Unlocking Hidden Expertise in Advocacy Networks

In every network, there are people sitting on treasures. It may not be flashy or well-publicized. It might not show up in a press release, a social post, or a white paper. But it’s there. It’s the deep, practical expertise that comes from lived experience, community fights, regulatory battles, and years of working through complex problems at ground level.

This is the treasure inside advocacy networks. And for too long, it’s gone underutilized.

In a recent blog post, we introduced the idea that review is the product and examined the changing landscape of movement knowledge. As content becomes easier to produce, legitimacy becomes the real constraint. What matters most now is not just what gets written, but who stands behind it. Review capacity, not production capacity, is the new bottleneck.

But legitimacy doesn’t start at the top. It starts at the edges of the network. It starts with people whose names may not be known widely, but whose knowledge is hard-won and deeply relevant.

The Problem: Expertise That’s Too Often Overlooked or Hard to Access

Many people inside networks have something to offer. They have seen what works in local campaigns, have developed shortcuts and checklists, or have a unique view on how to navigate power in their context. But their insight is often:

• Buried in experience but never formalized
• Shared in one-on-one conversations but not broadly captured or elevated
• Recognized locally but not visible network-wide

Why? Because historically, there’s been a high bar to share that value. If you couldn’t write a full guide, run a training, or staff an issue full-time, your knowledge often stayed in the background. The cost of developing, producing, and promoting useful content or services has simply been too high or too complex for many to justify.

If you were to sketch out the traditional ROI curve for sharing expertise, you’d see that in the past, the cost (in time, effort, and attention) to package and share insight often outweighed the perceived benefit. Valuable knowledge stayed siloed. Today, with easier publishing tools, technology, and more accessible distribution systems, the curve is flattening. The bar to share is lower, and the potential return is higher.

This shift means we can afford to go niche. Instead of asking people to generalize their knowledge to large audiences, we can elevate it for narrow, targeted, high-impact use cases. That changes the game.

The Services Lab: Surfacing and Packaging Network Intelligence

Netcentric Campaigns is experimenting with a structured way to do exactly this. We call it the Services Lab.

The premise is simple: every network has people who hold valuable knowledge. What they often lack is structure, framing, and a path to offer it in ways that others can find and use. The Services Lab concept helps:

• Identify high-value, overlooked expertise
• Support members in shaping that knowledge into a simple, accessible service
• Connect that service to people in the network who need it
• Merchandise it, by presenting the offer clearly and compellingly so it can be discovered, requested, and used

This isn’t about creating another resource library. It’s about offering real-time, lightweight, human-centered services grounded in authentic experience.

Take, for example, Jess Conrad. Jess brings deep insight from her organizing in East Palestine, Ohio following the major rail disaster in 2023. Through the Service Lab concept, we helped her package that experience into a 60-minute risk briefing, a custom action map, and a short strategy session. It’s not a PDF. It’s not a webinar. It’s a relationship-driven, responsive service that delivers value now.

Other offerings are in development: campaign design from seasoned campaigners, permitting strategy from frontline experts, and digital organizing insights from people who’ve tested and iterated under pressure.

Why This Matters for Network Health and Resilience

When we talk about strong networks, we often focus on connection. But connection without activation misses the point. The Services Lab concept gives people a way to activate what they know in service of the broader network. That helps:

• Recognize and validate contributions that might otherwise stay hidden
• Build relationships based on value, not hierarchy
• Encourage peer learning and reduce dependence on centralized experts

It also diversifies who gets to be seen as a leader. If the only way to show up is to be a policy wonk, a published author, or a full-time organizer, we lose too much of the network’s potential. But if a parent, a retiree, or a local volunteer can offer a one-time strategic session built on their unique experience? That’s network power at its best.

Digging for Treasure: A New Lens on Network Value

The idea of “digging for treasure” is more than a metaphor. Networks are filled with hidden value. Often overlooked people, ideas, tools, and stories that, when surfaced, can unlock strategic advantage.

Digging in this context means:

• Asking better questions: Who’s holding knowledge that’s not visible?
• Building lighter lifts: How can we make it easier to share that knowledge?
• Creating systems of support: What scaffolding turns one person’s insight into a reusable, trusted resource?

In a world flooded with generalized content, specificity is a competitive advantage. What your network can offer that AI or mass campaigns cannot is situated knowledge. Local nuance. Trusted relationships. Strategic context. The Services Lab concept is designed to find that value and give it legs.

What Comes Next

We’re still learning. The Services Lab is early-stage, and every service we pilot teaches us more about what works and what doesn’t. But already, we’re seeing the impact of this approach.

We’re hearing from network members who say, “I didn’t think I had a unique ‘something’ to offer,” and then discover that their lived experience is exactly what someone else needs.

We’re seeing how small investments in coordination unlock much larger returns in value, engagement, and trust.

And we’re seeing a new model emerge: not content production, but expertise activation.

In an upcoming post, we’ll explore how we’re building the systems and workflows to support this model at scale. Not as one-off experiments, but as a core competency we can offer to other networks.

For now, the invitation is simple: look around your network. Who has knowledge that isn’t being used? What would it take to bring it forward?

If you’re interested in shaping or testing this approach in your own network, reach out to Netcentric Campaigns. We’d love to hear what you’re sitting on. And help you bring it into the light.

Start digging. The treasure is already there.