How to Build a Modern Government Relations Department

“K Street” in Washington D.C. was long known as the area of town which housed the most lobbying firms. Although that’s no longer the case, the term is still used to refer to the lobbying industry in the nation’s capital.

Government relations has long been seen as a cost center within private companies. Government itself — standing in the way of innovation and shrinking profit margins — is often seen as an adversary to be placated or overcome, not a partner to be worked with.

At the same time, many government relations departments are stuck in the pre-Internet era. Most lay people view lobbyists’ work as some sort of dark art, and lobbyists do little to dispute that notion.

This conception of lobbying — and government relations more generally — is wrong. Yes, government relations work requires relationship-building, but so does sales. Yes, it requires negotiation, but so does procurement. Yes, it requires a savvy perception and navigation of public sentiment, but so does marketing and public relations. Sales, procurement, marketing — all of these business functions are driven by profit-creation, all are tied closely to data and metrics. All have long since been brought into the modern way of doing business — it’s about time that government relations is pulled into that group, too.

Processes within most government relations departments are not designed with these best practices in mind, but I propose four ways to improve the government relations function.

1. Become servants to the data. The impact of legislation and regulation, the likelihood of policy implementation, and the effectiveness of advocacy efforts are all quantifiable metrics. They can be used to formulate strategy, improve efficiency, and add to the bottom line.
2. Go local. For too long, the lobbyist on Capitol Hill has been lionized as the pinnacle of the profession. With gridlock and dysfunction dominating D.C., companies should emphasize state and local efforts.
3. Engage your customers. Uber is the example par excellence of this, but many companies should be able to leverage a loyal customer base to make their case to policymakers.
4. Make collaboration the norm. Government relations departments are often splintered, where they should (and could) be a cohesive unit, striving towards company goals.

These are not small changes — they are radical ones that will require restructuring the department, buy-in from key stakeholders, and effective communication of the reasoning behind the changes. But they are necessary if government relations is to transform itself from a backwards department treated as a necessary evil to a valuable part of the company, contributing directly to the bottom line.

Serve the data

Data is the foundation of any successful business. Without objective information to back up analysis, decisions lack any basis in fact and are not replicable or scalable. Thankfully, with the rise of new ways to capture data and the computing power to process that data, the information at the fingertips of everyone from front-line salespeople to marketing managers to the C-suite to, yes, folks in government relations, is greater than ever before.

Lobbying has long been seen as more of an art than a science, but the big data revolution means that this balance has shifted.

Here’s how government relations professionals at different levels can use that data. Managers, who may be on-the-ground lobbyists responsible for a state or a handful of states can use data analytics to determine which bills are likely to pass, allowing them to combine objective analysis with what they hear in the hallways of state capitols. They can also use these analytics to determine which legislators are sitting on the fence on important bills, which can help them be more effective in their advocacy efforts.

Government relations directors, who may be responsible for a region, oversee the entire country, or operate in D.C., can keep tabs on their managers, offering guidance on how to improve their efforts and more accurately assess the success of the strategies. Vice presidents and above will have useful insights into their departments, allowing them to adjust their structures to maximize effectiveness and provide meaningful reports to the C-suite.

Lobbying has long been seen as more of an art than a science, but the big data revolution means that this balance has shifted. With more data — accurate predictions on legislative and regulatory activity are now possible through advances in machine learning — the government relations department can shift from a cost center to a risk-mitigation and even profit-generating department. With forecasting, government relations departments can foresee risks and opportunities for their companies’ business, serving as both an early-warning system and a shield for their activities.

Go local

“All politics is local,” the saying goes. In our current political environment, riddled with gridlock and dysfunction, this is more true than ever. Little of note is likely to happen before the 2016 elections, but even if a new president brings with him or her a raft of new policy changes, most of the action will still be happening at the state and local levels.

By refocusing efforts on the state and local levels, companies can ensure quick wins that create real progress.

If that is the case, it seems like some of the money spent on lobbying in Washington is misallocated. Prestige, tradition, and lack of familiarity with the territory surely come into play, but those should not be the determining factors. By refocusing efforts on the state and local levels, companies can ensure quick wins that create real progress.

This can require larger teams to act on the wider range of events as they unfold, but with centralized databases, predictive technology, and real-time communication channels, the required increase can be minimized and the cost offset by the value added to the company. Data analytics allows you to focus your resources on the important issues rather than spending time trying to influence every single bill or proposed rule.

It’s not just tech companies that are shifting their advocacy efforts to the state and local levels. Even venerable trade associations like the American Gaming Association and the American Hotel and Lodging Association are changing their strategies. It will become more and more common to see government relations departments making this shift, unless the higher levels of government suddenly become more functional and the industry does not incorporate a new generation of leaders, both of which seem unlikely. This trickle will soon become a flood, as the lobbying battlefield shifts to this new space, and those who do not adapt risk getting left behind.

Engage your customers

If all politics is local, so is all business. New companies (notably Uber, AirBnB, and Facebook) are breaking new ground in activating their customer base in political battles. Technology companies, especially, are well-positioned to take advantage of this trend, since they have ready access to user data and often seamless means of communicating with them. And more than ever, these users have direct access to legislators and regulators through social media and other communication channels.

Uber has been a loud advocate for itself in cities across the United States and across the world. New York has been one of the hotbeds of this lobbying activity. Uber spent $369,000 on lobbying through Oct. 21 of this year — and that’s just the amount it spent on traditional outside lobbying firms. In the crowning moment of its fight against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Uber added another option to its app that showed users what Uber availability would look like if de Blasio got his way and pushed through stricter regulations on ride-sharing apps. This was separate from its public ad campaign imploring users: “Tell Mayor de Blasio, Don’t STRAND New York.”

Unlike most companies, Uber has been very public about its lobbying efforts. That is likely because Uber’s image among consumers is generally positive, save for the predictable flare-ups around Uber’s practice of surge pricing. Other companies, like craft goods marketplace Etsy and fantasy football gaming sites DraftKings and FanDuel, have joined the fray, enlisting their users to help fight the companies’ policy battles. And there’s reason to believe that these kinds of efforts work. A report on congressional staffers’ use of social media indicated that offices start to pay attention to issues on Twitter when 10–30 similar comments on the issue have been posted. That’s a fairly easy threshold to reach if a company has an engaged user base.

A 2015 article from the Harvard Business Review poses the question: “Are Uber and Facebook turning users into lobbyists?” That’s a question that may require a rethinking of the current definition of lobbying, but in the meantime government relations departments can take a page out of these companies’ books and engage their companies’ customers in their advocacy efforts.

Unite your team

Not every GR department will have dozens of members — not like the biggest companies in the most regulated industries do. Still, many have at least a few people at different levels. Making sure that all of them stay aligned and information flows freely among them can be a difficult task, but it doesn’t have to be. This alignment begins with transparency about the larger strategic goals of the department and the company.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former head of U.S. and International Armed Forces in Afghanistan and of the Joint Special Operations Command has talked at length about his efforts to create a “shared consciousness” in his organizations. Doing this empowers those closest to the action to act in ways that benefit the organization as a whole without requiring direction from above, an extra step that increases response times.

Taking a distributed network approach rather than sticking to a rigid hierarchy will allow you to be more flexible, responsive, and ultimately successful.

If your GR department is to be effective at the state and local level, where policy moves faster than at the federal level and information is sparser, it would be wise to adopt McChrystal’s methods. Taking a distributed network approach rather than sticking to a rigid hierarchy will allow you to be more flexible, responsive, and ultimately successful. It will also make members of your team happier, as they are given the freedom to operate more independently along with the accompanying responsibility. What’s more, allowing collaboration among team members operating at the state level will allow for earlier identification of cross-state trends.

As I noted at the beginning of this article, the changes suggested above are not small ones. However, if implemented with purpose and enthusiasm, they have the potential to transform not only the internal operations of your government relations department but the success of your company and the public perception of lobbying.