💰 Do you know who pays for APPGs?

The UK Parliament publishes data on who funds special interest groups (“APPGs” - All-Party Parliamentary Groups), but it does so in 800 page PDFs. It’s not easy to interrogate.

We were looking for an opportunity to test our new digital product development workflow, and this felt like a good use case.

So, in 6 weeks we conceptualised, harvested the data, designed, and built an an online dashboard to explore the financing of special interest groups in the UK.

We found:

• The Christians in Parliament APPG is the largest single recipient of funds this year, and has seen an 8 fold increase in funding in the past year—possibly related to the Assisted Dying Bill.

• Over the last three years, the United Nations is the largest single funder of APPGs through its UN Population Fund. The funding goes mostly towards the APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health.

• Despite frequent claims that APPGs are vehicles for private sector lobbying, the top five funders are not from the private sector. Indeed, only six of the top 20 funders are for-profit organisations.

• But… lots of companies fund the secretariats that operate the APPGs, rather than funding the APPGs directly. This means they do not have to disclose how much they contribute.

• The highest three funders from the private sector are all related to the digital economy: BT (telecoms), Nominet (internet registry services) and Google (software).

→ Scroll to the bottom of this email to explore the dashboard for yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with APPGs being used to host discussion of topics that are important to public life—private sector companies and NGOs do it for perfectly decent reasons.

But it’s important to be able to see and understand what’s going on in public policy debate. If the tools for doing so are clunky, democracy suffers.

We didn't just build this to track APPGs though.

It's an example of what we can do for clients, using AI to turn data into a policy and advocacy tool:

• Do you want to track climate commitments made by hundreds of companies?

• Are you trying to monitor agricultural regulations across 50 US states?

• Are you an energy company with 50,000 business customers, and you want to showcase your contribution to energy security?

• Are you monitoring progress made in health policy in every EU member nation?

• Do you have thousands of academics at your university, and you want to identify research from them that may have policy implications?

• Are you a retailer with 2,000 suppliers and 10,000 employees who wants to tell each MP about your economic contribution to their constituency?

• Are you an NGO searching for new funders?

If so, hit reply and let’s talk.

P.S. Whomever finds the most interesting thing in the data, posts about it on LinkedIn and tags us will win a case of Roberto Henriquez - Tierra de Pumas, 2021.