By Dr. Alan Hardacre & Dr. Paul Shotton

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.

Effective intelligence gathering requires acquiring the relevant and insightful information at the right time, in order to inform your advocacy prioritization, advocacy strategies, and activities. Intelligence provides both insight and feedback. If advocacy success is often about ensuring you are talking to the right person, in the right place, at the right time, with the right information, then you can appreciate the importance of effective intelligence gathering. If your information and intelligence is inaccurate or untimely, or your analysis ignores political reality, then you won’t be able to succeed in your advocacy work.

The first thing you need to do is to ensure you have the right priorities framework in place so that you know both the scope and depth of the monitoring work you need to do. For tier one priorities you will need detailed information for example – but as you move to lower tier priorities you may want to look for a lighter information load.

Intelligence consists of two types of information: monitoring and political intelligence. The former is the collection and analysis of publicly available information that you (usually) find online or in the (social) media. The latter is the collection and analysis of non-public information derived from political institutions. Non-public information is usually information obtained in a meeting or through a conversation or from a contact. Non-public information is the high value resource you need to cultivate through networking, attending events, calling officials and elected representatives, and talking to journalists.

Publicly available information should be seen as raw data that requires analysis and verification. Public information gives you the building blocks to go further. It provides information on the sequencing of events, what happened, what will happen, and what was said and written. It ensures you have the timeline of events and decisions made by others. However, following developments is a passive approach. Playing a pro-active and constructive role, influencing decisions requires engagement with the political process and the acquisition of valuable political intelligence. Combining both monitoring and political intelligence maximizes your chances of success and moves you from passive intelligence gathering to active intelligence gathering.

For publicly available information it is possible to build robust monitoring systems that generate high-quality intelligence data without too much cost or difficulty. In fact, the problem isn’t one of information shortage, rather it is the glut of information accessible from the internet and (social) media. AI will help this – in fact gathering, processing, analyzing, and packaging publicly available information is one of the biggest areas in which AI can help you. For Japanese companies with large global footprints AI offers a great opportunity for Public Affairs information management. Whether you use AI or not, the key is to set up a system to monitor the flow of intelligence and information that can decipher the important signals from the noise. The goal is to analyze the important data and discard the rest. We come back to filtering below.

Intelligence gathering and analysis bridge your prioritization process and your positioning work. It is premised on a focused set of priorities and objectives, but it also provides knowledge and insight that shape your positioning and your advocacy management. When translating the intelligence consider the following:

1. Who was involved? Who is in charge? Who does it impact?

2. What happened? What was the decision? What should I know?

3. Where did it take place? Where is affected? Where can I get more info?

4. What happens next?

5. Why did that happen?

6. How did it happen? How was the decision made? How does it impact me? How will we communicate internally / externally?

As you then look to report this internally it is critically important that you think of a framework both for reporting and also for information and capture. Let’s take them in turn. Firstly, in terms of reporting you need to think of a good internal template that works for your organization along the lines of;

1. What happened update

2. What this means for your organization

3. What happens next

4. What we are doing about / what action is/will be taken

A simple reporting structure such as this can have a big impact. Obviously, this needs to be tailored to the organizational culture (e.g. how much detail is required), but a common reporting structure helps understanding and breeds confidence. Secondly, intelligence feeds into a number of key advocacy documents beyond the monitoring report (what happened) such as: issue timelines (right time), stakeholder maps (right person) and position papers (right information). From the outset your intelligence gathering must deliver insight for your key advocacy documents. Consider this as an intelligence filter. The important thing is to have a clear structure and process in place that works for you. As a Japanese company with a global footprint getting this structure and process right is critical to ensuring you have the right information to hand as and when you need it. For firms looking to enter in the Japanese market, the byzantine maze of Japanese government documents might seem daunting, but doing the initial legwork to parse out this information will pay off dividends in the future.

A major part of successful intelligence gathering is filtering to determine what becomes a strategic consideration and what stays out. Good filtering of intelligence is a system that only transmits intelligence on your key issues, with specific relevance to the priorities and objectives you have clearly determined in advance. This is the structure and process that you need to build – and then subject to regular, say six-monthly, iterative reviews, and updates. Check-in with those who receive the intelligence information. Is the intelligence relevant? Is it sufficiently focused on the priorities? Is it well-structured and well-presented? Is the frequency good? Get feedback to be sure.

All of this monitoring and intelligence information empowers you to know when to act, what to say, and with whom to speak to. This prepares your advocacy action. Explore our issue tracker template. It summarizes key advice and offers tables for organizing your intelligence data to support decision-making. The real challenge of effective monitoring and intelligence gathering is to find the structure-process and templates that work for you and your resource and budget constraints.

To succeed you will need to use a mix of good monitoring and political intelligence that you filter into a well thought out and organizationally tailored structure, process, and set of templates. Under-investing in this exercise will harm both your advocacy and your internal credibility. Many governments, companies, consultancies, trade organizations, and NGOs develop their own bespoke intelligence gathering and analysis systems. These flag relevant developments in a tailored format that enables them to act before as and when necessary. Despite this, many governments, EU and non-EU, industry players, and NGOs frequently miss important policy, timeline, or stakeholder developments. And most organizations do not have efficient internal reporting structures and templates in place. For companies with a global footprint getting the right information in the right format can be a major commercial and competitive advantage.

In conclusion, our practical advice on intelligence gathering can be summarized in four key points:

1. Relevance: At the very start make sure you align your intelligence gathering to your priorities and objectives. Review the priorities and intelligence output at the very least every 6 months to make sure it is all still fully aligned to your priorities. This will ensure your intelligence gathering will remain focused only on what is important.

2. Structure & Formats: Spend time thinking about your information reporting structures and formats. What works best? What is the easiest way for you to do it? Getting this right can not only save you time and energy, but also boost your professional visibility.

3. Balance: Make the distinction between pure monitoring work and political intelligence, and be sure to have a clear view of how you intend to acquire public and non-public information. You will need both to be successful.

4. Templates: Intelligence gathering needs to feed into updated timelines (make sure you have timelines), stakeholder maps, issue updates and your advocacy plans (which will be based on what your intelligence is telling you). Establish a list of key documents that require regular updating with intelligence analysis and define a process for updating them.

In future blogs we will explore the subsequent steps of the 7-step advocacy method because we strongly believe that structured advocacy gives you the greatest chance of advocacy success. If you get your priorities and your intelligence gathering right you are building on solid foundations.

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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.