- You and your community partners can clearly communicate community priorities with relevant decision makers,
- You have shareable data, evidence, and/or stories relevant to local decisions,
- Your institution has relationships with or connections to key decision makers and/or media representatives.
Connecting with Decision Makers
In addition, you can take direct advocacy actions, such as meeting with officials, providing public testimony, and joining broader regional, national, or issues-based advocacy coalitions that support community priorities, to foster a more equitable and just society. Speaking directly with officials and providing public testimony—when the community invites your support—can add legitimacy to local advocacy efforts by leveraging your organization’s credibility. Science engagement organizations can also engage with other influential individuals, such as local business leaders, public figures, and community organizers, to garner support for advocacy initiatives. “Grasstops” refers to influential individuals or leaders within a community who have the power to shape opinions, policies, or decisions. Engaging with grasstops involves building relationships and garnering support from these influential figures to advance advocacy goals or initiatives. Unlike grassroots efforts that mobilize support from the broader community, grasstops strategies focus on targeting key interested parties who have the power to effect change at a higher level.
- Learn more about strategic planning for advocacy: Advocating for Change from Community Toolbox is a list of specific steps to take in preparing for a new advocacy effort.
- Learn more about productively communicating with decision makers: Communicating with Decision Makers from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography shares guidance on calling, writing, and visiting policymakers or representatives.
Civic engagement in action
Creating Cycles of Civic Power and Action
A member of the Canarsie Street Action Team invites workshop participants to share their resilience concerns about the neighborhood’s transportation infrastructure at the Cycles of Resilience Action Forum 2019.
In communities long neglected and excluded from science and science-based decision making, finding effective methods for increasing power is essential. To address this challenge in New York City, the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, along with Public Agenda and their network of research collaborators, created Cycles of Resilience (Cycles). Cycles is a sustained community engagement program that aims to assist Jamaica Bay residents in identifying issues, using science to refine ideas for action, and connecting their priorities with city, state, and federal efforts. Cycles comprises games and activities to engage residents, mapping exercises to better understand community issues, idea generation activities, and exploring how to turn ideas into action. This cycle helped position residents in strong roles to prioritize research and actions that prepare their communities for climate change and urbanization. A Cycles project in Brooklyn included a policy forum led by residents where they partnered with scientists to create proposals to address identified challenges. The proposals were presented to residents and officials for feedback for future implementation.
Amplifying Community Voices
Science center professionals can use their expertise in communicating complex topics to help community members voice their needs and perspectives through writing policy briefs, letters, and petitions:
Letter writing campaigns can also be an excellent option, as they provide a direct channel for authentic community voices to reach decision makers when face-to-face interaction is impractical. You can guide community members in crafting persuasive letters to express their concerns, demands, or support for specific issues.
Petitions, whether on paper or online, can also be a useful tool to communicate with and influence decision makers, especially when there is a specific solution you want to uplift, you know which decision maker(s) to target, and the solution has broad community support. Successful petitions are built through background research and persuasive writing, both of which a museum can support the community in producing. Your museum can also serve as one of the places where the petition is circulated for signatures. It is important to note that petitions to add a candidate or ballot initiative, or asking legislators, mayors, or governors to support or oppose specific legislation, would be considered lobbying activity (See “Distinguishing Advocacy and Lobbying”).
Science engagement organizations can also advance change by connecting community members with media outlets and using their communications skills to craft talking points. There is a wide range of tools available to share messaging and center community voices:
Press releases are brief statements that outline your organization’s stance on a current issue and are directed at a public audience and the media. Typically, press releases are limited to one or two pages and include quotes from the organization’s leadership or experts—in this context, including community voices as also is essential. A press release’s primary purpose is to convey stories, announcements, or other information that reporters use to inform their work.
Letters to the editor are short (typically no more than 200 words) responses to or comments on an article that has run in a publication. Each newspaper, magazine, or journal has its own guidelines for submitting a letter.
Op-eds are commentaries, often written by a subject-matter expert or a person with a direct experience of an issue, on any timely topic. These are typically 700 to 800 words at most in length and feature a strong, focused, and informed opinion or argument.
Social media posts are messages published online through a variety of platforms, including Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, TikTok, blogs, or message boards. These posts intend to convey a message that can be easily shared across various social networks and may include a call to action (e.g., read more here, sign this petition, join our group, or donate money).
It is critical to work with your community partners to develop messages that authentically represent community priorities, and to select the tools and channels that will reach your intended audiences, including decision makers and other community members.
- Learn more about creating policy briefs: Making Research Matter: Creating Policy Briefs from True North Group contains straightforward and specific advice on how to write a policy brief, appropriate for first-time brief writers.
- Learn more about letter writing as an advocacy tool: Letter Writing, a Powerful Advocacy Tool from the Society for Neuroscience offers specific advice of what to include in a letter as well as an example letter.
- Learn more about writing and circulating a petition: How to Write a Petition from Change.org describes practical steps for writing an effective petition.
- Learn more about planning a media strategy: The Public Health Media Advocacy Action Guide from Global Health Advocacy Incubator is a thorough, step-by-step guide for creating an advocacy media strategy.
- Learn more about creating talking points: Writing Effective Talking Points from George Mason University contains brief advice about writing clear, effective talking points.
Civic engagement in action
Reducing Pollution to Protect Communities
A report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in 2023 revealed that commercial sterilization facilities (like those that clean food and medical equipment) are disproportionately located near people of color, people earning low incomes, and people who do not speak English as a first language, particularly Spanish-speaking communities. UCS’s analysis of health risks to communities living near facilities that emit the known carcinogen ethylene oxide, along with advocacy for science-based standards helped push the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue a proposed rule to cut emissions at these types of facilities by 80%. At EPA’s public hearing on this proposal, UCS analyst Darya Minovi and environmental justice advocates, health care workers, public health practitioners, and affected community members testified to share their expertise and experiences living and working near these facilities. In March 2024, the EPA finalized a rule strengthening emissions controls for facilities emitting ethylene oxide, requiring commercial sterilization facilities to significantly reduce their ethylene oxide emissions, install additional control equipment, and improve monitoring.
Evaluating Civic Engagement Efforts
Evaluating civic engagement efforts is crucial for understanding and increasing the impact and effectiveness of advocacy initiatives and informing future strategies. Evaluation should include key metrics that can be tracked to assess outcomes and determine success. Metrics may include quantitative measures, such as the number of community members engaged, the reach of your social media posts, or the level of policy change achieved. Qualitative measures can also provide essential insights that gauge the impact of advocacy efforts on community members, science centers or museums, and decision makers; conditions and strategies that affected outcomes; unanticipated outcomes; and opportunities for future impact.
The Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County Community Science Program works with scientists and educators to encourage the diverse communities that live and work in the L.A. area to participate in long-term biodiversity studies of urban habitats and surrounding natural areas.
To ensure comprehensive evaluation, science engagement organizations can choose from a variety of evaluation methods and tools designed to address high-priority questions. Further, comparing pre- and post-advocacy data can help assess changes over time and describe impact. As part of the evaluation process, science centers and museums should reflect on successes, challenges, and areas for improvement and work with community partners to refine future civic strategies. As you reflect on and learn from your civic and policy work, we encourage you to share your experiences (via conference presentations, blog posts, academic articles, etc.) to normalize these practices and develop a supportive community of likeminded institutions.
- Learn more about evaluating advocacy efforts: The Advocacy Evaluation Toolkit from New Tactics in Human Rights provides in-depth information about how to effectively evaluate advocacy efforts.
- Learn more about choosing appropriate evaluation methods and processes: Choose Methods and Processes from Better Evaluation is a step-by-step guide on how to choose evaluation questions and methods.