It’s the role that can often slip down the list of priorities but one of the most important roles that public affairs plays is to keep people informed. Not doing this will risk relationships and influence.
Too often the politics can get in the way. The emphasis of the job becomes focused on meetings and scouring what is going on in Parliament and in the media.
Keeping people informed may sound like the less interesting end of the workload but if you keep audiences abreast of information then you risk the relationships you have developed, internally and externally.
At the extreme this behaviour turns into a silo mentality with the expectation being that if anyone wants to know what is going on that they seek you out. Yes, that can make the oracle of all things political but also means that information will not be shared with you. Any good public affairs professional needs that information to thrive otherwise what else is there to say to anyone? How will the messages to deliver to political audiences be formed? This sort of mentality can develop whether you work in-house or for a consultancy.
Political and policy audiences do not just want to hear from an organisation in times of difficulty. They want to know that the relationship is valued. One way to demonstrate this is to provide information to them regularly. This has to be tailored, relevant and conveyed in a way that makes it easy for the audience to consume the content. There is also a balance to be struck between keeping people informed and bombarding them. Timings and frequency will vary between organisations, what they have to say, how fast moving an issue and the timing of an issue as well (in Parliament, a consultation, nothing much going on!).
These audiences do not want a constant nagging but a dialogue and discussion. It should not be a narrative based simply on continued, but periodic, complaints. Instead think of the relationships as needing cultivation. One of the ways in which this can happen is through you conveying information.
This puts you in control of that information flow. Critically though this needs to happen in both directions – from your organisation through to stakeholders and from stakeholders through to your organisation. When information flows in this direction, stakeholders will rightly expect a response and feedback. Again, this is part of relationship building, not an onerous task which detracts from the day job. It is the day job.
The information can be drawn from a number of sources and can focus on, for instance:
- Curating political intelligence – exchanging details of where a policy is, what thoughts are on it, how people are reacting. All can help form a response and an effective approach.
- Filtering the wheat from the chaff – there is too much information out there so getting rid of the irrelevant and getting the key bits to the right people can be hugely valuable.
- Saving people a job – looking across a range of sources, especially those from off the beaten track, means that you can provide information that others may not find or may never be aware of. Spending time on thinking about your range of sources can be a very valuable exercise.
Information is one way to develop and build constructive relationships. Do not see it as an unnecessary distraction.