End-of-Year Reporting: Everything You Need to Show Your Team’s Value

As the year comes to a close, it’s time to assemble your year-end report, build a funding case, and strategize for next year. You need to present all your efforts this year in the best light and demonstrate a solid strategy for moving forward. 

This resource aims to help you create an end-of-year report that highlights your success, proves your ROI, and helps build a solid strategy for the year ahead.

3 Best Practices for End-of-Year Reporting

A number of key best practices can help government affairs teams to make the most of technology in order to elevate their end-of-year reporting efforts.

No. 1 Demonstrate Value & Document Wins

By demonstrating the value of government affairs, both immediate and long-term, you can enhance your professional status and prove your expanding worth within the organization. But it can be hard to show hard numbers and tangible results. It’s not like you can tie your actions directly to the bottom line. 

“It's difficult to put a monetary value on what we do. Just by the nature of it, it's going to be a little squishy. Outcomes are going to be hard to see,” says John Sheff, senior director of global government affairs at Turntide Technologies.

To paint the picture, internal transparency helps. The more people within Sheff’s organization know about his work, he says, the easier it is for them to perceive the practical value of government affairs. He has lots of casual conversations with the executive team, and he maintains distribution lists that show who’s interested in what issues.

As a government affairs professional, “you need to relay information in a long-enough timeline so that people can make informed business decisions,” Sheff says. “Business leaders appreciate having those eyes and ears on the ground so that nobody is surprised when regulations come down.”

It’s equally vital to document the outputs — the end products of those efforts. "At the end of the day, being able to prove the impact of your engagement is a powerful way to show your value,” says Katie Beeson, government affairs director at the Washington Food Industry Association.

Digital tools can help track those engagements and generate data that demonstrates the accomplishments. A comprehensive policy monitoring software helps you stay on top of the legislation and regulations that matter most to your organization, to track and analyze the monetary value of your actions, and even show the potential costs had you not succeeded. 

All this in turn informs the end-of-year report.

No. 2 Measure & Report on Relationships

A strong stakeholder engagement strategy is a must for government relations professionals, but just as important (and more often overlooked) is a method for measuring that engagement and reporting on your progress.

Creating key performance indicators (KPIs) for stakeholder engagement is an effective way to measure results over time. When you report on KPIs, consider breaking them out by type of stakeholder (bill sponsors, issue supporters and detractors, and committees, for example). This will allow you to analyze the results more easily and identify areas for improvement.

It’s important to create levels of engagement that are specific to your organization, so there is no ambiguity when measuring progress with stakeholders. “People participate on different levels,” explains Erich Schuttauf, executive director of the American Association for Nude Recreation. “It’s helpful, in a corporate or association setting, to understand that [participation varies] based on their age or stage of life, or what time they have available.”

A stakeholder engagement assessment matrix offers a practical measurement tool for tracking changes between levels of engagement over time. This diagram should be updated over the course of a project to include relevant stakeholders and can be used alongside KPIs as an additional measure of success.

No. 3 Get Data Right in Your Annual Report

One of the most visible ways to prove your value internally and externally is by building the most impactful annual government affairs report possible. Incorporating data into your organization’s annual report starts well before you write word one of the report itself.

It begins with establishing alignment around which metrics matter to stakeholders within the organization, and to board members or other key external stakeholders. With a common understanding of the key metrics for your organization, it’s simpler to create a framework that can be easily communicated as part of your annual report.

High-level metrics are important to illustrate the broad impact of your work. The next layer is just as important, as it illustrates the efforts that support your results. These more detailed metrics are powerful additions to your annual advocacy report, but they can also be valuable throughout the year, as they allow your team to “show their work” by detailing the many individual actions that together add up to results.

Even the most powerful data proof points can get lost if the report itself isn’t clearly written and creatively designed. Leverage this template for your annual advocacy report, which can serve as the blueprint you need to succinctly communicate and present your advocacy year in review to internal and external stakeholders.

3 Ways to Prove Government Affairs' Value in Your Reporting

To demonstrate value, government affairs must provide hard metrics in professional and visually appealing reports that resonate with decision-makers. They can use data and technology (including the best legislative tracking software) to demonstrate they not only deserve a seat at the decision-making table, but also should be positioned near or at the top of it.

 Measure Economic Impact

Government affairs professionals have to pay close attention to the potential economic impacts of pending legislation and regulations on their organizations. Quantifying this impact should be a priority for modern government affairs departments. To do this, they have to be able to link the actions of the department to legislative or regulatory outcomes.

Technology platforms make it much easier to show return on investment for government affairs departments. For example, PolicyNote allows teams to log actions and relate them directly to bills, regulations, legislators, and committees, which enables professionals to keep track of what’s been done and the specific outcomes. 

Visualize Stakeholder Networks & Expansion

Government affairs professionals rely on their ability to build a network of stakeholders they can influence — to persuade to sponsor, support, or kill specific legislation or regulations, or to build a coalition. Stakeholder management is a labor-intensive activity requiring sustained effort, with limitations in terms of time and scope.

Data and analytics offer government affairs teams the opportunity to scale their work, exponentially expand their networks, and visually report all that work and effort for their organization's leadership to see.

Bottom Line Growth

Business development is not generally perceived to be a key activity for government affairs departments, but with the right technology and analytics, they have the opportunity to play a bigger role in the entire organization. Keeping track of appropriations bills at the federal, state, and international levels that are likely to have an impact on the bottom line is the first step.

With cutting-edge search capabilities and automation tools, a government affairs department can identify potential growth opportunities by watching trends where legislation is moving, thereby transforming itself into an effective business development operation.