#24: Brand as a policy influencing tool – Rowan Emslie
This interview with {ROWAN EMSLIE} is part of the {POLICY UNSTUCK} series. Rowan is the Chief Communications Officer at the Centre for Future Generations.
The emergence of policy communications
As policy gets more prominent, more complicated, and has more of an impact on the bottom line, there’s a realisation that ‘Okay, we need to do more than just listen and learn, or do quiet influencing in the background’. The traditional public affairs approach is very one-to-one, very high touch. And that element is still important in policy communications, but it’s just one of the three skillsets in policy communications. You need to combine it both with the strategic comms function, and people with digital marketing backgrounds who can measure stuff. Public affairs is difficult to measure, your KPIs were ten meetings with the commission, but today you can measure many things at a more granular level. People want policy comms people who can do all three of these things.
Integrate your communications function
Don’t disconnect your public affairs or your policy people from communications. It’s a common point of conflict in a lot of think tanks or NGOs – you get the policy people who want to do deals in the back rooms, and then you have the comms people who normally have more of a flashy, loud campaigning approach. Very often these groups clash, and if they’re not in one team and seen as different tools in the same toolkit, that clash is built in – it’s structural. The other big thing is that whatever your leadership looks like, you need to have communications and advocacy in that high level conversation. Otherwise there is a tendency to see communications as service delivery, which means you get people who understand the technical details designing products for non-technical audiences and they inhabit different worlds. Without communications in leadership, you don’t get those feedback loops from your audiences about what will actually work.
Avoid doing work that will never have impact
Another issue of not integrating communications onto your leadership team, is that you’ll get poorly thought through ideas executed and then pushed onto your comms team, who don’t know about them but then have to do something – anything – with them. It is a bad use of resources. If your comms person is going to stand up for themselves they’ll say ‘No one wants to read this, there is no audience for this’, and that’s frustrating for everybody. Or they’ll go ‘Okay I’ll put out a press release’ and nobody picks it up because nobody cares. You’ve wasted all that time and energy achieving very little. So that’s the big switch that has to happen – figure out the ideas that are going to work before any production happens.
Why brand supports influencing
My job is to make the knowledge products that we produce as influential as possible. There are tactical ways of doing that – this particular knowledge product needs to go to this particular person who has decision-making power over that particular area. But we live in a highly complex and noisy information ecosystem – there are many ways of people accessing a piece of knowledge. If people have to pick up your thing and go ‘who are these guys and what do they do?’ then you are one step back from being influential. That’s where brand comes in. If you have half an hour with the Commissioner that you care about – bearing in mind that Commissioner has many hundreds of other meetings every year – and you have to spend the first 10 minutes explaining who you are and why your opinion matters, you’re losing a bunch of valuable time and making your ideas a lot less salient, a lot less sticky for that Commissioner. The shorter you can get that intro, the better. And you do that with brand.
Measure influence, not output
We went through this whole thing in the digital marketing world where it was like, ‘I had millions of impressions on this tweet, I’m amazing!’… but that is just a vanity metric. You shouldn’t report on the number of outputs; you should report on the influence of those outputs. It’s not easy to measure that, but you can have a bunch of proxy measures that give you a sense of the bigger picture. Rather than being like, ‘look, we produced X number of things,’ it should be ‘our experts were featured by Y numbers of media outlets’ or ‘we had this many meetings with people who really matter.’ And in an ideal world, ‘our ideas were incorporated into these policies.’
That will change how you commission research
We ask people to produce less work and ensure that there is an audience for it. You’ve got to come and make the case to leadership… ‘I spoke to these people who would be the ultimate audience for it and they said that we have these problems and we think if we do this piece of research it would solve those problems and it would also push forward our ideas.’ If you can square that circle then it’s a good proposal. If not, then you’re not thinking it through enough – and that’s how you end up wasting time and energy.
Don’t expect technical experts to know how to run teams
A classic think tank and NGO issue is you have technical teams who are run by the best technical expert in that area. Your most senior engineer hires a bunch of other engineers and they all go ‘yes this would be the perfect product’ because they have similar worldviews. You should have a plan to diversify the inputs in your team. You should be hiring an engineer to do the research, and then somebody who really knows policy in that area in a deep way so they can play off each other, and then maybe someone who’s really integrated with your relevant bit of civil society etcetera. You need different viewpoints to create better products.
