Policy for Campaigns 13: Everyday policy

Day-to-day policy work in a campaigning organisation

In the last two articles, I looked at where policy might sit within the structure of a campaigning organisation, and how policy work can get distorted if one or more of the organisation’s strategy, structure, leadership or culture aren’t quite right. But assuming all is well, what does a policy function actually do?

We’ve already looked at ways in which policy is an input to campaigning activity (and we will look at further aspects of this in future), but mostly that has related to proactive, deliberately organised campaigns. In practice however, a lot of policy work is reactive or ad hoc, and there will be a constant background hum of business-as-usual activity that simply needs doing. This article will trace the outline of this side of policy work, and also sound a note of caution about allowing this ongoing work to soak up precious resources.

Information

A key role for the policy function will be to act as a repository for knowledge and information relevant to the organisation’s campaigning goals. The scope of this may vary quite a bit, however: if there is a dedicated research team, library function or similar, those functions will take the lead in being the source of authoritative information within the organisation. But as a minimum, the policy function should hold information about the state of play of key issues with the government, key decision makers and other stakeholders. The policy function should always be able to answer basic questions about relevant government policy and what it might mean for the organisation’s work. Monitoring of external developments, including political ones, may be part of this role: public affairs colleagues, if you have them, might take the lead on this, however.

So, where does this information come from? For organisations with enough budget, there are professional monitoring services that can provide a constant stream of updates, ensuring you never miss a parliamentary question, committee hearing or consultation announcement. They can be tuned to provide intel on particular topic areas, and usually come with a database of contact details for parliamentarians and officials.

However, when I say “enough budget” I don’t just mean enough to pay for the service itself. The volume of information they can provide, even with relatively well tailored parameters, is substantial: unless you have a very substantial team, you could spend all your time just looking through and processing it, without having the capacity to do much in response to it. In practice you can prioritise how the information is processed and handled, but you can’t cut out the legwork entirely. They can be a great safety net for ensuring nothing gets missed, but actually getting full value from a subscription to a monitoring service requires a lot of human resource.

There are cheaper and more light touch ways to get most of the same information into an organisation, although you get what you pay for: the risk of missing an important development is higher without a paid service. But useful information can usually be found in a relatively timely manner from a variety of sources, including: the secretariats of any campaigning alliances or coalitions your organisation might belong to; social media, RSS feeds, press releases and newsletters from government departments and other stakeholders; newsletters from other charities; and your network of contacts in other organisations. Hopefully your organisation will also have a strong enough relationship with your key decision making bodies to be on the list to get advance notice of developments (government departments, regulators and so on all maintain stakeholder lists for this purpose).

Whatever its source, you will be dealing with a steady flow of information into the organisation. What do you need to do with this information when it arrives? First of all, you need to understand it: what’s relevant and what’s not; what it means for the issues you are working on; and whether action is required in response. This is where the rubber hits the road for a policy professional: if you miss the implications of something, or misunderstand a development, you could potentially set your entire organisation back, whether that’s because it’s too slow to respond, or because it makes a mistake in understanding what a development might mean.

Assuming no blunders of that sort, the policy function needs to pass on relevant information within an organisation. Often this means explaining what has happened and what its significance is. This includes both to campaigns and public affairs colleagues, and to leaders in the organisation. You may also cascade it out to other staff groups, and potentially members, beneficiaries and supporters through newsletters, social media and the like. It will also be relevant to the work your organisation (hopefully does) to include its members / supporters / beneficiaries in its decision-making and delivery: you will have to cascade it to the member panels, advisory groups or whatever other arrangement is involved, along with appropriate messaging to ensure they are clear about what it means. You will therefore probably have some sort of interface with colleagues who handle internal and external communications, depending exactly what that looks like in your organisation.

You may also wish to store at least some of the information that comes in, for instance keeping official government policy papers on file, and maybe particularly useful articles, reports and so on. You don’t want to go over the top with this, as very often you’ll be able to find the information again on the internet. But equally, things don’t necessarily stay online forever, and even if it does there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find it again in a hurry when a colleague comes to you asking for help understanding something you last looked at months and months ago. So when I’m leading on policy for an organisation I often maintain a well-organised folder called “Policy Library” or similar, so that if I need to turn to a subject I’ve not worked on recently, or maybe not at all in any proactive way, I can bring myself and others up to speed on the important stuff without too much difficulty.

Giving a view

It's not just a matter of passing information and understanding on, however. The policy function will usually take the lead on a chunk of the organisation’s reactive work, where some sort of formal policy response is needed. Responses to consultations (by government departments, arm’s length bodies and sometimes other stakeholders) or submissions to inquiries (by parliamentary committees, public inquiries, maybe all-party parliamentary groups if they’re especially relevant) will be the bread-and-butter forms of this work. When I’m running a policy function, I always maintain a log of consultations and other opportunities to comment (including making notes of reasons why we’ve not responded to something, as it’s a question that can come back to bite you!). It may also fall to the policy function to provide input to other organisations’ work in roundtable discussions, at working meetings, to parliamentary inquiries as oral evidence, and so on; or it may be the policy function’s job to brief other colleagues for those tasks.

This bring us to the interesting question of the extent to which policy should be a “front of house” role. Should policy professionals be taking the lead in external relations, or deferring to external affairs or public affairs colleagues? Certainly they are slightly different skills: liaising, organising and building relationships do not require the same skillset as understanding complex information, synthesising new analysis and building an argument. Plenty of people can do a good job on both fronts, but very often people like to specialise one way or the other. So, provided the team is big enough and there is resource for multiple different roles, I’d always favour some sort of division of responsibility. But that’s not to say a policy role should be totally desk-bound: when conversations are needed with departmental officials, policy people in stakeholder organisations and others, often your policy person will be the right person to deploy. In a well functioning team (with all the usual provisos about strategy, structure, leadership and culture), there could well be enough breadth and depth of skills for the policy and public affairs roles to be able to Box and Cox a little if needed. As I explored in the previous article, if policy becomes too much of a silo, other functions in an organisation may start to take a lead on things that policy is better placed to do, so good ways of working with different functions across the organisation are important.

While this reactive work may often be more piecemeal or on a smaller scale than an organisation’s large, long term campaigns, it requires all the same rigour and attention. It still involves formal statements of the organisation’s view and position, and may therefore require the use of some governance processes as well. It should be informed by the active involvement of beneficiaries just as much as planned and proactive campaigns should be, although shorter reactive timescales can make this a challenge. This is where established or standing groups of beneficiaries who can be brought into a conversation at short notice can be useful, as can social media, online forums and the like for taking quick soundings (although all of these methods risk privileging an unrepresentative minority who shout loudest and/or are most vocally unhappy).

Prioritisation

Throughout the above, there has been a running theme of resource allocation: time spent on reactive work is time not spent on the organisation’s proactive campaigning priorities, and there is a constant risk of the bigger pieces of work being sidelined by an unending churn of consultation responses, information management and other routine process.

How an organisation chooses to strike the balance will vary in each case, but it will always be difficult (and if it doesn’t feel difficult, consider whether you really know about everything that’s going on in your policy area). The difficulty will always be more acute for smaller organisations, but in truth even very substantial teams will have to make some tricky decisions about what they can and can’t take on. It can be easy to feel that your organisation really should be responding to this or that consultation, but you need to be frank with yourself and colleagues about whether it will have any meaningful impact: very often, routine participation in formal exercises of this sort is a low impact activity (but judge each case on its merits!). As ever, your organisational strategy should be good enough to provide a steer, and your leadership and culture good enough to facilitate making the choices. But it’s something organisations often find hard: prioritising means choosing what not to do, which is a choice nobody likes making.

This ongoing and reactive work, coupled with the regular choices over what to prioritise, will be a constant drumbeat for the policy function in most campaigning organisations. Books and articles on how to campaign can often overlook its existence. Without care, it can come to soak up excessive resources for little impact. But equally, organisations without a firm policy foundation may end up floundering in the face of external developments they didn’t see coming and don’t understand. Delivering this ongoing work successfully will often be the bread and butter of a policy professional.