The Government Affairs Team in Disruptive Era

In recent years, government affairs teams across industries have been rethinking the way they advocate on behalf of their organizations and companies. Traditionally, organizations have had smaller teams reacting to government action and ensuring compliance with new laws. This allowed organizations to bypass hiring an in-house team of legislative and regulatory advocates, opting instead for their general counsel or external consultants to handle these responsibilities. 

However, the risks created by central and local government actions are increasingly hard to ignore among both established and growing industries. McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm, reported in 2013 that as much as 30 percent of earnings in most industries could be at the will of government action, and as much as 50 percent in the banking sector. When looking at regulatory risk, the numbers are even more staggering with annual costs of all current government regulations estimated at USD 17.5 million, or 11 percent of the GDP in Indonesia. 

Meanwhile, central and local governments in the country have become even more active in recent years forcing organizations to further expand advocacy teams outside of government offices. When central government has not taken up policy issues, local governments have also stepped in to take on issues such as minimum wage. 

Whether it’s a retail shop dealing with local labor laws, a new industry such as Tech-Startups educating Indonesian lawmakers on new technology, the need to actively engage and educate policymakers is increasingly apparent. The risks across all industries have transformed government affairs from an afterthought to an integral part of corporate and organizational success. 

The need for a digital operation 

Although the demand for government risk management has increased, companies and organizations have been slow to rejuvenate their efforts. In private companies for instance, “government affairs” organizations have long been cost centers. While other aspects of politics – elections, communications, grassroots – have embraced innovation, government affairs and lobbying have lagged behind. 

However, today’s government affairs teams cannot afford to follow the old way of doing things. With a need for more involvement at the central and local level, there is more ground than ever to cover. To add to this, companies and organizations have trended toward reducing staff as opposed to adding human capital. These two trends have stretched resources thin where they are needed the most. 

Additionally, the government affairs profession is beginning to see tools that can help them do their jobs smarter. Big data is replacing news media as a better information source; software now tracks contacts better than the old-fashioned rolodex; and social media networks are aggregating public communication. These are just a few ways advocates have changed their workflow over the past 20 years. 

As a result, modern advocacy is less about handshakes and more about efficiency. This is a lobbyist’s race to the moon – the government affairs team that innovates the fastest and embraces data doesn’t just mitigate growing risk, but also creates opportunity for their company or organization. 

Five factors of digitalization 

Government affairs teams with an eye on innovation and efficiency are adopting best practices that include data-driven decisions, understanding return on investments, and leveraging social media. They’ve built in-house teams that can increasingly focus not only on federal policy, but also central and local politics – where changes happen quickly. 

Any advocacy team can adapt these practices to become more modern and compete better in an economy ever-more reliant on government affairs. 

1. The application of big data to politics 

For years, the resources and thought applied to quantitative analysis for election campaigns had far outpaced the attention Indonesian government spent on data-driven strategies. Since 2009, billions have been spent on increasingly sophisticated messaging, media efforts powered by big data. 

That trend is now expected after Election Day. The most difficult part about managing a robust government affairs program is prioritizing efforts within the hundreds of bills in legislatures around the country. While big data can’t address backroom deals, it can help you target the most strategic lawmakers with whom to engage and 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 top 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 DPR, trust an external consultant on their gut alone or read up on news with an editorial swing. All of these are largely inefficient, risky, and costly. 

Instead, today’s top policy teams are turning to reliable analytics platforms to more efficiently supplement their qualitative expertise with data-driven insights. With the right technology, they 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 their strategies. On the regulatory front, this can also include analyzing the sentiment of public comments or looking at how certain groups are siding on a proposed rule. 

2. Tying results to actions 

Today’s executives are increasingly looking for metrics, and policy teams are finding it hard to justify their impact. Since advocacy efforts don’t always translate easily to the financial impacts on a company or organization’s bottom line, teams have been looking for ways to quantify their performance and directly tie it to what executives care about. 

For government affairs teams, impact can be captured in a number of different ways. Many shops will do a post-mortem analysis after a session on how many bills their team got into consideration, passed, or even blocked across the country. Grassroots and PAC managers can also look at political contributions and measure the development of strategic relationships with lawmakers. For regulatory and larger legislative teams, economic impact analysis on pending legislation and regulation can also be used to quantify their efforts to push or block new laws. 

With the help of a government relations management service, modern advocacy teams have the opportunity to go a step further to drive more effective government affairs strategy. Advocates can 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 chart the effectiveness of the team’s strategy, individual performance, quantify the value of external consultants, and even quantify relationships with members of DPR or local legislatures. 

3. Investing in central and local politics 

With legislative activity at an all-time low, central and local governments in Indonesia have become increasingly important to organizations, and their opposition. Proactive advocacy campaigns being stonewalled on the Hill are finding avenues at the central level. Where those efforts are facing pushback, many issues have found greater success at the district (Kabupaten) and city level. 

The benefits of this strategy are simple — while you could get stuck fighting for a meeting with a single legislative staffer or battling the huge amounts of money still flowing to the local government, you could just as easily call up central legislators or city councilmen personally to have them take up your issue in a few strategic jurisdictions. If the policy sees success, it could then find its way into national debates as a model policy. 

The first way government affairs teams can manage this is by leveraging technology to more effectively track and prioritize issues. With a high volume of legislation and regulation moving across the country, teams can focus on ensuring faster, more reliable alerts to pending activity as well as updates to committee hearings, sponsorship, and amendments. 

Also, this is where it becomes critical for modern advocacy teams to have a central place for knowledge management. In addition to tracking hundreds of bills, there are thousands of central and local legislators in Indonesia with whom they need to build relationships. Utilizing a technology to track meetings, communications with members, staffer contacts, and sponsored legislation helps to maintain strong ties to key decision makers. Additionally, a government relations management platform can help to keep tabs on those relationships when resource-strapped teams lose co-workers that may have stronger ties in certain provinces or to particular lawmakers. 

4. Development of in-house teams 

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 a company has more control over its interests, more executives are adding in-house government affairs teams to handle their issues personally. These professionals have the tools to manage their issues and the insights and knowledge to educate lawmakers for better policymaking. 

The best way to develop an in-house team is to hire an experienced professional from an advocacy group and equip them with the tools to succeed. Successful organizations will first set a clear set of objectives to measure success against at the end of the first year. This can be based on the performance reports of previously utilized outside consultants or services. Additionally, it is essential to procure the best technology to start tracking relationships, build institutional memory, and report on advancements. This initial team will define the process for advocating on issues and begin to foster relationships with industry advocates, legislators, and regulators making it essential they have the tools to maintain what is put into motion. 

5. The integration of social media 

Social media has become an essential part of grassroots and grasstops efforts as more people engage their legislators that way. Lawmakers have been known to check their Twitter accounts more often than email, suggesting the trend toward social media as an advocacy tool is only picking up steam. When considering how overloaded inboxes are, it makes sense for legislators to look for other means of sorting through public opinion. Besides, what’s more public than social media? 

This has made it critical for policy teams to add social media tracking to their workflow. A central place to see what legislators are tweeting about or search for what legislators are talking about minimizes the time allocated to social media. 

Many social media tools make it easy to create lists for accounts you’d like to follow, but this often requires an extensive amount of time for monitoring. The ability to search for a topic you care about within a list of legislators reduces this time drastically while increasing impact. 

Additionally, more government affairs teams are becoming active on social media to increase company transparency and engage in advocacy efforts. For teams also tying results to actions, social media provides built-in analytics for seeing reach and engagement. 

Modern government affairs in practice 

When adding in these five factors, today’s organizations can expand their limited resources exponentially to mitigate government risk and capitalize on new opportunities. 

By embracing big-data, teams see a level of quantitative analysis that supplements their qualitative expertise for more holistic decision making. Defining a return on investment in government affairs creates clear objectives and ties efforts to a company’s bottom line or organization’s mission. Investing in central and local politics as well as building an in-house team creates a new level of control over government strategy. Integrating social media adds another layer of context around public opinion and legislator communication. 

The results can have a dramatic effect on the voice of a company or organization.