📜 Brand as a policy influencing tool

The emergence of policy communications

As policy gets more prominent, more complicated, and has more of an impact on the bottom line, there's a realisation that ‘Okay, we need to do more than just listen and learn, or do quiet influencing in the background’. The traditional public affairs approach is very one-to-one, very high touch. And that element is still important in policy communications, but it’s just one of the three skillsets in policy communications. You need to combine it both with the strategic comms function, and people with digital marketing backgrounds who can measure stuff. Public affairs is difficult to measure, your KPIs were ten meetings with the Commission, but today you can measure many things at a more granular level. People want policy comms people who can do all three of these things.

Integrate your communications function

Don't disconnect your public affairs or your policy people from communications. It's a common point of conflict in a lot of think tanks or NGOs - you get the policy people who want to do deals in the back rooms, and then you have the comms people who normally have more of a flashy, loud campaigning approach. Very often these groups clash, and if they're not in one team and seen as different tools in the same toolkit, that clash is built in - it's structural. The other big thing is that whatever your leadership looks like, you need to have communications and advocacy in that high level conversation. Otherwise there is a tendency to see communications as service delivery, which means you get people who understand the technical details designing products for non-technical audiences and they inhabit different worlds. Without communications in leadership, you don't get those feedback loops from your audiences about what will actually work.

Avoid doing work that will never have impact

Another issue of not integrating communications onto your leadership team, is that you’ll get poorly thought through ideas executed and then pushed onto your comms team, who don't know about them but then have to do something -  anything - with them. It is a bad use of resources. If your comms person is going to stand up for themselves they’ll say ‘No one wants to read this, there is no audience for this’, and that's frustrating for everybody. Or they’ll go ‘Okay I'll put out a press release’ and nobody picks it up because nobody cares. You've wasted all that time and energy achieving very little. So that's the big switch that has to happen - figure out the ideas that are going to work before any production happens.