Policy for Campaigns 01: introduction
What is campaigning, what is policy, and why does one need the other?
This article is an amended version of a piece from the Policy Pulse channel, and introduces a new series on the theme of policy for campaigning organisations. These articles will look at policy practice more than at particular policy issues.
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Policy for campaigning ends is my stock in trade: I’ve spent all my career doing it, in the worlds of both charities and trade associations. It’s not quite the same as policy for delivery organisations, which is what most policy books and academic articles focus on: an organisation that campaigns for a change won’t usually be directly responsible for implementing that change. That said, it requires fundamentally the same set of skills in terms of understanding a problem and developing workable solutions (although I will be addressing the differences across the two types of organisation in future articles).
Policy work is also not exactly the same as campaigning. There are lots of articles, online resources and even books about campaigning, both for professionals working in campaigning organisations, and for volunteers looking to start up a campaign on an issue that matters to them. But it has often felt to me like they are only indirectly about the sort of work I do, and only indirectly address the question of how to go about understanding your problems and developing your recommendations. I’m hoping to fill that gap with these articles, and provide some insight about where policy fits in with this wider campaigning advice.
Definitions
Before we go any further, we need to deal with the basic questions: what is policy, and what is a campaigning organisation?
I’ve worked with people who find defining terminology rather tiresome, and struggle to engage with it: for some, this is because it doesn’t align with their own skillsets; for others, it can seem like mere pedantry. However, I’d argue that this isn’t at all about dancing on the head of a pin: rather, you’ll find yourself at greater risk of endlessly doing exactly that if you don’t achieve clarity about terminology at the outset.
I once heard defining your terms likened to a surgeon sharpening their tools before an operation: if you don’t do it, you will just end up butchering the patient. That’s because it is about more than language: if you aren’t clear about what a particular term means, then you aren’t clear about the concepts you are dealing with; and if you aren’t clear about the concepts you are dealing with, then you literally don’t know what you are talking about. From that position, you are bound to stray into error and confusion, regularly doubling back on yourself to try to re-think and re-litigate what it is you thought you were supposed to be trying to achieve.
Defining “policy”
First things first, then: what is policy? Dictionaries offer a perhaps surprising range of framings:
a plan of action agreed or chosen by a political party, a business, etc.
a set of ideas or a plan of what to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organization, a government, or a political party
a course of action adopted and pursued by a government, ruler, political party, etc.
a set of ideas or plans that is used as a basis for making decisions, especially in politics, economics, or business
a definite course of action selected from among alternatives, esp in light of given conditions
an overall plan intended to guide and determine decisions
Taking these together, a couple of key themes emerge. One is that policy entails a set of ideas or plans, which might even be described as a course of action. A second is that there are two things to be done with these ideas or plans: they are firstly in some way adopted or decided on, and then secondly pursued or utilised. I found it interesting that even in these dictionary definitions, some stages of a rough policy cycle can be discerned: the business of working out and developing the policy is left implicit; but the subsequent stages of getting agreement to it and then implementing it are directly referenced. Anyone working in policy will recognise that not only are these all important, but they can all be done either well or badly.
It also follows from these definitions that policy can be something that occurs in different contexts, and can look quite different depending on this. It can mean public policy, of the type developed and implemented by politicians, governments, public bodies and so on, which we’re principally concerned with here. Or it can mean an operational policy used by any organisation to carry out its work.
In any organisation concerned with public policy, whether it’s a delivery organisation or a campaigning organisation, the two variants of policy should of course align: an organisation campaigning for tougher restrictions on smoking (its public policy position) would probably wish to have a rule against accepting donations from tobacco companies (its operational policy), to give a perhaps trite example. Or less obviously, an organisation campaigning for someone else, such as the government, to pay for a service or facility for its beneficiaries (its public policy position) might look silly or even incompetent if it was simultaneously raising funds to pay for that facility or service itself (an operational policy) – although there could be ways of making the two compatible with careful messaging. But I suppose that brings us to campaigning.
Defining “campaigning”
This is an example of where there is more readily available material (that I could find, anyway) on campaigning than on policy: a good definition of campaigning is easy enough to find, and I’m a fan of NCVO’s:
Campaigning is about creating a change. You might call it influencing, voice, advocacy or campaigning, but all these activities are about creating change. […] The impact is the real world change created by a campaign: this is the difference it makes to people’s lives or environment.
When I work with organisations I actually prefer to use the term “achieving change”: it is descriptive (think about it for a moment: it says exactly what you are doing), and doesn’t bundle up some of the preconceptions that can be attached to “campaigning” (which for some people can conjure images of waving placards, going on marches and so on).
Not only does “achieving change” describe what the organisation is trying to do – achieve a change – but it encompasses all the work involved in doing that. This includes both the policy part and the influencing and persuading part, but potentially also other work such as on-the-ground work to support local services to understand the needs of a particular group. Examples of the latter might include providing training to local service providers, inspectors or regulators about the distinctive needs of a particular minority group, or advising on how to improve processes or facilities to make them easier to use.
Organisations can sometimes trip themselves up by not realising that a lot of their work that is not explicitly labelled “campaigning” is fundamentally about achieving a change. If different aspects of the work look and feel different, it can be easy to assume they are organisationally distinct: for instance, working with local services on the ground to improve how they deal with a particular group, as in the examples above, can seem very different from working nationally to alter a government policy: but both are about making things different for the people the organisation exists to serve, ie achieving change.
At its worst, this confusion can mean that the work is not done in a co-ordinated manner: different teams or departments can fail to collaborate with each other, or at worst directly cut across each other. Future articles will explore challenges of this sort in more depth.
However, for defining the scope of these articles, “campaigning” and “campaigning organisations” are clearly the easiest terms: “courses of action adopted and pursued by organisations that seek to achieve change” is hardly snappy, so “policy for campaigns” it is.
Future articles
As all this implies, there are many different ways in which an organisation can campaign (or seek to achieve change). Policy might fit in differently depending which one is being used or, perhaps preferably, the nature of the policy might give rise to choices about what sort of campaigning activity should be undertaken. This is the sort of thing future articles will get into in more detail: hopefully I will be able to provide helpful pointers to organisations in understanding what is policy, in the sense of their operational needs. So, future areas to look at will include:
Alignment of policy with an organisation’s strategy
Identifying an organisation’s policy needs – both the issues it needs to address, and what it wants to see done
How to gather evidence, develop the policy, and agree it internally
How the policy feeds into campaigning
The situations and obstacles that can make it hard.
I hope you’ll find the articles interesting and sign up for them. If you think you will, please also share this with friends and colleagues who might be interested too, and let me know your thoughts. What would you say counts as a “campaigning organisation”? What are the key considerations for policy work in this context, in your experience? Do get in touch on Twitter or LinkedIn, or just hit reply.