There’s no one size fits all to public affairs engagement. Depending on the size of the organisation and the nature of the engagement, you could be maintaining relationships, mitigating billions of dollars worth of risk or realising significant opportunities. Because of this, generally speaking, before any public affairs engagement, hours of research must be put into preparing information to make informed decisions about key stakeholders, messages and actions. New tools such as GovConnex help public affairs professionals more efficiently identify key stakeholders and messages, helping you focus on strategy and engagement.
Current Approaches
If you’ve worked in public affairs, chances are you’ve spent a good deal of time sifting through information from across social media, newsletters, government websites and sourcing press releases. This is all done so you can get a clear picture of the issue you’re working through including who is relevant and what is being said. The approach can take hundreds of hours, and often because of the sheer volume of information out there distributed across hundreds of websites – you’re not able to cover off on all bases.
Using Data to Inform Direction and Decision Making
With modern tools designed for public affairs teams – such as GovConnex – the research tool for public affairs teams – you can easily sift through information from hundreds of relevant sources and find relevant stakeholders, messages and positions with ease. Data from insights related to any search can help you identify within minutes who is most vocal on the issue you’re working on, what their key messages are and identify clear positions.
Case Study – Electric Vehicles
Consider you’re preparing for a campaign to engage with Federal and state governments on electric vehicles. How do you identify who to engage with and how to talk to them about the issue in a way that is relevant to them? The traditional approach would be to determine the relevant ministers, shadow ministers and parliamentary secretaries, then conduct further research by looking at recent news, press releases, hansard speeches, social media and government websites to get a complete picture of where the issue sits.With a tool like GovConnex, you can simply search for electric vehicles and bring up documents and insights from representatives.
Straight away we can identify the key stakeholders relevant in the discussion, and begin identifying key messages. With modern workflow tools for public affairs professionals built straight into the platform, you can just export that information, including relevant documents to include in meeting requests, briefing notes and messaging documents.
A more streamlined research process enabled by new political research platforms like GovConnex, enables public affairs teams to drive significant efficiencies and focus on developing strategy and engaging with key stakeholders.
