Policy for Campaigns 11: Policy structures and roles
Where should policy fit into an organisation's structure?
In previous articles, I’ve written about how policy can be a crucial input to campaigning work and inform it throughout, and how it should also inform how other parts of an organisation go about things. Does that mean the policy guys should just be in charge of the whole thing? Probably not.
There is more to achieving change than just policy, and that’s true whether your organisation exists primarily or exclusively to campaign, or whether achieving change is just one part of how the organisation achieves its objectives. Developing and holding relationships with other organisations is broader than just policy. Working with members or beneficiaries should be central to policy work, but also involves specialist skills that are not just the domain of policy, and are needed elsewhere across an organisation. Equally, policy should ideally be informing how the organisation operates, in the broadest sense, to at least some degree (and there’s an interplay between policy and strategy that will merit a future article).
So while there’s nothing wrong with drawing senior leaders from policy staff, and while policy should be influential with an organisation’s leadership, it probably shouldn’t be at the very top of the organisational tree (unless the organisation really does specialise in policy above everything else). Most commonly, policy sits as part of a team or department dedicated to campaigning / lobbying / achieving change. However, there are almost countless different approaches to structuring this, some more effective than others.
Where does policy fit?
A policy function will typically perform a mix of proactive and reactive work, and a mix of ongoing / business-as-usual tasks and one-off, more project-based tasks. Together, this will encompass ongoing monitoring and information gathering, routine inputs to other stakeholders’ work such as via consultation responses, and joint work with other organisations. It will also include internal-facing work such as providing material for communications and briefing senior leaders. This will all be on top of the substantial work to provide the necessary inputs to campaigning work, and manage aspects of those projects. That range of tasks provides some clues about where policy might usefully be placed in an organisation’s structure.
It can also be helpful, although also more complex, to consider where policy sits in relation to other disciplines. It can be tempting to see it on a bit of a spectrum, ranging from comms to campaigns to public affairs, with policy coming next: each discipline along the line is a bit more concerned with the substance of an issue, and a bit less with the messaging. But while that’s a useful frame up to a point, it’s too simplistic.
Where, for instance, does engagement fit in? Many organisations treat engagement as a sub-set of communications, and if you ever see an organisation that does that, you immediately know it’s terrible at engagement. I’ve argued in these articles that working with supporters and beneficiaries, to the extent of ensuring they have an active role in the work, is the ideal way to approach campaigning: engagement (which may not be the best term, but it gets at the core idea for these purposes, I think) should therefore run through every discipline on that spectrum from comms to policy, but is also a specialism in its own right: working with people in that way can be hard, and policy, campaigns and other colleagues can benefit from support to do it well.
Two other potentially related disciplines are strategy and research. Perhaps only very large organisations will have dedicated units or teams working on strategy, although this can in practice mean evaluating impact as a way of monitoring progress on implementing the strategy; even medium-sized organisations might have some staff dedicated to assessing impact, and therefore progress against the strategy. If it exists, there should be a relationship between this team and policy: even if the policy is directed primarily at telling other organisations what their policies should be, there is risk in this positioning not being aligned with your organisation’s own work.
Separately, some organisations may have teams, departments or units that are dedicated to understanding and researching the issue or sector that the organisation works in. This might range from extensive programmes of original research, through to more library-like work to catalogue and organise available information for reference. This will be a valuable resource for a policy function, and policy in turn can help an organisation understand and articulate the significance and implications of its research findings. So if an organisation has either of those functions, they should have a relationship of some sort with its policy function.
As this implies, the range of possible structures that policy work can fit into is essentially endless. In very small organisations it may well be a matter of one or two people doing all the campaigning work and everything relating to it, so structure isn’t much of a consideration. Another common scenario is a “policy and campaigns” (or similar) team hosting campaigns, public affairs and policy specialists, or maybe a more broadly framed “external affairs” (or similar) team with those disciplines plus perhaps the communications and digital side of things. In large organisations, campaigns and policy can sometimes be arranged in distinct and separate teams, with the policy side being more overtly “back room” in nature and more closely aligned with research type functions.
There can be more complicated approaches than this, however. Sometimes the complication arises from an organisation not fully understanding the scope of its campaigning work. Here I’m particularly thinking about organisations that work both nationally and regionally / locally. A health-focused charity might have both a national campaigning team and staff located in the regions. If the regional staff are working directly to support beneficiaries, the two functions will be very distinct; but if the regional workers are working with systems and structures to improve their delivery for beneficiaries, that’s another form of achieving change, or campaigning. There should ideally be close alignment between the national and the regional campaigning teams, as they will be working on largely the same issues, but at different levels. I’ve even known one charity scrap its regional teams as a structure entirely, and have a single campaigning / achieving change department that included staff whose role was to translate between centre and locality, dropping in and out of local work in a responsive way. But I don’t know how well that worked in practice or how long it persisted: while it may well have overcome possible problems of the work and priorities of national and regional teams not being aligned and co-ordinated, it could have missed out on the benefits of staff being more rooted in particular localities and having strong local networks and knowledge.
It’s too obvious and hack a conclusion to observe that there’s no right and wrong answer. For any given organisation, there probably are right and wrong answers. Structure is of course only part of the picture: whether an organisation succeeds is also to do with its strategy, its leadership and its culture. But it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that only some of those things matter: a bad structure will be an ongoing barrier to success even for an organisation with excellent strategy, leadership and culture; and the same is true however you mix those elements up.
In terms of structures for policy work, I don’t see a problem with departmental boundaries such as between a policy team and a public affairs team provided the departments work well together and do not become silos. This relies on the organisation’s strategy being clear and well understood, with a shared understanding across every team or department of what the organisation is trying to achieve and each department and individual’s role in that. Effective leadership is essential to making this stick in practice, so that everyone understands why they should work well with colleagues in other departments, and regularly does it. You also need an effective, collaborative culture in order to achieve this. But it also relies on the organisation being clear about the extent of its campaigning work: if it does not understand that, for instance, its regional staff are pursuing the same goals as its national policy and campaigns team, different departments will inevitably end up pursuing different priorities and not co-ordinating their work, and what should be sensible organisational structures instead become unyielding silos, potentially even in very small organisations.
Even in organisations that recognise they have a problem along these lines, a major pitfall is attempting to solve it using structural change but nothing else. This can give rise to overly-fancy structures that seem very clever on paper but in practice leave staff even more confused about who should be doing what. From experience, I tend to be wary of teams or departments with abstract names that wouldn’t appear in a job description or the name of a discipline, or that lump together a disparate set of functions or disciplines. Both suggest that too much is possibly being lumped together in one pot, or that there’s a lack of clarity about what the department is supposed to do. But that’s a rule of thumb: I’ve no doubt there are examples of teams set up in that way that have worked really well (though perhaps not all that many). Overall, an un-fussy structure will usually do perfectly well, as long as the organisation has decent leadership, strategy and culture to make it work. Those other elements should give a decent clue about where in the structure policy should be positioned.
Does any of that strike a chord? Let me know in the comments, or over in the LinkedIn group. What structures have you seen that worked best (or worst)? What’s your preference for positioning policy work within an organisation?
In the next article, we’ll pick up this theme of structure to consider how different parts of an organisation can distort or derail policy work.