Advocacy Groups Editing and Proofreading Services

Advocacy organisations are usually outspent by the interests they oppose, sometimes by orders of magnitude. What they have instead is a clearer argument and the credibility that comes from being right over a long period. Both live in writing, and both are spent quickly by a campaign that overstates a finding, uses a figure it cannot source, or lets its most committed supporters set the language for an audience that has not yet agreed with anything.

We edit what advocacy and campaigning organisations produce — policy briefings and position papers, consultation responses and submissions to inquiries, campaign messaging frameworks and spokesperson guidance, press releases and media statements, supporter emails and action alerts, petition and campaign page copy, coalition sign-on letters and joint statements, research reports and their summaries, briefings for parliamentarians and officials, community organising and training material, funding applications and reports to funders, and evaluation of campaign outcomes. Our editors check that every claim is sourced to something a hostile reader could check, and that the language is pitched at the people who need persuading rather than the people already convinced.

The messaging framework is the document that decides whether an organisation speaks with one voice, and most are written as a list of key messages nobody uses. Spokespeople under pressure fall back on the language of the movement, which is precise among colleagues and alienating outside it. We build these so the frame is stated as a short sentence anyone in the organisation can deliver from memory, so it leads with the value the audience already holds rather than with the problem, since an audience that has not accepted the problem hears a description of it as an accusation; so the three facts that support it are written with their sources attached, in the form a broadcast interview can carry; so the opposition's strongest argument is stated and answered rather than avoided, because it will be put and an unprepared answer is what gets clipped; and so the internal vocabulary is listed alongside the words to use publicly, not because the internal terms are wrong but because they do work only for people who already share the analysis.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, campaign plans and coalition correspondence. We are editors rather than campaigners, lawyers or policy advisers, and we offer no view on strategy, on the merits of any position, or on election and lobbying rules that may apply to your activity. What we can do is make the argument clear, the claims defensible and the language reach past the people who already agree.