Regular readers of Nonprofit Advocacy Matter know that each edition closes with a story of nonprofits marshalling their advocacy rights and powers to advance their missions. Hence the section title, Advocacy in Action. Now comes a comprehensive collection of materials and instructions on what this section is all about, the Build a Movement – or BAM! – from Washington Nonprofits.

Build a Movement: Tools to Use Public Policy to Achieve Your Nonprofit’s Mission [1] provides a wealth of materials, including background information, learning guides, and a document vault with dozens of templates and sample messages to help every nonprofit of every mission move into advocacy efficiently and effectively.

As Washington Nonprofits explains, Build a Movement! “uses the metaphor of a house to explain the ways to engage advocacy in the life” of nonprofit organizations. At the very foundation, there is Everyday Advocacy [2], that is essentially upkeep that every organization should consider to be “nimble, resilient, and ready to serve.”

Adapting to circumstances is where Urgent Advocacy  [3]come in. The training materials in this room of the house help nonprofits respond to the “reality that it is sometimes a crisis or sudden opportunity that brings nonprofits to policy work.”

And then there is Step-It-Up Advocacy [4] for those occasions when lobbying is called for. This section of teaching materials explains the superpowers that charitable nonprofits possess, the laws that govern the process, and cheat sheets on how to comply with reporting requirements.

[1]The materials astutely point out that fixing policies is not just a question of lobbying a lawmaker. State legislation of course can have significant positive or negative impacts on the work of nonprofits. And so can local ordinances, state regulations, judicial determinations, and oversight. All are part of the climate affecting nonprofits and their missions.

Build a Movement! is tailored specifically to the laws and realities of Washington State. So no one should simply print out individual templates and run with them. The cultural, legal, and mission differences can matter.

We’ll conclude the description with the summary in the BAM! materials: “Build A Movement! invites you and your colleagues to take action on policy issues that matter to your mission. In its purest form, government is intended to represent the will of the people. This toolkit will support you as you build a movement of people and policy that propels your work to the destination you envision for your organization. ‘Raising the roof’ refers to the tradition of barn-raising — working together to achieve things we can’t do alone.”