ALMASI Organisation guide for Diamond OA advocacy events

The guidelines and lessons learned in this resource represent the first building blocks for a guide to organising advocacy events and engaging and consulting with key communities. We hope this resource is useful for anyone setting out to plan an advocacy event, especially events that are global and multilingual. The process of organising such events is complex and requires collaboration, so the step-by-step guidelines provided in this resource will help teams plan efficiently and benefit from the lessons that we have already learned.

The data in this organisation guide emerged from the planning process for the Diamond OA Policy Forum, which launched on 29 October 2025. The Forum brings together international, national, and local policymakers and funders in Africa, Europe and Latin America to discuss policy and funding needs, progress, and challenges. The launch was a multilingual event that convened eleven speakers and over 370 participants from around the world. It was essential to have live interpretation in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish to enable speakers and audience members to participate in their preferred language.

As we hold more events through the ALMASI project, we will add our learnings to this resource. After each ALMASI event, team members will reflect on what we learned from the planning process and in running the event, to determine whether and how the organisation guide needs updating.

Since this guide is meant to be used, the spreadsheet is formatted as a checklist. Columns for timeframe, partner lead, and partners involved in each task can be filled in. At the start of planning all future ALMASI events, we will create a copy of this spreadsheet and use it as a checklist and planning tracker. All stakeholders planning advocacy events can download the spreadsheet and use it as a checklist and fill in or edit the columns according to their needs.