Tag: Government Relations

How to change behavior in advocacy campaigns

Strategy

This post is a summary of work and ideas developed for a foundation in Southeastern Pennsylvania while I was employed at Message Agency in 2019. Part of my role was to conduct secondary research on models of behavior change to use in our strategy for engaging the local community.

How does behavior change happen?

One of the most considered questions of philosophy is that of free will. Do you choose how you move through your day? Or is it all predetermined? Or, are others determining things for you? With the amount of external influence on you through media, the internet, and your peers there are endless stimuli able to nudge you in a new direction.

“I’m convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does. This isn’t just a metaphor, in other words. I’m talking about a very literal analogy. . . . Ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is.”

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

Research shows that the information that sticks with us most does not simply hang in the air like a virus. Instead, it is very deliberately passed to us by those we interact with on a regular basis and those we hold in high esteem. In this post I’ll attempt to provide an overview of some evidence-based models related to behavior change and how they can be operationalized in campaigns.

Dr. Damon Centola’s Models for Behavior Change

In his latest book, How Behavior Spreads, Dr. Centola uses a combination of research and narrative to help the reader understand the means by which information leads to behavior change. To illustrate the basic premise of his research Dr. Centola uses the example of Korea in the early 1960s when they were attempting to increase adoption of contraceptives among rural populations. Instead of buying billboards and radio ads, the Korean campaign provided a menu of contraceptive options to each village in the nation. At the local level, Koreans were able to select the methods that they were most comfortable using – not the one pushed on them by a spokesperson. Peer-to-peer discussion of the options led to further adoption by those with overlapping social ties. Eventually Korea surpassed all of its policy goals for the initiative, and the theory of social influence was born. Instead of a network effect of loose ties leading to a “viral diffusion,” it was instead spatial interactions that emerged as the most successful pathways.

While the viral model suggests that radiating networks
of weak ties would lead to successful dissemination, it was instead
overlapping patterns of spatial interaction that were the key to widespread adoption.

Dr. Damon Centola, How Behavior Spreads

Another line of Dr. Centola’s research involves “tipping points” for adoption of behaviors and ideas. Using online chatrooms, Dr. Centola and his team were able to measure how much of a group needed to agree with a non-mainstream idea before more and more of the participants flipped to embrace it. They found that once about 25% of a group have adopted the more extreme view, adoption accelerates among the rest of the group until it reaches a saturation point.

What does this mean for your campaign to change behaviors? It helps to give you a more realistic goal. Imagine a County in your state and how the residents might feel about a certain policy. You might estimate that 20% are strongly in favor, 20% are strongly against, and the other 60% undecided. If you are leading a campaign to get the policy passed in the legislature, you need to increase your number of residents in favor. But by how much? In order to get and keep the momentum, you can target 25% of the undecided population. Once your polling indicates you’ve moved roughly that many residents towards your side, you can be more confident that the tide is truly turning.

How can I leverage spatial patterns in my campaign?

In the case of our campaign in Southeastern Pennsylvania, we relied on what we called an “opportunity map” to help guide our decisions. We used the free Google MyMaps software to build our initial map. Many jurisdictions with Open Data platforms offer file types that are easy to upload directly, which saves time. If you are building your data set manually, it is very easy to add new locations, but cant take quite a bit of time to add everything you’d like to track. This map should include several layers depending on your goals – some we included were non-profit organizations, faith-based organizations, public housing developments, and schools, libraries, and recreation centers.

Once your map is built, you should immediately begin to notice patterns in where the points fall in relation to one another. Remember, space is the key here, so if you see certain points “out on an island”, do some research or engage your community in that area to find out what you might be missing. The goal is to find the clusters of organizations and individuals who might or might not talk to one another because of proximity, and get them to be on the same page and engaged in your work. For example, the librarian and the fire chief might be next door to one another, but not have much need to speak on a regular basis. However, if the county receives a grant that could fund joint public safety work by both groups, you’d find it very valuable that they could be easily brought together in a physical location.

The map can also be used as both a communication and organizing tool. You can share access easily among your peer group, and encourage them to add points to the map they think would be relevant to your goals. It can also be used in organizing to divide responsibility for certain areas of a larger county or city. For example, the Census (in addition to tracts at the micro level) often uses larger divisions to break down counties in the US. These can be valuable in identifying demographic trends, deputizing others to lead outreach efforts, and help limit travel over longer distances for meetings or other activity.

Conclusion

Behavior change doesn’t just happen by having a celebrity record a PSA. The most effective models for change involve social influence, and are driven by overlapping spatial relationships. The “tipping point” means you can more effectively target ambivalent people in your geography. You can use GIS and mapping tools to create a clear picture of your target geography and the assets available to you. Use the map to guide your strategic interventions and gain adoption of your campaign messages.

Strategies for Engaging Governments

Public Policy, Strategy

This post was inspired by Mr. Timothy Richards, who I had the pleasure of studying under while attending the University of Pennsylvania. His graduate-level course, “Strategic Engagement with Governments,” was among my favorite I’ve taken at any academic level.

Government is good

I don’t think Gordon Gecko would ever say it, but even he would have to admit that government and business are inseparable. There are myriad ways that the two intersect, interact, and interject in one another’s day-t0-day operations. Sometimes the relationships are pleasant partnerships meant to solve problems for people in their jurisdictions. Sometimes they are bitter battles between powerful groups who want very different – even opposite – things.

Given that government is a requirement in modern society, one would assume that businesses are investing heavily in the areas where they come in direct contact with these important stakeholders. Reader, they do not. For several years, McKinsey conducted an annual survey among executives to measure how important government involvement was to their business and industry and how well those executives feel their firms perform. What they found was fairly shocking given the conventional wisdom around this topic.

The value of engaging government

In 2013, McKinsey estimated that the value at stake from government intervention for most industries was 30% of earnings, except in banking which could be as much as 50%. This is an enormous figure – in some cases adding up to tens of millions of dollars per employee working in the government relations function. And yet fewer than 30% of executives reported that they had the government relations talent and organizational setup to succeed. Only 20% felt they were successful in influencing government policy that was critical to their business.

In the 2010 study, executives were asked to estimate how government activity in their industry would change over the next few years. Overwhelmingly they reported it would increase or at least stay the same (86%), and 52% felt government would be the stakeholder with the greatest economic impact on the firm. The story was similar as it relates to operating income – executives were mostly in agreement that there would be a change (72%), but split on the whether that would be an increase or decrease. Selected data is shown in the charts below.

Via McKinsey
Via McKinsey

While this study is from 2010, the many experienced, senior government relations officials we heard from in class confirmed it is still the case a decade later. In short, there is a gulf between where business knows it must be and where it currently sits as it relates to government relations work.

Improving government relations

Despite the data being a few years old, it would seem one doesn’t need to say much to convince leadership of the impact of government intervention. But how does one go about improving the function so that this value is not lost? Or ideally, leveraged into growth opportunity for your firm?

Start by understanding the current and likely future states of government intervention

You must map the current ways in which government impacts your business. This can be across several dimensions: government as partner, as customer, as regulator, or as policy maker. Once you understand the relationships, you can begin to evaluate the various touch points using your internal goals, metrics, and strategies.

For example, in class we learned about an American manufacturing firm that, after researching emerging tax credits for renewable energy technologies, made a strategic shift in their business to build out their green technology vertical. This would have been a missed opportunity without deliberate, proactive work by the government relations team.

Prioritize the issues that can be pursued

Using your map, rank your issues that you’ve uncovered by their relative impact on your business (high, medium, low) and the relative effort and/or cost required to influence them (high, medium, low). You can use a simple two-by-two matrix to draw this out visually. Are there obvious winners (High Impact, Low Cost) or losers (High Cost, Low Impact)? Note them as such and move to the “stickier” issues (High Impact, High Cost; etc). Which of these align most strongly with your goals internally? Asking these questions is essential, as you won’t be able to pursue all of the issues at the same time.

Create campaigns around each issue to make a dent

Once you have your top issues identified, you must think strategically about how to influence the relevant government officials and departments. Your government relations and external affairs staff should be able to organize the resources, tasks, and target stakeholders to support your goals. Be sure to build some flexibility into your strategy – tactics will be your saving grace if you experience any friction.

In another example, we learned about a potential production facility that would be built in a Southeast Asian nation by an American multinational firm. The firm planned to get a US Senator from their home state to make a personal call to the leader of the Southeast Asian nation, but when the Senator declined, they instead produced a joint letter signed by all of the Congresspeople from their state. This is an example of achieving the same goal, without following the strategy verbatim.

Conclusion

Government has a constant and likely growing role in every sector of the economy. In Macroeconomics 101, you are taught that government is the biggest consumer and usually the biggest producer in every country. It makes sense that 30% of earnings would be at stake, and likely much, much more indirectly as well. By creating strong processes internally to research, plan, and implement influence campaigns, companies can flip the script and proactively engage government in ways that benefit both parties.