8 Best Practices to Modernize Your Government Affairs Team and do More with Less

With more legislation and regulations at the state and local level, public policy issues expanding across continents, and an endless news cycle of public perception to deal with, covering more ground faster with smaller teams has become the norm of government affairs. 

Here are seven strategic best practices to help you do more with less and bring your team into the next chapter of innovation. 

1. Use Reliable Big Data for Analysis

The most difficult part about managing a robust government affairs program is prioritizing efforts within the tens of thousands of bills on Capitol Hill, in legislatures around the country, and around the world. While big data can’t address backroom deals, it can help you target the most strategic lawmakers to engage or figure out who should sponsor or amend a bill. It can also give you insights into a legislature you’ve never worked with, and even tell you how likely a bill is to pass if it gets a floor vote. 

The solution for innovative government affairs teams has been to leverage legislative and regulatory analytics to drive more effective decision-making. In the past, advocacy teams had to rely on the qualitative understanding of relationships in Congress, trust an external consultant, or rely on news reporting.

All of these are largely inefficient, risky, and costly. Turning to reliable analytics platforms to more efficiently supplement qualitative expertise with data-driven insights is proving much more effective. With the right technology, you can quantify relationships by vote count, predict the probability of passage, analyze the effectiveness of legislators at moving legislation, and draw upon trends to devise strategies to move forward.

2. Tie Results to Actions With Stakeholder Management

Metrics is the language of executives, and policy teams are finding it hard to validate their impact without them. Since advocacy efforts don’t always translate easily to the bottom line, your team should prioritize looking for ways to quantify your performance and directly tie it to what the C-suite cares about. 

A key best practice for government affairs teams is performing a post-mortem analysis or checklist after state sessions to see how many bills the team got into consideration, passed, or even blocked across the country, and the financial estimate of what the efforts saved the organization. Grassroots and PAC managers can also look at political contributions and measure the development of strategic relationships with lawmakers. 

In addition, for regulatory and larger legislative teams, creating an economic impact analysis on pending legislation and regulation can be used to quantify efforts to push or block new laws. And don’t forget to add what using a technology solution has saved in terms of research and staffing hours.

Grassroots and grasstops advocates should start to record granular details like meetings with legislators, actions taken on high versus low priority bills, and virtually keep track of the votes they’ve whipped. All of these items create new data points that help you chart the effectiveness of your team’s strategy, individual performance, quantify the value of outside consultants, and even quantify relationships with members of Congress or state legislatures. 

3. Invest in State and Local Politics 

With congressional activity slow and no signs of that changing, state and local governments have become increasingly important to your organizations. Let’s put it this way: the states are already where your opposition is focusing. 

The necessity of a state and local strategy is obvious. In 2020, the combined statehouses across the United States introduced more than 120,000 bills, and signed and enacted almost 22,000 of them. Conversely, the United States Congress introduced almost 9,000 bills and only 466 were signed and enacted within the same time period. That's almost 18 times less than the states. 

Very few organizations are not touched by state legislation on some level. While you could get stuck fighting for a meeting with a single congressional staffer that goes nowhere or battling the huge amounts of money still flowing to the federal government, you could just as easily call upstate legislators or city councilmen personally, to educate them on your issue in a few strategic jurisdictions. If the policy is successful, it’s likely to get replicated in other states and could find its way into national debates as a model policy. 

Leveraging technology to more effectively track and prioritize issues is a crucial best practice. With a high volume of legislation and regulation moving across the country, your team can focus on ensuring faster, more reliable alerts to pending activity as well as updates to committee hearings, sponsorship, and amendments. 

This is also where it becomes critical for modern advocacy teams to have a central place for keeping your proprietary notes and knowledge all in one place. In addition to tracking hundreds of bills, there are thousands of federal, state, and city legislators with whom they need to build relationships. Using technology to track meetings, communications with members, staffer contacts, and sponsored legislation will help you to maintain strong ties to key decision-makers. 

4. Build Your In-House Resources

Long gone are the days where letting the industry blindly advocate for you was a good move. Companies, in particular, are left holding the bag when their own industry abandons them on an important position or fails to handle an issue entirely. 

To minimize the damage and ensure your organization or company is up-to-date and working on your issues specifically, look at growing your team or giving it an overhaul. Do you need a digital grassroots professional or advocacy campaign manager? Have you got a stakeholder or issues management title on your team? These professionals can operate the tools of the trade to manage your issues and give you the insights and knowledge to educate lawmakers (and your higher-ups) for better policymaking.

5. Operate for Consistency and Continuity 

Just like business development teams store data and intelligence on prospective customers throughout the sales cycle in platforms like Salesforce, your government affairs teams can utilize technology as a single system of record to manage information. That eliminates the loss of legacy knowledge as folks leave the organization, and it’s also an effective tool to keep lawmakers and staffers (who also suffer from a high rate of turnover) up to speed on past meetings and positions.  

For example, your team can gather contact information, notes on meetings with legislators, and information on communication with staff in one system for a comprehensive view of which actions were most effective, which relationships need to be strengthened, and which opportunities need to be pursued.

As your team grows and scales, you’ll need to have a comprehensive digital workplace where your colleagues’ work is housed in one place so that everyone can be aligned with the information that is critical to your organization’s success. Having a disparate team working from the same set of tools, as opposed to random spreadsheets, will allow you to access necessary information when needed, report up and down effectively, and keep everyone on the same message and moving forward.

6. Be Mobile and Agile

While the C-suite might see government and public affairs as a team based in DC, as a practitioner, you know it’s a global function with stakeholders spread across multiple states, cities, and even continents, all influencing the future of your industry. 

As a result, your role will continue to evolve into shifting your stationary workstation and home base into that of a “road warrior,” most typically seen in other departments such as business development and account management.

By going to where your organization seeks to grow across the country and world, your team can become a revenue generator and ambassador for your organization. Government affairs extends way beyond the halls of Congress, and being a mobile and agile team can make all the difference for your organization or company. To do that effectively you’ll need a platform with an on-the-go app that lets you see all the inputs mentioned above in one place, from the palm of your hand. 

7. Build a Globally Aware Practice

Understanding emerging global trends and consequential policy developments to inform geostrategy, enhance market-level resilience, mitigate reputational risk, and maintain safe and ethical global operations is becoming increasingly challenging for all types of organizations. Staying on top of all of these issues across multiple time zones and languages isn’t easy, especially as global footprints grow and lines of hierarchy get more complicated.

To thrive and survive in an increasingly complex world, you need to see the full picture by combining deep political intelligence with fact-based economic market analysis. From that 50,000-foot view of what’s going on across regions to the ability to zoom into a particular country and how to connect with the stakeholders that matter.

With over 70 in-house experts and analysts from FrontierView, Oxford Analytica, EU Issue Tracker, Professional Services, and CQ — not to mention an additional 1,500 Oxford Analytica experts around the world — FiscalNote brings you more policy,  politics, and market analysis and insights than anyone else.

8. Expand Your Network Beyond Government Relations

Remember your stakeholders are not just lawmakers and staffers. Finding new advocates based on the issues that matter most to your organization can make all the difference in trying to push your agenda forward. Local business leaders, influencers, coalition groups, employees, even frenemies who may have been against you on certain issues can be invaluable on others. 

Capturing the behavioral patterns of stakeholders, such as their positions and priorities and voting histories over time is an effective way to broaden your organization’s network. These patterns serve as a guide, allowing executives to see who they should be reaching out to on a certain issue, or who they should build long-term relationships based on ideological leanings.

It’s imperative that your team looks beyond just legislators, their staff, and association leaders in building out their network of influence. As the world becomes more connected with technology, issues involve a greater range of non-traditional stakeholders.

Anyone with reach and rapport on any number of web platforms like Twitter or Facebook has the potential to influence public opinion on key issues ranging from gun control to personal data privacy from their mobile device or desktop. Identifying and activating these non-traditional stakeholders can pay dividends when you’ve got an issue you need to squash or push through.