Continuous Progress

Continuous Progress is a set of practical, web-based tools to help donors and advocates work together to plan, evaluate, learn from and improve their global development advocacy efforts. The website provides a step-by-step roadmap for planning advocacy programmes and conducting evaluations before, during and after a campaign.

The two complementary guides of Continuous Progress - one for grantmakers and one for advocates - work together and interconnect to promote the idea that better advocacy can come from collaboration. The two guides feature advice on topics including:

• creating/using a theory of change to make your goal a reality;
• determining benchmarks and indicators on the path to your goal;
• building and maintaining a coalition;
• effectively using and monitoring the media; and
• investing in capacity building as well as policy change.

Within each guide, users can move around, picking and choosing the information they need to advance their advocacy goals. In addition, users looking for a basic understanding of evaluation can consult the Basics and Background section for a quick primer. Throughout the guides, key concepts and tools can be compiled in a users' Toolkit, where they can be saved, printed or shared with a colleague. Each independent guide can also "toggle" to the same type of information on the other.

These guides are a product of the Aspen Institute's Global Interdependence Initiative (GII), who collected insights and advice from foreign policy advocates, communications strategists, private sector advertisers and grantmakers in their Evaluation Learning Group. The writers of these guides also drew on interviews with grantmakers, advocates and evaluation professionals in the summer of 2006, as well as their own experience, recent research on effective advocacy and the growing body of tools intended to help grantmakers and grantees improve policy advocacy. These sources are noted in the resource list.