📜 How the ONE Campaign rewired its influence strategy

If your incentive is to shift policy, you’d be doing things differently

The effectiveness of policy researchers at spotting moments where they can actually change policy comes down to incentives. Some researchers are incentivised to have a well-researched report published under their name on a credible institution’s website. That’s great, and there’s lots of good content out there. But if your incentive were to shift policy, you’d be doing things quite differently. In my organisation, I get zero credit for just publishing a report. How do your organisational incentives align with your goals for policy influence?

One report had only been downloaded 16 times

We were going through this process of publishing a big report every year, sometimes 150 pages long, taking six months to produce. I asked our team to pull out the statistics on who was downloading our analysis, and we found that one report had only been downloaded 16 times. That kicked off a whole reorientation. We started asking: What are our objectives? Who are our audiences? What do they need in a context where people aren’t reading long reports anymore? This kind of honest assessment of impact is crucial for organisations to stay effective.

You need to keep evolving

We’ve got a pull strategy and a push strategy now. The pull strategy is analysis and data that’s relevant to the communities we want to keep coming back to us. The push strategy is social media threads, channels, and newsletters that talk about current issues, and bring our analysis to bear on those issues. Once you step on that treadmill, it’s never-ending because the channels, tools, and culture are always shifting. For a while, we had massive success with Twitter threads, sometimes getting a million views. Now, no one’s looking at Twitter. You need to continually experiment and stay current.