The many faces of advocacy effectiveness : a scoping review on ‘effectiveness’ in NPO-driven policy advocacy

In this paper we report the results of a scoping review on how effectiveness of advocacy strategies of non-profit organizations is defined and measured. While most studies in the field of NPO advocacy focus on the prevalence of different types of NPO strategies, few efforts have been conducted on the effectiveness of these strategies (Almog-Bar & Schmid, 2014).The few scientific efforts that have been conducted on this matter predominantly focus on the determinants of self-perceived NPO effectiveness (Buffardi et al, 2018). These authors show that advocacy strategies are perceived as effective when NPOs engage in direct and close relationships with government officials and initiate meetings between government officials and clients (Onyx, et al, 2011; Buffardi et al., 2018). However, as emphasized by Almog-Bar & Schmid (2014), reliable evidence on the extent to which advocacy strategies are able to actively induce policy changes can only be provided when taking into account the perspective of policy makers on the influence of NPOs. Other studies are limited to building a theoretical and methodological framework to enable further empirical research concerning policy advocacy effectiveness (bron). We present the results of an interpretative scoping review on peer-reviewed journal articles on advocacy effectiveness during the last thirty years to examine the current understanding of the dimensions of policy advocacy effectivenes