Strategic Advocacy for Public Service Media

Strategic Advocacy for Public Service Media

Overview

The Master Class aims to further build the individual competence and know-how of participants in the processes, strategic calculations and instruments required to successfully manage advocacy efforts to defend the role, resources, prerogatives, and added value of public service media (PSM) in an increasingly adversarial context.

The Master Class focuses on the required techniques and skills to advocate the interests of PSMs in an impactful way. It combines operational analyses, practical exercises, best practices, and hands-on methods and instruments of direct benefit to participants that are used by other sectors.

It uses a multilevel governance approach with advocacy tools that are effective at regional, national, and supranational levels of decision-making. It therefore also laser beams on the European playing field and how current or future agendas – and major legislative operations – affect the legitimacy, added-value, market operations, competition conditions, and accountability of PSMs.

The Master Class will help participants read the challenges and choose the right battles, elaborate plans and roadmaps, lobby with integrity, adapt messages, and anticipate the functioning modes as well as preferences of the institutional and individual actors that should be influenced to safeguard the interests of PSM.

Who it's for

Directors and Executives in charge of:

  • Communications
  • Strategy
  • Marketing
  • Policy

Skills learnt

  • Meeting the audience: How to better communicate the value of PSM to stakeholders
  • Storytelling: How to build a story that shows why PSM are important for society
  • Strategy: How to prepare positions, organize resources efficiently, and the battle fields
  • Lobbying: How to influence and persuade interlocutors
  • Negotiation: How to represent, defend, and bargain your interests.

Course objectives

This Master Class offers the opportunity for participants to come with issues related to specific PSM challenges, and leave with sufficient confidence on how to better engage personally in advocacy and lobbying operations.

Schedule

Day 1: 14:00 - 17:00
Day 2: 09:00 - 17:00
Day 3: 09:00 - 12:00

Programme Outline

Session 1: Advocating and/or lobbying?

  • Lobbying as part of an advocacy strategy
    • Advocating a cause
    • Lobbying policy-makers 
  • Engaging PSM into advocating and/or lobbying
    • Exchange experiences and define main challenges of national PSM (common patterns, specificities)
    • Planning a campaign strategically (setting objectives and interests, gathering of facts, timeline and identification of required resources)
    • Secure a sustainable dialogue with partners both at the national level and the EU playing field.
    • Workshop: Organizing roles and functions in teams.

Session 2: Preparing a campaign

  • Mapping the scene
    • Understanding the political system, the policy-making mechanisms (including budgetary procedure)
    • Mapping all stakeholders, including possible allies or opponents (policy-makers in the Ministries and at the Parliament, trade associations, NGOs, political parties, think tanks, trade unions)
    • Stakeholders mapping exercise.
  • Defining and formulating messages (position papers, amendments to draft legislation or regulation, press releases, media campaigns, social networks)
    • Workshop.

Session 3: Executing a campaign

  • Communicating the messages
    • Running face-to-face meetings
  • Organising the follow up
    • Short term (follow up of meeting or conference, execution of campaign until close of legislative/budgetary procedure)
    • Long term (establishing PSM views in the political and national landscape)
  • Respecting laws and ethics
    • Main rules and practices derived from Codes of Conducts or Transparency rules (EU and national)
  • Practical exercise

Session 4: Approaching and lobbying the EU

  • Identifying the competencies of the EU as policy maker.
    • The EU and public services
    • The EU’s media policy (regulatory and supporting programmes network)
    • The EU as guardian of European values, including freedom of speech and plurality of media (Art.2 and 7 TEU, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
  • Strengthen your strength at the EU level: Influential lobbying and representation of interests
  • Practical exercise. Participants are invited to blueprint an advocacy by implementing the knowledge, skills, and techniques presented in the Master Class.

Certification

After completing the 4 modules, you will be awarded an EBU Academy Certificate