Policy for Campaigns 12: Tails that can wag the policy dog

How can other parts of a campaigning organisation muscle in on policy work?

In the previous article, I looked at the different ways in which policy can be made to fit into the structure of a campaigning organisation. What started with a discussion of structure quickly identified that strategy, leadership and culture also need to be sound in order to ensure policy work is done effectively. This follow-up article looks at what can happen if something goes awry somewhere in that mix.

When the alchemy of structure, culture, leadership and strategy goes wrong, it can have all sorts of odd effects on policy work. The organisation’s priorities, or at least campaigning priorities, can get set for odd reasons that run counter to your policy advice. It might even start taking public positions that don’t seem to stack up, or put the emphasis in hard to justify places. The policy function can find central aspects of its work dictated, or heavily influenced, by other bits of the organisation. For all that there are reasons why policy shouldn’t necessarily be the dominant or sole driving force even in a campaigning organisation, there are some respects in which it should definitely be in the lead. But here I want to look at ways in which other functions can sometimes make the running instead: what tails can wag your policy dog?

The first example to consider is actually, in my view, an example of structure and strategy going right rather than wrong. This is where the campaigns function / team / person has the biggest say on priorities, perhaps with the result that the issues that get prioritised are the ones where a successful campaign can most easily be mounted, not the most pressing issues or those where success would have the biggest impact. If this happens, it’s probably a result of the issues where success might make the most difference also being the ones where achieving success will be hardest. Faced with a choice between an issue where a positive change would make a massive difference but it can’t realistically be achieved, and an issue where a positive change would make a modest difference and is readily achievable, it’s entirely legitimate to prioritise the latter. Going back to our policy and campaigns cycles, this sits in the “prioritisation” phase that I argue should be owned by a policy function, but for completeness there should probably be an input arrow for campaigns pointing to it on the diagram. Deciding on policy priorities for campaigning reasons, if done properly, is a feature rather than a bug of an effective campaigning organisation.

There are some other functions in an organisation that can exercise more influence than they really should over policy, however. These are support functions: they are important for ensuring that the organisation can deliver the work needed to achieve its strategic aims (achieving change, and others if appropriate), but they are not (or should not be) the parts of the organisation that are responsible for this mission delivery.

Tail 1: Fundraising

The first potential tail is the fundraising or income generation function. Particularly in charities, it can be easy for an organisation to slip into doing the work that it is easiest to raise funds for, rather than the work that most needs doing – if they’re not the same, that is. In an organisation that carries out a range of activities, of which campaigning is just one, this can distort its work if you’re not careful. I’ve used the example before of the health charity that was campaigning for the NHS to fund a particular item of healthcare equipment, while also putting out fundraising literature asking for donations so that the charity could fund the same item of equipment: this was a tangible, popular fundraising ask that was easy to make and had a lot of success, but it completely undercut the organisation’s campaigning messages. It was a dynamic that was repeated in respect of several other areas of spending for the charity: challenged on whether it really should be spending charitable funds on things that the organisation believed should be funded by the NHS, its senior fundraising lead would reply simply, “but we are doing.” It was a failure along all four of the dimensions previously outlined: the organisation was not clear enough about its strategy; its leadership hadn’t clocked the problem; it didn’t have the right structure to align its work with its policy positioning (in particular, responsibility was split between a campaigns function and a care function, which caused a lack of clear-sightedness over this and other issues); and its culture shied away from facing up to difficult questions that might expose problems.

(That’s not to say the circle couldn’t have been squared. Emphasising the disgrace of charitable funds having to be spent because the NHS was leaving patients without equipment that it was clearly obliged to supply could have been a powerful campaigning message, for example. But in this case, the fundraising department would have objected on the grounds that the campaigning message would undercut the fundraising message - an objection that would have been spurious, because the fundraising function was the support function, and the campaigning function was the mission delivery function.)

The same dynamic can play out in a variety of other ways. Particular policy issues might be prioritised because they are popular among donors, or soft-pedalled because they are uncomfortable or even controversial among the donor base (which may or may not be the same as the activist / supporter / member / beneficiary base/s). Or other ways of raising revenue might distort policy priorities: if it’s easy to get funding to issue reports or hold events on particular issues, campaigning might focus on those issues rather than on less attractive but possibly more strategically important ones. Or perhaps your organisation is a trade or professional body that has concluded that there should be a compulsory, statutory register in your sector, but the organisation generates income from operating its own voluntary register – how does it achieve campaigning success without blowing a hole in its own finances? Hard though it may be, a way should be found: generating the funds to run a campaigning organisation can be a daunting and thankless task, but compromising the policy and campaigning work to make the fundraising easier risks fouling up the organisation’s efforts to achieve its core purpose.

Tail 2: Communications

The other support function that can end up accidentally taking a lead is communications. Comms people often become trusted lieutenants for senior leaders because of an interesting dynamic: they demand to know what the organisation can say about what it thinks of a particular thing, or what it’s doing about a particular thing. The need to achieve this clarity can prompt leaders to act when they might not have done otherwise (or help them to understand something they might not have done otherwise): they initiate action that might not otherwise have been taken, because the need for a clear message has highlighted that something needs doing. This can even lead to the comms person being delegated to support the other parts of the organisation with a piece of work to sort out the matter at hand.

Often this may be an indication of something not being quite right in the organisation: its strategy or plans aren’t clear enough, or maybe another leader or department is not functioning well and leaving a vacuum for comms to fill. In a more positive light, in smaller organisations that might not have a full range of skills in-house, the comms people or person can become handy all-rounders, filling in on bits of work that don’t readily fall to anyone else on the team. That’s fine, as long as it’s recognised that it’s a bit of a compromise and being done out of necessity, not because the comms person is the person who should ideally be leading on the work. If the whole organisation starts being run to meet comms needs, something’s gone wrong: again, it should (usually) be a support function, not directly a mission delivery one.

Tail 3: Chief executives

Finally, chief executives and their offices can also be a tail that wags the policy dog. This is a bit more of a complicated one, as ultimately the CEO is the boss, and if they want to make a call on something they’re entitled to. It may also be that any strategy or evaluation function of the sort I mentioned in the previous article is part of the CEO’s office or reports to them directly. A lot of the time, this is all good: if the CEO and their immediate team understand policy and can work well on it, that’s a huge asset. The CEO will be the key point of contact with senior leaders in your stakeholder organisations, including those whose decision-making you’re seeking to influence, so you need a CEO who can take a policy brief and make use of it.

Some of the pitfalls here are simply the general risks of a bad CEO. And really, compared to the existential trouble an organisation can get into if the leadership isn’t good enough, things like getting the policy lines wrong in an external meeting is minor stuff. That said, situations such as a CEO who enjoys talking to journalists direct and regularly takes direct calls from them, leaving the poor comms officer desperately scrabbling to find out what on earth they’ve said this time, can cause an organisation a lot of reputational damage.

However, there are some particular dynamics around CEOs and policy work that can make the chief executive a tail that wags the dog. Their role as a key external point of contact can be a way for the CEO to agglomerate work to themselves: if there is an issue that a chief executive finds particularly interesting or congenial, they could through the best of intentions end up becoming the de facto policy lead on it. While hopefully the organisation will have a sufficiently open culture, and the chief executive be a capable enough leader, that they can take briefing and be gently put back on the right course if needed, inevitably the work won’t be managed or overseen in quite the same way as other items of work where the policy and/or campaigns functions have clear ownership and are held to account for their delivery.

There are all sorts of other risks: information that notionally comes into the organisation in practice not being cascaded down from the CEO to anyone else (CEOs are busy people, after all); a policy goal being pursued in a way that ends up getting gently bent over time into the shape of the CEO’s personal understanding of it, rather than what the policy analysis originally said; or friendly external relations being prioritised when more robust challenge might have been more appropriate. In the latter case, it’s a regular dilemma for campaigning organisations over whether to take a firm, principled stand at the risk of being excluded from decision-making, or be co-opted into a policy by a government department or agency, having some say but ultimately being complicit in something that doesn’t serve beneficaries’ or members’ interests especially well. A CEO breaking free of their policy support while building constructive external relationships might be particularly prone to this sort of “capture”.

Of course, if something like this happens it’s not sufficient to shrug and say the buck stops with the CEO (although of course it does). Part of the job of any policy function is to support the CEO and other senior leaders with information and advice, including by managing upwards if you have to. If the chief executive has sprung into the lead on an issue, you need to ask if that is a reflection on the job the policy function has been doing in some way, and rectify problems if you find them. But it takes two to tango: that relationship could go awry on either side, or both.

Have you ever found another team or department taking an unexpected lead, or exerting unwelcome influence, on policy or campaigning work? How did you try to resolve the issue? Did it work? Leave a comment below or in the LinkedIn group, or find me on Twitter.