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“How could I have a greater impact on the policy landscape?”
“How can I benchmark the effectiveness of my public affairs program?”
“What are other teams doing that I could also be doing?”
If you find yourself looking for the answer to these questions, this article is for you. Read on for information about the five tiers of public affairs maturity—Just Getting Started, Ad-Hoc, Reactive, Proactive, and Strategic—and strategies to help you level up from one tier to the next.
(PS — If you haven’t already, take the Public Affairs Maturity Quiz first to evaluate your program in 7 quick questions!)
Public Affairs Maturity Levels
1. Just Getting Started
Setting Goals to Level Up
When you’re just getting started, you have the opportunity to set yourself up for success right from the word go.
You probably have a high-level vision (or even a company directive) for what you want your public affairs program to achieve. Maybe it’s changing the narrative around the issues you care about. Maybe it’s maintaining the status quo on other issues. Whatever your goals, consider them your north star as you think about how to structure your public affairs function.
In terms of what to prioritize, you’ll need a system for gathering intelligence (like federal and state bills, statements from legislators, or contact information for staff assigned to your issue), so you can build an informed plan of action. You’ll also need a system for executing on that plan.
Most teams rely on a public affairs software solution to craft the workflows they rely on. To help you identify what you need in a software solution, consider the following strategies that you might choose to prioritize. Note that not every strategy makes sense for every team, and that this isn’t a comprehensive list:
While there are many things your team can do to address the election, here are some basic steps that almost any organization can take:
Strategies to Implement
Tracking legislation & regulations
You’ll want to ensure you can monitor the relevant policies without spending too much time digging through policies that aren’t relevant. Make sure you can receive email alerts, keep track of hearings, and collaborate with team members, so your organization can be the first to know and take action on important developments.
Monitoring lawmaker dialogue
Make sure your software solution allows you to track how lawmakers talk about the issues from their comments on social media to their floor statements or participation in committee hearings. That way, you can spot champions of your cause, identify legislators who disagree with your stance, and uncover those who might be open to your perspective.
Engaging with stakeholders
You need a solution to help you build and monitor your relationships with stakeholders, namely a public affairs CRM. Make sure it logs in-person and digital interactions and allows you to track each stakeholder’s alignment with your policy priorities.
Running advocacy campaigns
Harness grassroots-level support for your policy positions with an advocacy program. You’ll want to make sure your advocacy software lets you set up online campaigns, send action alerts via email and text, and drive new supporters to support your campaigns.
As teams start out, they sometimes prioritize short-term goals over long-term success, which leads them to depend on manual or makeshift solutions. This characterizes the Ad-Hoc phase: a tier which ultimately requires teams to modify their systems and disrupt their workflows in order to level up. By implementing the strategies listed above,, you can sidestep these pitfalls and prepare for long-term scalability. This approach will quickly advance your team to the Reactive or even Proactive tiers.
For more about what to look for when you’re evaluating a software solution, check out the Public Affairs Software Buyer Guide. And if you’d like to have a personalized conversation about your goals and how to achieve them, reach out to our team.
2. Ad-Hoc to Reactive
Setting Goals to Level Up
We all wish we could build all the right systems from the get-go—but constraints on resources or time can mean that’s not always possible. Consequently, teams with established workflows but without scalable or automated systems fall into the Ad-Hoc category.
To level up, Ad-Hoc teams should identify ways to automate some of your manual processes. When essential tasks are less manual, you’ll have time for more impactful work.
But what does “manual” mean in the context of public affairs, anyway? Manual tasks might include keeping track of your meetings with lawmakers in your head, or relegating legislative tracking to congress.gov or other free tools. You’re getting everything done, but the work is taking longer than it needs to. After all, there are tools available that automatically track almost everything you need to know.
Below, find some examples of manual work that could be automated — reclaiming several hours each week.
Strategies to Implement
Dialogue Tracking
Ad-Hoc teams often track how lawmakers are talking about certain issues by relying on Google alerts or reports from other teams. But those methods require a lot of manual sifting through potentially irrelevant alerts.
To level up, automate this work via a dialogue tracking tool that filters what lands in your inbox. And, you’ll have more time to spot who’s talking about your issues, craft messaging, and build relationships that move the needle.
Stakeholder Mapping & Meeting Tracking
Are you still mapping stakeholders in Excel and writing meeting follow-ups in notebooks?
If so, look for a software with at least these two features: 1) a directory of officials and staff, and 2) the ability to track meetings and attach them to the official’s profile in that directory.
These features will let you see the priorities and relationships of those stakeholders at a glance.
Finding a software solution that can automate important tasks is fundamental to setting yourself up for growth in the future, and it’s the biggest way to push yourself and your team to work more efficiently, so you can influence more effectively.
3. Reactive to Proactive
Setting Goals to Level Up
If your team has reached the Reactive tier, you have automated many of your most time-consuming tasks via software. Now, it’s time to rise to the next level by taking full advantage of your software’s functionalities.
Teams at this level know that they will be able to catch and react to everything important that happens. So, leveling up means shaping more of the policy dialogue instead of just reacting to it—establishing relationships, identifying potential champions, and preventing potential threats from developing.
When you take a more proactive approach, you should notice that tasks start to cross-pollinate. In other words, getting more advanced in one area (for example, dialogue tracking) will help you advance in another area (like stakeholder mapping).
These goals require expanding use of the tools you already work with. See below for some examples:
Strategies to Implement
Dialogue Tracking
At the Reactive level, teams rely on software that tracks lawmaker dialogue (both online and offline) and filters out the noise to ensure you only get an alert when it’s relevant.
So to level up, you should use that dialogue tracking functionality to monitor trends and spot potential champions or detractors before the legislation comes down.
For example, Proactive teams create interest-influence matrices based on lawmaker dialogue in order to see which lawmakers it makes sense to engage with.
Grassroots Advocacy
Reactive-level grassroots teams typically have dedicated staff who run episodic advocacy campaigns. But to move the needle even more, teams should engage their audience year-round.
How? Take campaigns with a single call-to-action (like signing a petition) and turn them into multi-step campaigns (signing a petition, making a phone call, and sharing it online), or show lawmakers how much their constituents care with an in-person fly-in.
As your grassroots program grows more systematic, you’ll have a greater impact on lawmakers, and be more likely to earn your desired result.
4. Proactive to Strategic
Setting Goals to Level Up
Strategic-level teams benefit from many of the same efficiencies and systems as those at the Proactive level, with one major difference: Strategic teams beak down the silos between departments.
Why is this important? For starters, when departments or teams are siloed from one another—for example, if your grassroots and state government affairs teams rarely communicate—they may miss important insights. Teams may duplicate each other’s efforts, or end up sending mixed messages to stakeholders receiving outreach from more than one department.
To level up, take steps to unify the teams and information. Use the data you already have more effectively: get teams into the same system, create data-sharing systems, and make use of intel from one team to help another. In other words, make your data work for you.
Tasks at the Strategic level will continue to cross-pollinate, so that getting more advanced in one area (for example, grassroots advocacy) will help you advance in another area (like stakeholder mapping). When teams share information, the strategies begin to depend on each other. See below for some examples:
Strategies to Implement
Grassroots Advocacy
Proactive-level grassroots teams drive supporters to action with multi-channel, year-round campaigns. They use data generated from those campaigns to guide their future strategies. Strategic-level teams do the same, but they also share their data with other teams, and vice versa.
For example, when advocacy teams can see notes from engagements with lawmakers, they can send more personalized and impactful outreach.
Meanwhile, lobbying teams can leverage grassroots supporters’ stories to drive home their point when speaking to lawmakers.
Stakeholder Mapping & Meeting Tracking
Teams with Proactive-level stakeholder mapping pull in information about each stakeholder: their votes, their public dialogue, any sponsored legislation, and other publicly available information. They also use meeting notes from previous engagements to determine the stakeholder’s alignment with the organization’s priorities.
Strategic teams go a step further by monitoring the stakeholder’s interest, influence, and alignment over time, and making use of that information across each team.
For example, Strategic lobbying teams map stakeholders based on their alignment and send them specific outreach. Grassroots teams direct advocacy efforts toward lawmakers with a specific stakeholder tier, relationship, or vote history. Department leaders identify what moves the needle in one region and share best practices with teams in other regions.
Teams rely on each other and move in lockstep.
Strategic-level public affairs organizations use the most advanced tools to execute the most advanced strategies. When teams are armed with the information they need to make strategic decisions, you can make the maximum impact on the policy landscape.
5. Strategic and Beyond
Setting Goals to Level Up
Strategic-level teams use advanced, efficient approaches to move their policy priorities forward—they’re at the top of their game, and now their priority is to guard against complacency.
To remain at the Strategic level, think critically about how to make the best use of your data, tools, and connections to achieve your goals. Ensure you’re subscribed to industry publications and thought leaders who challenge your philosophies. Consider experimenting with new tools or expanding to new regions, and make sure to measure the effectiveness of these approaches.
Strategies to Implement
Expand Your Reach with Local or International Tracking
Stay at the forefront of the policy landscape by expanding your dialogue or policy tracking to a new region.
Monitoring local government will help you get a sense for emerging issues. You can get an idea of where communities stand on your issues and participate in the policy conversation at its roots.
Similarly, multinational organizations will find it useful to expand their dialogue and legislative monitoring to governing bodies outside the United States. Both of these strategies will broaden your insights—and your impact.
Artificial Intelligence
Even the best systems require upgrades to stay sharp. That’s where AI comes in. Incorporating artificial intelligence into your strategies will ensure you can use your time most efficiently.
AI can take on manual tasks previously only done by people—and can even take on time-consuming tasks you never had time for before.
For example, AI can personalize messages to lawmakers and staff faster than a team of people could, so you can share more resonant messaging with more officials in less time.
Efficient, collaborative systems that ensure teams march to the same drum will keep paying dividends. To stay at the top of your game, continue to think critically about what kinds of strategies will help teams contribute to the wider policy goals of the organization.