This brief aims to help funders, evaluators, and other social change agents be crisper and more accurate in how they talk about and understand approaches to advancing large-scale social change. In response to the increasing use of the term movement to describe a wide variety of efforts, we compare and contrast three distinct social change approaches that are often conflated with movements: field building, network development, and promoting the uptake of practices by large numbers of organizations.

This worksheet from "When the Best Offense is a Good Defense" helps advocates take periodic stock of short-term policy goals and document progress, including when progress means maintaining a past win or defending against an unanticipated threat. Use this tool at two points in time: 1) when identifying policy-related goals in specific areas for an upcoming legislative session, and 2) when later reflecting and documenting progress on these policy goals, as well as additional, unplanned positive changes and disadvantageous policies that were avoided. This tool is meant to be modified to fit different contexts and serve as a starting point for discussing variations of advocacy work.