A Public Affairs Method to Deliver Success
By Dr. Alan Hardacre & Dr. Paul Shotton
Measuring Public Affairs Success: What Defines a Winning Campaign?
What’s the biggest measure of a winning public affairs campaign? Achieving your organization’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?
The Power of Advocacy Methods in Public Affairs Strategy
In this post we argue that the cornerstone of public affairs success is the use of an advocacy method to build your advocacy strategy. We believe in the transformative power of a comprehensive advocacy structure and this has led to the development of the 7-steps of advocacy method and the creation of Advocacy Academy. Both of us had already developed structured ways of building an advocacy process and we are not alone in doing so. For Alan it happened in the context of his corporate experience and his book: How to Work with the EU Institutions: A Practical Guide to Successful Public Affairs in the EU within which he, and Aaron McLoughlin, proposed an advocacy process to help empower people to deliver more advocacy success. In parallel, Paul, who teaches public affairs and advocacy to university students and advocacy professionals, developed his own method.
Introducing the 7-Steps of Advocacy Method
The 7-Steps of Advocacy Method is the culmination of these two initiatives. Through our own experiences working in public affairs we both realized that we could pool our know-how and extensive collection of best practices to build a better public affairs method using our existing building blocks as a starting point. We set ourselves the goal of defining a method that breaks advocacy down into a sequential process and provides an easy-to-use framework for building best-in-class public affairs. We want to support people with their ongoing campaigns, but more importantly, we want to empower people to build lasting public affairs foundations for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. The key to achieving this is a combination of knowledge, skills, tools, and templates across each of the following 7 steps: Prioritization, Intelligence Gathering, Positioning, Information Management, Engagement, Management, and Evaluation.
Why a Structured Advocacy Process is Key to Success
Together with Gemini Group, our partner in Tokyo, we’ll discuss how our method can be applied in Japan in conjunction with localised expertise. It is also useful for Japanese companies with a footprint outside of Japan as it helps them create a uniform process for Public Affairs. The tools we provide enable you to craft your own public affairs strategy tailored to your organization, your footprint and your exact needs.
Let us explain what we mean.
Applying the 7-Step Advocacy Method in Japan
Each public affairs campaign is unique to, amongst other things, the issue, the external environment, to your organisation, your team, and your resources. This is especially true when operating in different countries or an international context. Techniques that may be effective in one country may backfire in another. In Japan, for example, consensus-building is crucial. This is exemplified by the idea of nemawashi, or laying the groundwork for a proposal by individual engagement with stakeholders ahead of formal decision-making. This enables public affairs practitioners to gather support and address concerns, ensuring campaigns move forward with as little opposition as possible.
There are other elements important to public affairs in Japan: a powerful and highly centralized bureaucracy, a high-context culture, a unique approach to corporate social responsibility, and more. A well-designed public affairs campaign will employ the structure of our method and on-the-ground expertise like that of Gemini Group to achieve its objectives.
Building a Winning Public Affairs Strategy with the 7-Step Method
Campaigns must adapt to their environment as well as to feedback. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy, and no strategy is ever static. Strategies, and the teams implementing them, must evolve with time and circumstances. Each campaign requires a collective research and analysis effort to define goals and to work back from these goals to determine, activities, and resources – which leads to results and measurements and evaluations of success. So how do you build such a strategy with confidence? How can you ensure that your strategy is appropriate for the context in which it operates? And how you can do this in a uniform way across all of your footprint?
The Importance of Continuous Evaluation in Advocacy Campaigns
Designing and executing a strategy as a team can only be done effectively if you have a clear view of the component parts of your advocacy, in short, a clear structured method. Our method is composed of 7-steps. Only when you and your team can sit back and assess every aspect of what you need to do, can improvements and changes be made. We provide tools and templates within each step to ensure you build in line with industry best practice. The outputs from each of the 7 steps are sequentially used to build into the following step and eventually the overall strategy. At the same time, each step is an ongoing process that continually delivers outputs that then serve to refine the campaign, strategic choices, and their implementation.
How the 7-Step Advocacy Method Strengthens Public Affairs Teams
Though the method is sequential, you must see each step as an ongoing process that kicks-off with the identification of an issue that requires action. In our method this ongoing nature is particularly emphasised for three steps: Intelligence, Information Management and Evaluate as these permeate the whole advocacy process. So, the 7 steps represent a multi-stage end-to-end process, starting with the identification and prioritization of issues and the definition of SMART objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), running all the way through to how we use those KPIs to continuously evaluate what we are trying to achieve and how we are going about achieving it. This way we ensure we can learn for the future. Viewing public affairs in this way allows us to isolate and perfect our understanding and practice of each individual component and to do so based on a uniform approach that we can use across countries and sectors. Also, crucially, it allows us to understand the transitions where knowledge and insight are transferred from one step of the process to another.
Four Key Benefits of the 7-Step Advocacy Method
To summarize, we believe that the 7-step advocacy method provides public affairs professionals with four key benefits:
It provides a methodology to deconstruct the advocacy process. It is based on strength across the process and not in just one or two areas. If you want to increase your chances of public affairs success you need to deliver across all of the advocacy method.
It provides a comprehensive framework. It makes your advocacy strategy more complete. Because to be successful, you need to deliver across a complete set of activities from one campaign to the next.
It delivers a long-term improvement to your advocacy practice. By adapting your advocacy practice to the method, you initiate long-term changes to the way in which you work individually and as a team.
It makes your advocacy strategy more adaptable. As internal and external events change, using our method makes it easier to react and understand what aspects of the strategy need to adapt as well as determine the consequences for other areas of your strategy.
The Role of Knowledge, Skills, and Tools in Public Affairs
A method is critical because it structures how your team works together to develop and deliver your public affairs strategy. It is also valuable because it maps out each step of the strategy in detail which works well in teams because it offers transparency and allows for clear delegation and ownership – and crucially everyone sees what their contribution brings to the whole. Public Affairs is an interdisciplinary profession and people draw from their knowledge of politics, law, communications, and business. Few people start out with an education in public affairs itself. Most juniors start their career without a toolkit of knowledge and skills in the profession. They learn by doing. To address this, each step of the method contains the knowledge, skills, tools, technology and templates required to do the job to the level of industry leaders.
Turbocharge Your Advocacy Practice with the 7-Step Toolkit
Knowledge and skills are key but so too are tools and templates. Public Affairs is a hands-on applied profession. Theory applied to practice can help people understand and explain political processes and the impact of communication strategies. However, public affairs professionals need to be able to draw from a comprehensive advocacy toolkit. Such a toolkit often takes many years for public affairs professionals to acquire and master. Thus, using our method and templates across 7 steps turbo charges your acquisition of best-in-class public affairs abilities – giving you immediately increased chances of success in your public affairs work.
Partnering with Local Experts to Maximize Public Affairs Impact
The likelihood of success can be even further enhanced by partnering with actors with localised expertise. The toolkit provided by our method and their specialized experience and knowledge ensure that your public affairs work will have the desired impact.
Looking Ahead: Deep Diving into Each Step of the 7-Step Method
In future blogs we’ll be exploring each of the 7 steps to clearly define their purpose, but also to identify the key knowledge, skills, tools, and templates needed to be an industry leader. We will also map out how steps interconnect with each other to form a campaign. In doing so we will share best practice and encourage more open exchange within the profession on how to build the best public affairs strategies.
To receive future articles like these and for updates on upcoming events covering the 7-step method, please sign up for our mailing list.
About the Authors
Dr. Alan Hardacre is a renowned expert in Advocacy and Public Affairs, specializing in crafting and delivering top-tier public affairs strategies. With a background as Director of Group Corporate Affairs at Imperial Brands, he brings extensive consulting experience to clients like CropLife Africa & Middle East and the European Tyre and Rubber Manufacturers Association. Alan holds a PhD in International Economic and Political Relations from Loughborough University.
Dr. Paul Shotton is co-founder of Advocacy Strategy and Advocacy Academy in Brussels and is dedicated to advancing the professionalization of advocacy practice through innovation and bridging research with practice. With over two decades of experience in Brussels, London, and The Hague, Paul has worked across media, trade associations, companies, NGOs, and academia. His passion for exploring advocacy with professionals and students has driven his work in structuring the advocacy process and gathering best practices. He holds a PhD in Information and communication science from the University of Nancy II in France.