📜 What ministers want

Frame your stats like headlines.

Instead of saying there are 400,000 children in need and over a million children who have been in need at some point in the previous six years, we changed it to ‘on average three children in every classroom have needed a social worker.’ I’m comfortable that broadly speaking this stat is right, but we framed it in a way that ministers will go, “Wow, three people in an average classroom have had a social worker. That’s a lot of kids.”

Time your financial asks with fiscal events.

You can’t have individual civil servants signing off taxpayers’ money with just no scrutiny. That would be bananas. Time your financial asks with a fiscal event. That seems super basic, but they’re not going to be able to just pull money out of thin air. That’s not how it works. So, help them to help you.

Don’t flood them with information, find the hook.

It’s a bit like fishing – you want to give ministers enough that they go, that’s an interesting little tidbit. And they hook onto it. And then you want them to drive the meeting. If they say some things that aren’t quite right or they’ve misunderstood, that’s not the end of the world. The important thing is that by the end of the meeting they think that your thing is interesting.