work on

Potential advocacy issues can be identified by:

Gathering views of beneficiaries and partner organisations

Analysing your own programme experience

Researching opportunities in the external policy and media environment

Listening to views of staff, volunteers & supporters

Finding out the priorities of your current and potential funders

There are times when you are engaged in a process of strategic planning when you may pro-actively seek all this information to gather a long list of issues that can be whittled down in the selection process. However, it is also important that you have established effective communications and knowledge management systems to receive and process this information on a continual basis so that you can react to needs and opportunities when they arise.

Without effective systems, it is likely th\at the views of staff and funders will dominate.

Beneficiaries

Research Partners

Programme

Experience

External

Opportunities

Potential

Issues

Apply

Criteria

Agreed

Issue

Funders

Consultation

Staff

Potential issues need to be assessed through a set of previously agreed criteria. The criteria will be individual to each organisation and should be specified in the organisation’s overall strategy for advocacy. Areas that criteria could cover include:

Numbers affected by, and severity of, the issue

Likelihood of success

Impact on organisation’s public image and reputation

Impact on organisation’s funding and/or whether the potential advocacy project can be funded

Whether the organisation wants to do advocacy in alliance with other organisations, or whether it wants a distinctive niche

Potential for mobilising supporters, beneficiaries and/or the public

Links with existing programme

This can be supplemented with a process of research and consultation with internal and external stakeholders.

At the end of the assessment, there needs to be a clear decision making process on which (if any) issue is to be pursued through advocacy and campaigning.

Analyse the problem

Having identified the problem or issue to work on, you need to analyse the problem.

You do this in order to better understand it, identifying the scale and nature of the

problem and its causes and effects. Your analysis should also lead you to identify a range of recommendations for actions that different actors should take to resolve the problem. Your objectives will be selected from these recommendations.

Analysing the problem will also start the process of building your case – a rational argument backed up with solid evidence.

Research

A first stage in analysis is to do some research. It is worth remembering that there are two main purposes to research in advocacy and campaigning:

To help you understand the situation better in order to improve your analysis

To gather evidence to help convince others of the validity of your arguments

Ideally the methodologies applied to these purposes would be different – a more open approach to the first and a more narrow focus to the second. However, we may not have the luxury of doing research twice, so we should be aware of both purposes when designing our research approach. We can do primary or secondary research. Primary research is essentially field research – investigating the reality of the problem by talking directly to those involved. Secondary research is usually desk research – investigating what others have already done and said about the issue. Desk research is clearly cheaper than field research and so will probably be your starting point. The data that we gather can be either quantitative or qualitative. Both are needed to help you understand the situation and to help convince others of your arguments.

Participatory Research and Analysis

In situations where you have access to people who are affected by the problem or issue, it is always beneficial to involve them in the research and analysis. Not only are they informants to your research, they can also be deployed as gatherers of information (with appropriate support). More than this, those people provide one of the key voices in the process of analysing the problem. It is too easy to make wrong assumptions about the causes and effects of issues affecting others, and to guard against this we can involve them in the process. There are a range of different participatory tools and methodologies available, usually involving people in group discussions and activities.

Analysis Tools

Whether you are involving the people affected by the issue, other experts or just your colleagues, there are many analysis tools that you can use to help clarify your thinking and give you a more complete analysis. Most tools are better when used in a small group situation, as the group process helps to challenge our assumptions, pool greater knowledge and create a more robust analysis.

Examples of suitable tools include:

Problem & Solution Trees

Force-Field Analysis

Agree your policy position

Your analysis of the problem needs to documented and adopted by your organisation or network. This agreed analysis will then form the basis of your advocacy/campaign, ensuring internal understanding and coherence.

The usual format for such documentation is in a Position Paper, sometimes called a

Policy Paper or Policy Brief. They are usually just one or two pages, never more than four. Making them clear and concise helps them to be agreed, read and understood.

The Position Paper will typically set out:

A summary of the problem or issue and its effects, including its scale and scope, supported by key quantitative and qualitative data where appropriate

Your analysis of the causes of the problem, supported by key quantitative and qualitative data where appropriate

Your recommendations for its solution, highlighting the specific actions that you want different actors to take

When this policy position was agreed and who by

Note that these recommendations are not your advocacy or campaign objectives. Your objectives will be drawn from your recommendations, but will usually be more focussed and possibly more limited in scope.

The main audience for a Position Paper is internal. It is a tool to help get formal agreement on what your organisational policy position is on an issue.

Once that agreement has been reached, the Position Paper is then a tool to communicate that policy position to staff and volunteers so that they are able to represent it to their external audiences.

You might use the Position Paper to help build alliances by getting other organisations to sign up to the same policy position (although you might want alliance partners to also sign up to the same set of narrowly defined objectives).

You might also give it to your target audiences after a face-to-face meeting where you have presented your arguments. It is not usually suitable as a main form of communication with targets – the form and style should be adapted for each audience.

Strategic Approaches to Advocacy & Campaigning

There are four strategic approaches to advocacy & campaigning:

• Rational

• Collaboration

• Legal/Judicial

• Political/Pressure

Which approach to take depends on the context, especially what the barriers are to the decision maker taking the course of action that you want. Most advocacy is contested, with opposing views arising from vested interests, different values, alternative perspectives, diverging priorities or being under pressure from other stakeholders.

Rational: The target is influenced through the weight of rational argument. For purely technical issues that are not contested and where the barrier to action is lack of information, then a rational approach may be the most cost-effective approach. This approach requires a clear case supported by objective evidence, where underlying values are not in dispute and there are no opposing stakeholders. For contested issues, another approach is required (although having a clear evidence-based rational argument will add value to your credibility and coherence to your arguments).

Collaboration: A target institution is influenced by collaborating with it – for example, to perform joint research or deliver a pilot programme. The advocacy organisation does not press a particular solution to the target and has to trust that the process will lead to an acceptable outcome. There also has to be a level of trust between the two organisations and agreement on broad objectives if not on the detail of the approach. The shared ownership that ensues can help ensure that policy changes are put into practice. One danger is that the advocacy organisation can be co-opted into the targets agenda and its external credibility damaged.

Legal/Judicial: Established legal processes are used to force a change of policy and practice. It requires a legal framework in line with what is being advocated, a independent judiciary who is willing to make judgements in line with the law, and an judicial system that is powerful enough to impose those judgements on the target institution. It also requires the advocate to have sufficient resources and appropriate skills. However, it is highly

confrontational and can take a considerable length of time.

Political/Pressure: The target is influenced by mobilising pressure from other stakeholders.

It recognises that advocacy is usually contested, with stakeholders having different perspectives and values, and opposing forces trying to wield their own influence on the decision maker. It can involve various tactics, not all of which are confrontational.

Most successful advocacy and campaigning has a foundation of an evidence- based rational argument, but using a political or pressure-based approach to influencing. By engaging with selected audiences to win their support, this will have a greater direct and indirect influence over the decision maker than we would have had by merely presenting them with our rational argument. We choose our audiences (channels of influence) according to a range of factors, including their influence over the decision maker, their interest in the issue and our accessibility to them. Channels of influence can become chains of influence, and the chosen influencing strategy should be presented in the

form of an influence map.

Decision Maker

Audience 3

Audience 6

Audience 2

Audience 4

Audience 5

Audience 1

Advocacy & Campaigning Organisation

Representing your strategy in such a diagram forces you to make clear choices concerning which audiences you are going to target and which you will not. It also helps to ensure that your choices will realistically have an impact on the decision maker, and it makes your chosen strategy much easier to communicate.

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• Source: 2012-05-18.org