Cultural Advocacy

Through engagements with socially innovative programs and campaigns, Marvin Strategies constructs cultural advocacy strategies designed to shift perceptions and influence behaviors.

Define the Movement

The process of developing a robust cultural advocacy strategy begins by defining a movement. It is crucial to identify specific goals and develop measurements by which to evaluate them. Vision design, landscape analysis, goal setting, message review, and metric creation are key elements of early phase cultural advocacy. Using principals of human centered design, Marvin Strategies facilitates strategic assessments with clients to help define their movement.

Network Cultivation

For established programs and campaigns, network cultivation can serve as a change accelerator. This involves mining the existing ecosystem with a focus on partnership building, collaborative facilitation, and joint narrative agreement. Fundamental to this stage of development are the tenets of cross-sector collaboration. Marvin Strategies uses “collaboratories” to knit together the fabric of a campaign or movement.

The Next Phase of Impact

Sometimes campaigns need a fresh start. Qualitative marketing research, internal program evaluation, consumer interviews, and facilitated stakeholder engagement can inform the next phase of impact for already successful initiatives. Marvin Strategies specializes in dedicated listening tours that all current or potential stakeholders in a campaign to freely express their attitudes and desires.

Long-Term Support

No matter the maturity or scope of the project, the ultimate goal is to shift cultural perceptions and influence individual behaviors. For many efforts, marked results take years, the establishment of novel branding, talking points, spokespeople, and audiences are the fastest way to achieve results. Marvin Strategies can provide long-term support for cultural advocacy strategies, because change doesn’t always happen overnight—but when it does, adding stability is most crucial to maintaining the momentum over time.

Media Production & Impact Campaigns

Creative content is powerful, but often times those behind the camera or microphone struggle to provide an inspired audience with a call to action and next steps.

Tell the Whole Story

Media writers and producers tend to create content around stories and people with which they are familiar. This can often limit a production’s ability to be genuinely diverse and inclusive. Marvin Strategies offers narrative building techniques that enhance character development and storyline. Using skills originally honed around the military and veteran narrative, the firm uses proven strategies to help producers and writers to dive into other traditionally hard-to-understand subpopulations. These techniques are especially important in scripted narratives, but also play a major roles in nonfiction, documentary, and journalistic projects.

Inspire to Action

Marvin Strategies helps filmmakers and media creators influence audiences after they have left the theatre, flipped off the television, or finished the podcast. By creating thoughtful, robust impact campaigns attached to a media project a producer can follow through on the passion of their audience extent the power of their content. Impact campaigns can be established at any phase of production and focus on reaching unique audiences, leveraging the production’s social message, developing tangible follow-on opportunities, and creating a standard of achievement that can be measured.

Program Development

The key to long-lasting impact is sustainable programs the leverage the excitement created by cultural advocacy strategies.

Empowerment, Not Charity

The veteran nonprofit community has experienced a shift away from organizations that offer charity to veterans and toward those that use veterans as a means to accomplish a social good. Marvin Strategies’ leadership has been on the cutting edge of this movement for more than a decade, including work in community building, national service, disaster relief, and social perceptions of veterans. The firm expands on this expertise by helping corporations, foundations, and nonprofits to understand the value of an empowerment, asset-based narrative for any population. Data-driven and anecdote-supported, the empowerment narrative presents and new and valuable approach to any social movement.

Turn Ideas into Action

Many times, exercises in cultural advocacy—strategic assessments, collaboratories, or listening tours—leave organizations and campaigns hungry for next steps. Marvin Strategies provides implementation plans to transfer ideas into action. Human center design principles and the fundamentals of collective impact serve as key touch points as the firm walks through execution and expansion phases of their cultural advocacy strategies.

Mark the Bench

A crucial part of any nonprofit program or campaign is measurement and evaluation. Marvin Strategies aids clients both with the establishment of metrics at the onset of a project, as well as the evaluation of success and impact months and years into any initiative. The firm specializing in measurement that incorporates feedback from stakeholders and target populations.

Marvin Strategies is certified by the Small Business Administration as a service-disabled veteran owned small business.