What is Advocacy?
Advocacy is the act of actively supporting, promoting, or arguing in favor of a cause, policy, or idea. It involves influencing decision-makers, raising awareness, and establishing people and resources to achieve your desired outcome. In the context of digital preservation, this means making the case for why preserving digital content matters, ensuring stakeholders understand its value and securing the commitment, funding and policies needed to sustain it. Advocacy has become a core competency for digital preservation practitioners because our work often happens behind the scenes, which makes risks and needs largely invisible to those who control budgets, priorities, and strategy. Practitioners must therefore advocate for resources, policies, staffing and long‑term commitment to ensure digital materials remain accessible for as long as required.
Other terms and definitions
-
Ask - The specific action you want a stakeholder to take as a result of your advocacy, for example: approving a policy, allocating funding, allowing time for training, joining a working group, or supporting a system procurement. An effective “ask” is clear, realistic, and aligned to a stakeholder’s role and motivators. To avoid confusion: goal = what you want to achieve overall, ask = the specific thing you want someone else to do and actions = what you do to get there.
-
Stakeholder - A person, team or external party who can influence, enable, approve, or benefit from digital preservation activities. They could comprise audiences which are internal or external to your organization. Stakeholders may hold decision‑making power (e.g., executives, finance leads), operational expertise (e.g., IT, records managers) or represent communities who rely on long‑term access to digital materials. In this toolkit, “stakeholder” includes anyone you need to influence or communicate with; you can treat stakeholders as your advocacy audiences.
-
Message - A targeted statement that links a stakeholder’s motivators with the benefits of digital preservation. Effective messages translate technical needs into meaningful outcomes, clearly explaining why digital preservation matters, how it supports organizational goals, and what action you want the stakeholder to take. Tailored messages form part of your overall communications and engagements with stakeholders.
-
Motivator - A factor that drives a stakeholder’s interest, behavior or encourages and enables action. Motivators may be organizational (e.g., compliance, efficiency, risk reduction) or personal/professional (e.g., workload, reputation, service quality). Related term: ‘Barrier’ - that which resists, delays, or blocks action.
|
