As a lobbyist, you are going to spend a lot of time in meetings.
I find the most effective way to promote your case is meeting the officials, politicians and political aides who are drafting the policy and law. This is easy to do. Phone them up or email and ask for a meeting. There is no better way to get your position co-opted than meeting the people who have the power of the pen.
A good lobbyist will spend around half of their time in external meetings with officials, politicians, political aides and influencers. This is the easiest and the most effective way to find your position and text appear in the final policy or legislative text. I have not worked out a better way of getting the message out and taken up.
I’ve spent the last few weeks meeting several MEPs and their political aides with another organisation to promote, what on the face of it, looks like a niche issue. We made the case, answered questions, and saw the same language tabled and adopted in the Brexit resolution adopted today. It’s like it is good to talk with you want to communicate your case.
There is something almost primal to see if your position has legs to stand on than by getting the raw and direct face to face feedback. You can gauge a lot by the look in the other’s person eye and body language. They’ll give direct feedback, ask for proof points, that will help you seal their support or not.
When I was a Labour Party activist, in my youth, I canvassed for the Party in elections. It’s great training. You get sworn at, spat at, and sometimes welcomed. You are forced to make your case very quickly.
Face to face meetings are the best test of the strength of your case. If it is weak, you can go back, reflect and adapt your case. You can bolster proof points, remove weak points that do not resonate, and through an iterative process improve your chances of winning.
I am not much of a fan of internal meetings. There is a case for them. It’s a limited one.
I know this view has become deeply unfashionable.
Many lobbyists seem to think that you can persuade policymakers, legislators and influencers by what amounts to a process of telepathy. This must be the reason for replacing external meetings with so many internal meetings.
This takes the form of internal meetings hammering out internal positions as if it were anything other than a self-confirmation exercise. When it is tested outside with real-life officials and politicians the points tend to fall flat.
I’ve found the major success factor in any political campaign is avoiding internal meetings/conference calls. I landed up organising campaign pushes when colleagues were on holidays. When they were away, the campaign got won. In one case, my counterpart from another NGO and I had to feign ignorance about how so much had changed in such amount of time. Internal meetings and calls did not clog up the campaign machinery.
A variation of this is a collection of lobbyists meeting up, often in trade associations or joint NGO get-togethers, and speaking about what they think the positions of policymakers and influencers are. These often turn into cathartic sessions where they divine these “views” from the ether. It makes Chinese whispers look like a good way of passing on a message.
One can’t help but wonder if the time would be better served by meeting the policymakers and influencers directly.
There is one internal meeting that is worthwhile. They are short, have an agenda, and have the concise pre-read memo (no PPT) circulated twenty-four hours in advance. If people don’t send the pre-read, scrap the point. These are focused on action, and deciding who is going to whom, and what, if any, additional information is needed. These can last about 15 minutes. They help push the action forward rather than towards inertia and inner dialogue.