Whether you work at a nonprofit, association, or corporation, policy has a significant impact on your organization. The only way to manage that risk/opportunity is by proactively working with legislators and your advocates.
Your ultimate goal as advocacy, public affairs, and government relations professionals is to enable your organization to conduct business and protect its interests. To do that effectively, you have to develop a robust legislative strategy.
Here are a few recommendations on how to get started developing a successful legislative strategy.
Decide on Legislative Priorities
To build a legislative strategy, you first need to decide what your legislative priorities will be. This sounds obvious enough but the process is not so cut and dried. Will Krebs, vice president of policy and government relations at Project Lead The Way, a non-profit organization in the PreK-12 education space, recommends starting with identifying what the desired outcomes are for your legislative work.
“What is it that you want to accomplish in the space? And how does that sync up with your organization's mission?” he says. “It can't be advocacy for the sake of advocacy. It ought to be attached to what you're ultimately trying to accomplish.”
To do this, you have to marry your business needs with your clients’ or members’, as well as your key legislators’ priorities. “We don't make legislative strategy in a bubble,” says Chris Spence, managing director of federal government relations at TIAA, a Fortune 100 financial services organization.
Spence suggests starting internally. He and his team rely on their internal business leaders to understand what’s important and what the government relations team should be focused on. “As government relations professionals, our job is to build relationships in Washington, D.C. with regulators, with lawmakers, with Hill staff,” Spence says. “That's also our job internally, to build relationships with the business so that they know they can call us, they know we're around, they know what we're doing.”
For example, if one of your organization’s key goals is to increase sales, you should collaborate with your sales team “to understand their barriers and their opportunities so that those are reflected on your policy framework,” Krebs says.
You should then reach out to your external stakeholders to ensure your policy agenda is not only based on how your organization perceives the issues. “We also really try to take the approach of making sure that it's inclusive, that our conversations and our research represent a wide swath of voices, experiences, etc.,” Krebs adds.
Determine How to Measure Outcomes