If you want to grow your influence as a lobbyist, here are some things you can do. These tips have been taken from working and dealing with some excellent practitioners in the field.
The checklist may be helpful for a new third-country government official, company or NGO representative sent to Brussels, or a young lobbyist starting off in their career.
Checklist:
- Budget for relevant studies, data, and evidence.
- Budget for lunch and coffee.
- Allocate time to meet officials, politicians, advisers, and journalists.
- Possess communication skills – in writing and speaking.
- Able to build rapport and connect with people.
- Able to work across political boundaries – non-partisan.
- Possess issue expertise or are able to tap issue expertise.
The late Tony Long, who established WWF’s European Policy Office, demonstrated these traits.
Firstly, issues were only worked on if there was an available budget to work on them properly. From this, I learned that you are setting yourself up for failure if you think you can win on a legislative or policy issue on goodwill alone. You need to have a dedicated set-aside budget for the duration of the campaign to commission the relevant best evidence, data, and studies you can afford. If you don’t have the relevant data, evidence, and studies to support your case available on time, you will fail.
Secondly, an easy way to meet someone is to invite them for lunch or coffee. It is a tried and tested method that works for most European cultures. Just phone them up and ask if they are available to discuss the issue, and mention you have a new study, data, and information to share with them. To do this, you need a budget to pay for this. Money does not grow on the sacred money tree unless you are a central bank.
Thirdly, you need to set aside the time (budget for time) to allow you to go outside and meet the people making and influencing decisions. You need to put buffers into your planning. I recall Tony Long getting a call from the office of Prime Ministers/Commissioners to meet. He made those spontaneous requests his priority. He knew that the political returns from those meetings were the highest. I’ve seen throughout my career that the spontaneous requests to help an official, politician, official, or journalist on an issue deliver the highest political returns. I know in doing so I missed the annual appraisal, internal planning meeting on room design, and the like. I’d take the political win over irritating colleagues. I know some for-profit and non-profit organizations set a baseline where 50% of their lobbyist’s time should be external engagement.
Fourthly, a good lobbyist needs to be able to communicate clearly in writing and speaking. The combination is rare. A good reference point is being able to explain an issue to a smart 16-year-old. You need to be able to explain complex issues to decision-makers, colleagues, and clients. I started off doing EU fisheries policy, which forces you to understand a slightly crazy scheme and translate it back into plain English. It’s not easy. A good way to improve is to read a good author or journalist’s take on an issue. I learned a lot from reading Charles Clover on fisheries, Dan Gardner on risk, and Thomas Hager on drugs.
Fifthly, and I think I am in the minority here, it really helps to like the people you are dealing with. If you don’t like civil servants, politicians, the political and regulatory class, and journalists, I believe that hostility will come across when you are dealing with them. There are two species I know – officials and politicians – I’ve worked for both. I know what they want and can empathize with the challenges they face. My job is to make their job easier. I like journalists as a class. They tend to be witty, entertaining, and full of great anecdotes and war stories. Every time I dropped things to take a call from George Monbiot for one of his pieces, it helped my client’s interests.
Sixthly, it helps to be able to work across political boundaries. I find this easy as my personal belief structure is a mix of Personalism, free trade, and social democracy (Labour Party). If you base your network on one party card, you will find it hard to develop winning coalitions. I am at home using the ideas of Mises and Hayek with free trade classical liberals and the ideas and words of His Holiness Pope John II to defend the same issue (fish stock conservation) with different political interests. Personally, I won’t deal with fascists; my Catholic guilt would be too much to deal with.
Finally, you need to develop relevant expertise. Here again, I take a minority view. For me, your core expertise as a lobbyist is process expertise – knowing how a law/policy gets adopted – and how to influence that process. You can develop issue expertise quite quickly. For me, a more valuable skill is being able to tap the right expertise and coach that expert to present to the relevant political and policy decision-makers. When I was at IFAW, working on the oil tanker disaster legislation, the Erika legislative package, I was fortunate to work with a world-leading expert who had worked on similar disasters in the USA. He was a delight to work with. He asked what expertise depth to take the issue in each meeting and answered every question perfectly, to the appropriate level, for each level. He was one of those rare master craftsmen who had real-world expertise and who could explain it. When working with Baltic Sea 2020 on the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy, we took a leading government fisheries official, who had orchestrated a country’s loss-making and stock-poor fisheries, to one where stocks were sustainable and the fisheries profitable. There was no one better to take our message, the need for sustainable and profitable fisheries, to governments than one of their own who had done it. It helped bring on board some countries and, more importantly, ensure France did not vote against us on one issue.