📜 If you're explaining, you're losing

We’ve had an influx of new subscribers recently - welcome all. For those of you who don’t know Cast from Clay, we’re a communications consultancy for those who work on policy change. Our consultancy services span strategy, brand, communications, creative and digital, and we offer a handful of online trainings alongside these, on persuasion, impact evaluation, and artificial intelligence in communications. I hope you enjoy this newsletter, and a big thank you to all of you who are referring this to your colleagues, it is very kind of you. — Tom Hashemi

Create that connection between your policy ask and what politicians care about

David Cameron spoke a lot about being a parent and having to face the battles in the kitchen with his own kids about things like sugary drinks, which fuelled his support for child health policies. Nick Clegg came at free school meals from the education perspective. He cared about fairness in educational access - the idea that it shouldn't matter where you're from or what background you have, you should be given a fair opportunity. His advisers and Henry Dimbleby were key to convincing him by linking nutrition to educational outcomes. So you need these people who have done the deep thinking to make those arguments to the politicians, to then align them with their own perspectives and ideas.

Surround yourself with people who think differently

Do the research to understand how to frame your ideas so they align with decision-makers’ beliefs, principles and values, and appeal more broadly to the electorate. Some will have an instinctive sense of how to frame an issue, but more often than not you need to do the communications research to really identify a way forward that is not inhibited or shaped by our own individual biases. That includes how you do the research - working with those who don’t share your fundamental value set on work like this gives a real depth to your understanding that surrounding yourself with ideological bedfellows does not.

Don’t get stuck in explain mode

Lean into arguments that ignite an emotional response – people’s minds aren’t changed by statistics but stories. William Hague is right - if you're explaining, you're losing. Rather than spending a huge amount of political capital - time, energy, resources - explaining why something should be done, work on building compelling arguments that feel like “no-brainers” to people you want to persuade. Politicians have limited political capital, so if your issue requires a lot of it to be spent, they likely won’t adopt it.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Someone somewhere has done a tonne of deep thinking about your policy area, so don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Hundreds of policies get proposed but not implemented. There are key pieces of information that increase the chances of a policy being implemented: Is the government clear about who it should be targeting with a particular policy? Is there a timeframe? Is there a cost or budget? If you're proposing an idea that needs funding, can you marry it with a revenue raising tax and then allocate ring-fenced funds? Is there cited evidence upon which this policy idea is based? Is there a theory of change about why that policy particularly needs to be tackled?

[Further reading: Dolly’s analysis of what factors matter in policy adoption and why decades of UK obesity policies were destined to fail]

Feed the machine however you can

When it came to dealing with obesity, the Department of Health and Social Care had built up a vast knowledge base internally by engaging with advocates and academic experts over years. When [then Chancellor of the Exchequer] George Osborne was designing a sugar tax he kept it secret until the design was complete because he knew how controversial it would be. That existing evidence base was vital. Despite not knowing a sugar tax was very much on the cards, the Department of Health had been sending evidence to the Treasury, so the Treasury also had access and fed this into the sugar tax design. On the downtimes when it can feel like one is bashing one's head against the wall, still feeding in that information, still making sure that the best quality research is being fed into government is important. Although it can be hard to keep that momentum going if you're not getting feedback loops that indicate government's going to do anything about it, that evidence base is crucial for when a policy window opens.

Always shape the political context

External support cannot be underestimated in securing policy change. The sugar tax is an example of this where there was a cacophony of voices calling for it in the build up to the announcement and crucially on the day too. The government knew there was public support for a sugar tax but also opposition. To ensure the opposition voices didn’t win, George Osborne asked Jamie Oliver to support the announcement and this successfully became the news story on the day. But you don’t have to be a celebrity to make sure external support is felt by politicians. You can write to your MP and show that your agenda and policy idea is a vote winner. Or why not stand for election and become the political decision-maker yourself? 

Positivity sells

We have a lot of evidence of harms, whether it's harms to health or harms to the planet. And it's critical to highlight those. But I'd love to see a lot more effort in creating the positive vision, something that people can buy into and want to be part of. Particularly in the food space - in Britain today our traditional food culture has been displaced by large ultra-processed food corporations, yet we know that there is strong public support for access to good, non-ultra-processed food that doesn't make us sick. I'd love to see more attention on the policies that achieve this and celebrate Britain’s traditional food culture.

Many of Dolly’s comments relate to her research on the Nourishing Britain report, co-authored with Henry Dimbleby, which you may find interesting. You can read it here.