In our last blog we shared our views on best practice around priorities, objectives, and KPIs in Public Affairs. Prioritization is the central foundation of your advocacy strategy because it defines the boundaries and sets the milestones on the horizon for every other aspect of your advocacy, including today’s post on intelligence gathering. Your priorities and objectives define the scope of your intelligence gathering; a scope that resources demand to be narrow and focused. The tighter the scope, the fewer resources consumed and the higher quality delivered by your intelligence gathering. This can be a real challenge, especially if you are looking to do, or collate, global monitoring and intelligence as many Japanese companies need to do to cover their global operations. We will address this in our post.

Prioritization is the first step of our 7-step method and it is foundational to everything you do. Get this right and you will set yourself up for success. Get this wrong, and you are setting yourself up for failure from the very beginning. As a Japanese company with global operations are you capturing and prioritizing all the risks and opportunities in your policy environment? As a foreign company looking to expand into Japan, are you analyzing and selectively choosing your engagements into this new market? Are you then building strategies and reporting aligned to what is most commercially important to you? Let’s look at this in more detail.

What’s the biggest measure of a winning public affairs campaign? Achieving your organisation’s public affairs goals. Strengthening your advocacy practice. Working as a team, supported by your organization. Data-driven decision-making. Demonstrating flexibility and agility in strategic choices. Seeing your career grow. All the above and more?