Governments have formal processes, rules, and institutions. But anyone who has spent much time working in or around government also knows that there are plenty of unwritten conventions about how things actually get done, including how organizations effectively engage with ministers and their offices.
For people outside of government, political offices, or professional advocacy, many of those conventions can be surprisingly opaque. Not knowing them can also mean inadvertently undermining your own advocacy efforts.
FutureBridge, which provides training on engaging with and working alongside government, has published a particularly useful series of posts that helps demystify some of this. They cover the unwritten rules of meeting with ministers, understanding the role(s) of exempt political staff in ministerial offices, how governments and political staff actually approach policy development, and some of the fundamentals of effective advocacy.
As I read through them, I found myself repeatedly nodding along. At the same time, a few things that I’ve done (or watched others do) over the years clicked into place. Some of the advice articulates practices that people who spend a lot of time around government may follow almost instinctively, without necessarily stopping to explain why they work.
It’s possible to agree or disagree with individual pieces of advice in the series. Some of those differences will come down to personal experience or preference, differences between sectors, or other factors. Taken as a whole, though, there is a lot here that organizations engaging with governments would benefit from reading, internalizing, and turning into consistent practices.
Most valuable to me is how clearly the series illustrates what organizations should be doing before, during, and after an engagement with government. Effective advocacy is not simply about getting the meeting or making the argument once you are in the room. It requires preparation, follow-through, and organizational capacity. The posts help make visible the time and resources that are more likely to give an organization’s advocacy a meaningful chance of success.
For people working in government or operating as professional advocacy / lobbying bodies, much of this may seem obvious. For everyone else, and particularly those who only occasionally interact with ministers’ offices, it offers useful institutional literacy. It can help organizations think more carefully about how they advocate for a preferred course of action and, just as importantly, recognize when an advocacy strategy may be poorly positioned to succeed from the outset.
Excited Pixels 