Nonprofits advocacy means different things to different interests. Groups and organizations may perform more than one particular type of advocacy at any given time, often unknowingly. Nonprofits play an important role in identifying, framing, and monitoring issues; mobilizing resources; bridging and leveraging participation across sectors; promoting change and participation by social actors; providing opportunities for leadership by, and representation for, affected populations; and providing legitimacy by engaging public support around issues.

Over the course of their work, nonprofits generate a large body of information that informs and affects their activities around social change and civic participation. That body of knowledge and expertise, however, is not easily accessible, due to lack of attention; hesitancy to divulge successful tactics or strategies and lessons learned from failure; and uncertainty as to the value of such information by other organizations. Ideally, for example, seasoned policy advocates on environmental issues would be able to share their insights and experiences with less experienced human needs policy participants and vice versa, regardless of geography and issue-specific concerns.

For the past three years, a taxonomy of nonprofit advocacy and policy activities has been developed and vetted through an ongoing dialog with a range of practitioners, reflected in the organization of content throughout the NPAction site. To be sure, other classification schemes for nonprofits exist. The National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) categorizes nonprofits by the type of service they deliver, and attempts to begin classifying nonprofit activity online in terms of the services they provide online have emerged as well. More academic approaches categorize nonprofit activity by the type of organization structure and role it plays with respect to society. Any formulation, however, cannot easily accommodate the roles of nonprofits as both participants in the policy arena and service providers.

Our information classification scheme is by no means an exhaustive list of mutually exclusive activities, nor will remain fixed in stone, but it does provide a useful framework through which to explain nonprofit advocacy that has given legitimacy by practitioners themselves as one means of exploring and explaining advocacy, flexible enough to accommodate and incorporate other items as needed. We believe it has the capacity to stay relevant and draw attention to resources otherwise not captured or overlooked by other resources.