Interview: trainer Helen Collinson on INTRAC’s Advocacy Strategy and Influencing Skills course

Our long-running course on Advocacy Strategy and Influencing Skills (ASIS) returns in May 2026. This online course introduces participants to the core skills needed to influence powerful stakeholders and policy processes in a range of contexts. It also gives participants a thorough understanding of how to develop and monitor effective advocacy strategies. In the third in our series of trainer interviews, Andy Johnson spoke to Helen Collinson about what participants can expect.

HC: Advocacy can be messy and confusing as it relies entirely on influencing stakeholders and processes over which one has little or no control. This course takes participants through a series of systematic steps and tools to help them develop a strategic path through all of this complexity. It also provides tools and methods on how to measure the progress and contribution of an advocacy initiative which can be challenging, plus some tried and tested techniques for maximising influence. Three things make this course special: firstly the way in which participants apply the theory directly to their own advocacy work and issues, with feedback provided by the trainer (and peers) on any self-paced activities uploaded to the Moodle platform. Secondly the rich learning about advocacy initiatives internationally from fellow participants who join the course from all over the world. And thirdly the one-on-one mentoring session which each participant is entitled to in addition to the course which enables me to provide some hands-on advice and support to participants’ real-time advocacy challenges.

HC: There has been a huge expansion in advocacy by civil society organisations in the international development, human rights, women’s rights and environmental fields over the past 30 years, with a much bigger emphasis on holding governments and other powerful stakeholders to account, and less emphasis on CSOs delivering services themselves. At the start of my career nearly 40 years ago, the word `advocacy’ was barely ever heard outside a courtroom or a legal context. However, it may be that civil society advocates have become the victims of their own success. Around the world and across diverse political contexts, a backlash is in full throttle, and a shrinking of civil society space the common denominator. Arguably, that makes our advocacy work more critical than ever before – and part and parcel of defending democracy itself. What hasn’t changed in thirty years is the passion and willingness of organisations to take on this challenge. However restricted the context, I’ve been struck by how someone somewhere will still find a way of trying to make a bad situation better, and turning to advocacy as a means to do so.

HC: This is a highly participatory course and learning from peers is a major asset of this course, as I mentioned above. We try to maximise interaction in multiple ways. For example, many of the self-paced activities in between the live sessions (often on a Mural Board or in a googledoc) are designed to encourage participants to review each other’s work and offer advice on each other’s challenges. Secondly, a lot of the time in the Live Sessions is dedicated to plenary discussions and structured break-out group activities. Participatory activities in the live sessions often involve working together on a Mural Board. To free up discussion time in the live sessions, quite a lot my own input on tools and approaches is communicated through short screencasts which participants watch in between the live sessions. Even when presenting slides, I try to pause frequently to pose questions to participants – to help join up the dots between the theory and participants’ own experiences in practice. We also regularly showcase participants’ outputs in the live sessions – whether that be someone’s power & stakeholder map or an advocacy roadmap or a compelling advocacy message.

HC: Yes, absolutely! I have a lot of experience myself as an advocate and a series of tools and approaches to share, based on established standards and principles in the CSO advocacy sector. But my main role in this course is to facilitate the sharing of participants’ own rich advocacy experiences and expertise. Through this process, I myself have learnt so much more about how advocacy is being done in different countries and on different issues. I particularly enjoy digging deeper into participants’ experiences and challenges in the mentoring sessions – and can get so fired up that I’ll want to get directly involved in implementing participants’ advocacy strategies myself!

HC: There is no blueprint for how to do advocacy and how it is done will depend hugely on the specific external context at any given time and whom one is seeking to influence. So even though there are tried and tested steps, tools and approaches, it can be hard to plot a strategic course. So the one-hour mentoring session is an opportunity for me to provide tailored advice and inputs on specific challenges which participants are facing or more in-depth feedback on their emerging advocacy strategy. These days we tend to start scheduling the mentoring sessions while the course is still going on (though some of the sessions take place in the weeks after the course). A few days before their allotted mentoring session, participants just need to send me an email with details of what they’d like to discuss in the session and any background documentation that can help me get up to speed on the issue.

HC: We’ve built in some ongoing monitoring into the course design. For example, at the end of every live session, participants are asked to fill in a quick Zoom poll on how they found the self-paced activities on the Moodle platform over the preceding week and how they found the live session itself. They’re also asked to suggest how the next live session or module could be improved. The producer and I also stay on the call after the official end of the live session in case anyone wants to give us further verbal feedback or ask any questions. We also encourage them to get in touch with us directly on email whenever they want. Then at the end of the course, all participants fill in an end of course survey which is a requirement if they wish to receive a course certificate. We take this end of course survey very seriously. I’ve now been running this online course for over five years but every course is slightly different as we’re always revising it in the light of participants’ feedback.