Social Work with People Practicing Same-Sex ... - ILGA Europe

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5. Identification of the campaign objectives.
Objectives are the set of more short-term — as compared to the goal — interim results,
where each result is necessary precondition for achieving ultimate goal. In order to
set objectives, you need to divide the overall issue, which needs to be addressed,
into smaller components, and to focus on their solution. It is better to formulate and
arrange objectives as the list, instead of making narrative descriptions. Objectives are
formulated as statements on results-oriented activities. If the campaign envisages
several objectives, all of them should be interlinked, necessary and sufficient to achieve
the campaign's overall goal.
Let us consider the abovementioned example on legalization of the same-sex civil
partnerships in Ukraine. Specific objectives may include the following:
Objective 1: development of the complex of legislative proposals to introduce
changes to the family law.
Objective 2: legalization of the same-sex civil partnerships or marriages in
Ukraine, which were legally concluded abroad between the citizen of Ukraine
and foreign citizen.
Objective 3: development of the mechanism of official registration of partnership
family relations, alternative to current legislation.
Both objectives and the goal should be formulated as specific completed actions, rather
than processes. For example, “development of the network of LGBT organizations at
the local level” cannot be set as an objective, but “registration of the new local LGBT
organization” would be perfect and clear objective.
Any objective within the advocacy campaign should be logically connected to the
ultimate goal of the campaign. For example, the campaign, aimed at the legalization
of the same-sex civil partnerships, should not contain such objective as “legislative
simplification of the procedure of correction of gender for transgender individuals”.
Objectives of the advocacy should follow so-called SMARTE principles:
a) Specific — concrete, definite, clearly defined. — Such statements as “holding
two roundtables with representatives of local authorities and key ministries”, or
“organization of press-conference on …” are very good. Clearly defined objective will
make it possible to evaluate whether it was realized or not.
b) Measurable — yielding to qualitative or quantitative measurements. — Observance
of this and previous criteria would be very important for current or final performance
evaluation of the entire campaign. For example, the objective “improvement of
psychological climate among MSM in a given penitentiary institution” is poorly
formulated, but “organization of regular psychological counselling of MSM, who serve
their sentence in a given penitentiary institution” is absolutely acceptable.
c) Appropriate — applicable to achieve ultimate goal, fully corresponding. — As we
noted above, objectives that are not linked to the campaign's ultimate goal, should not
be implemented within this campaign. For example, there is no point in establishing
dialogue with faith-based organizations to disseminate objective information on the
nature of homosexuality, if in fact our goal is to develop tolerant attitudes of mass
media towards LGBT.
d) Realistic — reasonable, attainable. — Any objective, as well as the goal of the
advocacy campaign, should be theoretically reachable given the availability of resources
(financial, human, and other), secured for the campaign implementation. Of course,
the realistic nature of specific goal or objective is defined not only by the resources,
but also by the number of objective factors, such as social and political situation; the
status of public opinion and its dynamics; legislative aspects. For example, the goal of
constitutional prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is very
noble in its nature, but objectively it is unrealistic. In order to pass such legislative
decision, we need at least 300 votes of the Members of Ukrainian Parliament, but today
and in the nearest future it deems impossible to secure this number of votes.