The Porch and the Platform: Advocacy at Every Scale

I have spent my entire career in advocacy. I just did not always call it that.

Interviewing human rights leaders for Satya Magazine, where the work was making someone else’s urgent cause relatable to a reader who had never thought about it before. Testifying in Sacramento and lobbying on Capitol Hill, where the work was turning evidence into language a committee could act on in the few minutes I had. Building national digital campaigns that moved millions of people to take action on issues from animal welfare to gender equity.

Different rooms. Different scales. Same instinct.

Make people understand why something matters. Make it feel urgent. Give them something specific to do about it. That throughline is what shaped how I think about digital advocacy and engagement now. Not as a separate skill from the rest of my career, but as the place where everything I learned in smaller rooms gets to operate at real scale.

Early on, the scale was one person at a time. Knocking on doors in Missouri to talk about puppy mill reform, not posting about it, but standing on a porch making the case to someone who had not thought about it that morning. Testifying before a state legislature where I had minutes, not pages, to convert evidence into something a non-expert could act on.

That work taught me what actually moves people, not volume, but specificity. The clearer the ask, the more likely someone is to say yes.

Digital advocacy did not replace that lesson. It scaled it.

When I helped grow Barred from Love into a national digital campaign with Sia, generating more than 10 million impressions and 1.5 million advocacy actions in support of federal animal welfare reform, the mechanics were the same ones I had learned on a porch in Missouri, just operating at a size no doorstep conversation could reach.

The campaign worked because the ask was specific, the evidence was strong, and supporters could see exactly what action they were taking and why it mattered. Digital tools did not make the work less personal. They made it possible to make that same personal case to a million people instead of one. That is the part of digital advocacy I find most powerful, and where I think the field still has room to grow: building engagement that does not just generate actions, but moves people from awareness to investment, from a single click to ongoing support for a cause.

These days, that has meant building multilingual campaigns across 21 countries, turning a global issue — girls and women blocked from finishing their education — into something a supporter can understand and act on immediately, in their own language, in a way that feels close instead of distant.

I still think about it the way I thought about that porch in Missouri: someone who had not considered the issue that morning, given a reason to care and something real to do about it.

Because that is the challenge in almost every advocacy campaign: making the issue human without making it small. Making the ask simple without making the work seem easy. Giving people a way in without pretending one action solves everything.

Some of the most important advocacy work also happens in rooms that are not friendly. Corporate partners. Industry stakeholders. Legislative offices that do not arrive already persuaded.

That work is not separate from digital engagement. It is what makes the digital ask credible. Knowing what pressure exists, what risk a decision-maker feels, and what a supporter’s action needs to accomplish is the strategy underneath the campaign.

Twenty years in, I keep coming back to the same realization: reach and relationship were never really in tension. The campaigns I am proudest of were the ones where I could feel both at once: the scale of a million people acting, and the specificity of a single ask that meant something to each of them.

Digital advocacy is not just about reaching more people. It is about carrying what works in the smaller room into the larger one.