Step five: Decide who you need to influence

It is very important to be clear about who you need to influence and what opportunities exist for influencing things. You need to understand how and where policy decisions are made. If you want to improve the delivery of health services, you may need to target the health administrators or doctors. If you are trying to influence community attitudes toward children, then your focus of attention will be, for example, community leaders, parents groups, or religious leaders. If you are trying to get the law changed, you need to target policy makers, government ministers, parliamentarians. Once you are clear about who you need to focus on, you can then design your advocacy strategy.