To achieve WWF’s mission of sustaining the natural world for the benefit of people and the planet, advocacy work is critical. With presence in 100 countries and with 60 offices world wide, the advocacy capacities and strategies can differ significantly between offices. To ensure that advocacy is strategic, inclusive and participatory throughout the WWF network and with high impact, WWF wanted to introduce a standardised set of tools and guidelines for the WWF network to work with.
Together with the Global Policy Advocacy team at WWF and practitioners throughout the WWF Network, we applied co-creation to build a toolkit to support their advocacy work. The process centered around combining collaborative prototyping in a series of co-creation workshops & design cycles with interactive user testing and enrichment through case studies and feedback sessions. To ensure a smooth adoption of the toolkit, training sessions were organised to empower a select group in the WWF network to use the advocacy toolkit and transform them into internal ambassadors for inclusive and participatory advocacy; so they can teach and support their colleagues within the network to use the tools as well.
The result: an interactive and actionable toolkit that outlines a standardised approach to strategic and effective advocacy, supported by workshop formats and practical tools to bring it into people’s daily work. The toolkit is seamlessly integrated with other internal processes and is available in multiple languages. To ensure that the new way of working is not only applied internally but also in broader collaboration between partners two different versions were developed – one for internal use – focusing on the link with internal processes and principles – and one for collaboration with partners of WWF – making the key elements accessible to others. With a group of highly motivated internal ambassadors, the toolkit is now being used throughout the WWF Network.
Photo credits © Luis Barreto / WWF-UK