ORCID Advocacy Toolkit/What is Advocacy?

Advocacy is about influencing change by raising awareness, building support, and encouraging action. In the context of ORCID, advocacy means promoting its adoption, demonstrating its benefits, and helping stakeholders integrate it effectively.

Effective advocacy often draws on established theories, such as:

• Stakeholder Theory – Identifying and addressing the needs of different groups (e.g., researchers, administrators, funders).
• Diffusion of Innovations – Understanding how new ideas (like ORCID) spread and tailoring messaging accordingly.
• Framing Theory – Presenting ORCID in ways that resonate with different audiences.

Successful ORCID advocacy involves clear communication, evidence-based messaging, and practical support. Explore this toolkit for strategies, resources, and best practices to strengthen your advocacy efforts.

Steps to effective advocacy:

1. Define your goals
2. Understand your audience
3. Develop a vision and strategy
4. Identify resources and gaps
5. Plan and develop the campaign
6. Anchor change in the culture
7. Evaluate progress regularly

Source: Open Research Toolkit Module 11 https://mfr.osf.io/render?url=https://osf.io/5d78q/?direct%26mode=render%26action=download%26mode=render

When applied to ORCID, the cycle of advocacy could look like this:

Steps to effective advocacy	Examples for ORCID advocacy / questions to ask	Resources
1. Define your goals	e.g. 80% of research staff is connected via Affiliation Manager implementation, identify drivers
2. Understand your audience	e.g. research staff, teaching staff, PGRs, PGTs - which reservations might each group have?
3. Build a sense of urgency	Consider deadlines such as e.g. REF, grant deadlines etc, then communicate this urgency to steakholders
4. Create a guiding coalition	Define stakeholders, e.g. library, IT, research support, researchers, research champions, strategic planning,...
5. Develop a vision and strategy	Engage senior leaders, existing groups (eg research committee) and embed in institutional policies
6. Craft the message	e.g. benefits of ORCID for each involved group
7. Identify resources and gaps	e.g. existing training sessions for researchers or postgrads that could include ORCID; any colleagues that need training
8. Plan and develop the campaign
9. Enlist a volunteer group	e.g. you could establish ORCID champions - researchers willing to promote ORCID
10. Empower broad-based action	Through training and knowledge of ORCID to colleagues, making effective use of institutional systems
11. Generate short-term wins	Identify where you could reuse information from the ORCID record e.g. researcher web profiles, pre-filled forms, re-use publication lists or identify other researcher benefits like time-saving, avoiding duplication, increasing visiblity of outputs
12. Anchor change in the culture	Training for researcher staff and professional services; links with institutional policies; links with institutional processes e.g. staff reviews
13. Evaluate progress regularly	Monitor ORCID member reports in Member Portal or from your institutional systems (CRIS, repository)

Examples of advocacy integration in other events

Build into a range of Library workshops i.e. not a stand alone session about ORCiD; users need a reason to attend the session beyond ORCiD.

Examples include:

Raising Research Visibility (Leeds University Library)

Open Research (Leeds University Library)

Research Data Management (Leeds University Library)

Researcher Profiles and Metrics (University of Liverpool)