Despite the challenges of remote work, employees are more committed to their jobs. The leader’s job is to make sure technology supports their commitment, instead of standing in their way.

Workers may not like the reasons why they’ve been working at home in 2020. But even with the stresses of a pandemic and various challenges to work-life balance, they’re feeling good about remote work. According to research from the HR software firm Quantum Workplace, the percentage of employees who described themselves as “highly engaged,” spiked in the early months of the pandemic, in some cases more than 10 percentage points over the same period in 2019.

Similar research from McKinsey & Company found that remote workers “are more engaged, and have a stronger sense of well-being than those in nonremote jobs with little flexibility.” Leaders are taking the hint. According to a survey of CEOs by the accounting firm KPMG in July and August, more remote-friendly offices are in the works: More than two-thirds (68 percent) say they’ll downsize office space, and 76 percent say that plan to build on “use of digital collaboration and communication tools.”

Remote work demands more than thrusting new technologies upon employees.

This isn’t temporary, to hear the CEOs tell it: According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey conducted this summer, solid majorities of CEOs say that remote collaboration (78 percent) and low-density workplaces (61 percent) will be “enduring shifts” that will last beyond the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether employees are working better because they prefer the flexibility of remote work, or are digging in harder because they’re anxious about their job status in the midst of a recession, they’re clearly demonstrating commitment to their employers. But they deserve a boost from leaders to make sure they continue that engagement.

Doing that right can be a matter of providing the right tools. Earlier this month my colleague Ernie Smith shared some examples of productivity software that equips workers to better manage work-at-home life and its attendant distractions. But leaders also need to be training up their workers for what a remote workplace culture looks like—after all, you likely didn’t hire for remote-work tech skills before 2020. So part of a leader’s job now is lowering the barriers to technology in your organization.

It’s easier said than done. As two corporate chairs, Frank-Jürgen Richter and Gunjan Sinha, pointed out recently in Harvard Business Review, many organizations cite a lot of barriers to a remote-savvy workplace: “employee skills, lack of senior management awareness, lack of remote working opportunities, organizational culture, issues of complexity, cost and risk, and inadequate infrastructure.”

To combat that problem, Richter and Sinha recommend building incentives for employees around technology—applying their engagement to performance review scores, for instance. But employers also need to make the investment in both tools and training. As they write, “rather than thrusting new technologies upon employees, organizations should provide them with the right training and support to better use and adopt those tools.”

This isn’t just IT strategy: Richter and Sinha frame the issue as a cultural one, which I think is the right way to look at it. Every tech tool from Zoom on down is essentially a means to facilitate communication and collaboration, which is where your organization’s culture lives. As the McKinsey report points out, remote work doesn’t eliminate culture, but instead puts more pressure on leaders to emphasize it. “Having a foundation of involvement, fairness, respect, and equality can help employees adopt to new ways of working and interacting,” the report explains. “Building such an integrated culture now will only benefit organizations in the future.”

Technology in itself won’t create your culture. But it’s worth making the effort to ensure technology isn’t standing in culture’s way.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Mark Athitakis.

Welcome back to our AuSAE Member Chat Series – Half an Hour of Power. This week we are delighted to have sat down with AuSAE member, Julie Dwyer, Communications, Media & Stakeholder Engagement Manager, Australian Physiotherapy Association. 

In a short 30 minute interview we discussed four key questions with Julie to reflect on the last four months and look forward to the future post this crisis.

What do the next 6 months look like for your association and your members?

As with all organisations across the country, COVID has had a huge impact on the physiotherapy profession, in particular private practitioners. The constantly updated health information, which has been different in each state, has been challenging for our members, as has the second wave of infections in Victoria with its increased level of restrictions.

Member value has always been our top priority, so helping rebuild business support and ensuring our professional development options are accessible to all members, whether that be face to face or online, is very important. Our focus on key advocacy priorities is also going to be a big part of our continuing work – ensuring that the voice of physios and their patients is heard and valued particularly in relation to treatment accessibility, funding and scope of practice.

Areas of concern

The unknowns around COVID continue to cause concern for our members and staff, ie how the pandemic will affect our member renewal and acquisition programs, and what other key priority issues will emerge for us to prosecute fully for our members and their patients in the post-COVID world.

The ability for our professional leaders and wider membership to congregate in person for events such as our annual conference as well as professional advisory council meetings is another longer term concern. While we have all learned to Zoom, FaceTime and Team-meet, it really isn’t the same as being together in a room to discuss, debate and agree on measures to best represent the profession.

Areas of opportunity

We have really learnt to move fast and communicate in new ways with our members over the past several months to support their needs; this is an area that we’ll continue to develop and innovate in. For example, instead of our long planned annual face to face conference and professional development courses this year, our professional development team pivoted quickly to virtual exhibitor show cases, job shows, live lecture series and an increasing number of online courses and webinars to engage and further enhance professional learning within our membership.   

Telehealth is another area of opportunity for physios, many of whom had not taken up this option prior to COVID. In a matter of a few weeks the organisation put together fully detailed telehealth guidelines and significant FAQs to support members transitioning to this platform.   

Celebrated moments in the last four months

Definitely a key achievement has been how agile our communications and advocacy support has been for our members. We worked around the clock during the heady days of the 1^st and 2^nd waves of infection and our teams really stood up to the challenge. Fast, accurate and detailed communications has been a hallmark of our work and our members have appreciated that enormously in these uncertain times.

Proving print’s alive and thriving in business-to-business (B2B) publishing, The Surveyor, published by Consulting Surveyors National, has recorded a stunning victory by winning top honours in the Best Single Issue category in the 2020 Tabbie Awards—an prestigious worldwide competition for publishers of business, trade and custom magazines.

“The entire magazine is clean and easy to read. The style and tone fit the industry and are cohesive throughout. There is no wasted space, yet the issue is not cluttered,” the judging panel wrote in its comments about The Surveyor.

Published for the Association of Consulting Surveyors by Brisbane-based publishing house TMPC, The Surveyor is a cutting-edge business title that profiles the incredibly important work of surveyors in Australia.

“We started this publication to tell the stories behind one of Australia’s oldest professions,” Association of Consulting Surveyors CEO Michelle Blicavs explains.

“Surveyors from Sir Thomas Mitchell and John Oxley explored and founded our original boundaries. But today, surveyors work on major infrastructure including Sydney’s second airport, inland rail and cross-river rail as well as greenfield housing developments.

“We are absolutely thrilled to have been recognised for The Surveyor magazine. It shows that publishing is not dead and remains a vital source of information for the association sector and our members. While many main stream magazines have stopped printing, we are increasing our readership and subscriptions each issue.

“The outstanding success The Surveyor has achieved highlights the importance of the tactile feel and nature of receiving something in the post or a hard copy to read over coffee and share with colleagues and friends. It allows us to highlight the achievements of our members, the professionals, their practices and their projects.

“The Association sector has become even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic providing support and advice to their members. This award recognition is a good news message for our industry.”

Toni Brearley, CEO of AuSAE, the peak body for the association sector in Australia, agrees.

“This award is recognition that associations have an integral role in providing quality information, celebrating and sharing best practice and upholding professional standards throughout their sector,” she says.

TABPI president Paul J. Heney, says B2B journalism continues to thrive in what has been a difficult few years for publishing companies.

“Even before the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot of turbulence in both B2B publishers and publishing associations. The last decade has been a tough one to navigate with the Internet becoming a preferred source for many readers. But each year, the editorial and design work submitted for the Tabbies continues to show the astonishing journalism that continues to happen in this space,” Heney comments.

“Around the world, editors and designers are doing quality work, meaningful to the industries they serve—and we’re proud to help spotlight it.”

Complete results, along with selected comments from the judges and samples of the winning entries, are available at www.tabpi.org. See online copies of The Surveyor at https://www.acsnsw.com.au/news/surveyor-magazine/

Media Contact: Michelle Blicavs – 0425 244 055

With small teams and big aspirations, association executives need to have a grasp on the way that strategy helps to shape their team’s use of technology. That’s a key takeaway from a virtual annual meeting that took place in home offices and living rooms, rather than a convention hall.

For many association pros, technology is a common part of life, but understanding what it actually does to make your association better can feel a bit cloudy. (And not just because most of what we do these days is being managed in the cloud.)

Association executives increasingly need to understand the integration of technology, especially if they are in a small-staff organization where there simply isn’t room for a dedicated technology executive on the team.

The plus side is that many executives across industries understand this need. The Gartner 2019 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey found that, after growth, the second-most-important business priority for respondents was information technology, at 32 percent. In many ways, tech is the glue holding everything together, so it makes sense that leaders need to understand it.

For attendees of ASAE’s 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting & Exposition last week, the concepts of leadership and management were key points of discussion during multiple technology-focused sessions, and “management” was not limited to the CIO or the head of the IT department. Often, the advice targeted the broader executive team, which benefits from having and implementing the right types of technology.

For those who didn’t attend or haven’t had a chance to dive in, here are a few highlights:

Executives need an understanding of how tech and strategy work together. In “Digital Strategy: How to Integrate Strategic and Technology Goals,” Tecker International senior consultants Duane Capuano and Donna Dunn broke down the ways that technology challenges emerge for associations, with the session centered on a case study involving the Society for Vascular Ultrasound. One thing was clear: Executive leaders often face challenges managing a digital strategy. Part of the problem comes down to the role IT plays, a resource that’s often outsourced or handled by a team without senior management experience. This can lead to strategic chaos.

“Every department wants something different,” Dunn said of the challenges executive staff may face, citing examples of LMS platforms, databases, or AMS systems failing to work effectively or integrate across departments. “All of those things come up, and the person in that chair is going, OK, we have some challenges here.” Another problem, she said, is a lack of understanding by the board of a need for IT resources—something that executive directors or CEOs might have to make the case for.

Leaders need to focus on the cultural shift. It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that things are working correctly on a project just because the deliverables are being met and there’s a go-live date. There needs to be a strategic focus on putting the right people on the team to ensure a large-scale technological process will take. This focus on change management was a key idea from “What Could Go Wrong? Navigating Your Technology Transformation Initiatives to Success,” led by speakers Jeremy Lurey of Plus Delta Consulting, LLC, and Lynn Plummer of SingerLewak, LLP.

“These change efforts are complex, they’re multifaceted. It’s not just about programming the code; we can get great technologists to do that,” Lurey said. “It’s about having the right people involved in these projects from the beginning who are process owners and experts, who can deliver the process change we’re talking about.”

Leaders who know their history may be able to make sense of the future. Lisa Rau, executive chairman of Fionta, designed her session, “The Future of Technology for Associations,” with leaders in mind who won’t attend ASAE’s annual Technology Exploration Conference, by offering insights on how to evaluate new technology with the perspective of what came before. Citing examples such as Moore’s law, Rau noted the way that technology suddenly emerges with such sophistication that its benefits are everywhere. “By the time that the technology is ubiquitous like this, it’s like we almost forget what the time was like before,” she said.

In this context, evaluating new technologies and implementing them requires strategic thinking. “By and large, you want to be a fast follower,” Rau said. “You want to be proactive about evaluation of new technologies, but you really want to wait until the technology has achieved a certain market penetration and a certain level of maturity.” Some associations can get away with bleeding-edge technologies, she said, but most can’t.

Whether your association is built around a small staff or a big team, it’s increasingly important to have an understanding of how these many pieces work together. Taken as a whole, this is what many of last week’s technology sessions hinted at.

Because, let’s face it. As complex as this stuff is, there’s only so much handing off that you can do before it becomes a strategic problem at your doorstep.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Ernie Smith. 

With budgets tight, selling association products and services can be a tough. Using personas to identify members and prospects and then leading them to services that really meet their needs can boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

With the pandemic touching every part of the economy, it’s crucial that marketing tactics target the right prospects and make them realize that an association’s products meet their needs. Creating the right personas and using the right lead generation can help associations achieve this, said Aimee Pagano, senior digital marketing advisor at HighRoad Solutions.

“It all starts with the persona,” Pagano said.

The persona can be fictitious—based on what you believe are the qualities of your ideal customer—or based on the characteristics of current members. “You are building a persona, whether that is a fictitious persona, or if it is really categorizing members into member segments,” Pagano said. “After that, every piece of information is going to further round out that persona.”

A good marketing automation system—or data intake process coupled with manual campaigns—can help associations fill out their persona details. The key is to understand what each persona craves and steer them toward learning, events, research, and other products that are a good fit. While associations can align current member data to personas, they can also find nonmember prospects by using small bits of free content.

“Lead generation is gating content behind a form. We call that a lead magnet,” Pagano said. She provided the example of a fictional persona called Mary, who is new to the association. “Mary would then download that [content] and the association would get her contact information and persona identifying information.”

Information like where Mary works and what she does, such as whether she’s a manager or not, could be required for Mary to get the free content and would provide information for your database. “You want that so you can send them into the right channel,” said Pagano.

The information would be used to slot Mary into a persona and provide her with the type of information that people fitting that persona typically want and need to better do their jobs. “If you were promoting a conference, you would map to that,” Pagano said. “There would be a nurture journey, where you send subsequent communications—maybe two or three—and give them more free content. The ultimate ask would be at the end: ‘You can get more great content like this at our conference.’”

Pagano said to always watch the data with campaigns like this. “It comes down to what your data is telling you,” she said. “If you run this campaign and see people are downloading one piece of content and going directly into registering, then you don’t need to add content to the campaign.”

As your industry changes the needs of people involved in it change, it’s important to keep personas and databases updated. “It’s not just set it and forget it,” Paganao said. “Once you categorize, then you’re setting up lists and fields and filters so that you’re creating those journeys based on the persona.”

While associations may have data in their system about prospects or members, just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to use it. Mobile phone numbers would fall into that category. “[Text messaging] gets attention because people open 98 percent of them, compared to email opens, which are 35 percent,” Pagano says. “Texting is not good for getting people to buy, but for providing information, if they’re already at a learning session or event.”

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Rasheeda Childress. 

Even having been at it for a while, you may not know all the tools and hacks that can make virtual work a little simpler. Here are a few ideas to bolster your remote toolkit.

Nearly six months ago, you might have found yourself working remotely for the first time in your professional life.

At the time, everyone was looking for ways to stay productive, and largely scrambling.

With a few months of benefit, a series of new, useful tools have emerged, many of them lesser-known software offerings that can make life easier when working out of the comfort of your living room.

These tools can boost your productivity, make conference calls more bearable, and even improve communication with your team. Check them out below:

Krisp (free for 120 minutes per week, $5 per month for unlimited use; MacOS, Windows, iOS) Phone calls while teleworking can be a challenge if there’s a bunch of household noise in the background. One way to minimize it is to use Krisp, a tool that removes background noise that both comes into your speakers and out of your mic.

Otter.ai (free for individuals up to 600 minutes per month; $9.99 per month for 6,000 minutes; $30 per month, per user, for teams; web-based) Taking more video calls than ever before? Want a way to more easily take notes? This service offers AI-driven transcription, including the ability to automatically transcribe Zoom calls on the fly. For those who need a record of what was said or an alternative to taking notes, this could help make life a little bit easier.

Notion (free for personal use, $4 per month for pro version, $8 per user per month for teams; web-based) Remote work often gets lumped in the category of video, but the fact of the matter is, you often need tools built for organizing information. Notion, which can be used as a writing tool or a team wiki, offers flexibility in what it can be, giving users an opportunity to both organize and collaborate in whatever way they’re comfortable.

Toggl (free basic plan, $10 per user per month; MacOS, Windows, Android, iPhone, Chrome, Firefox) Remote work allows for all kinds of distractions that can interfere with productivity and make it harder to manage time. Toggl, a time-tracking tool, is designed to help users build efficiency. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian recently told CNBC that Toggl helped him become more efficient after he became a father. “You find ways to cut time and to preserve time,” he said.

I Done This ($12.50 per user per month; web-based) This daily productivity tracker tool is dead simple: Every day, the software emails team members working together on a project, asking them to check in and report what they’ve done so that progress can be marked off. It’s project management that’s a bit less hands-on and keeps out of the way for the most part.

Focusmate (three free sessions per week; web-based) Described by The New Yorker as “part social network and part coworking space,” Focusmate is based on the idea that you’re less likely to procrastinate if you’ve committed to show up to work with someone else. The offbeat method here is that the tool sets up what’s essentially a video “work date” between two strangers who want to get something done in the same time slot. It could be just the thing to help remote workers feel some companionship and provide an extra nudge of accountability for how they spend their time.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Ernie Smith. 

Coronavirus has forever changed the meetings industry. As a result, event professionals need new skills to best navigate this new environment. Three to consider developing.

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed the meetings industry. As event professionals were tasked with transitioning in-person conference to virtual ones—sometimes in a matter of days or weeks—they often had to develop new skills they may have never considered to be a job requirement previously. Here are three skills that will benefit meeting professionals as they move forward in this new environment:

VX manager. I’m sure you’re familiar with terms like UX (user experience) and CX (customer experience). As more associations host virtual and hybrid meetings, I believe event professionals will have to give much more thought to what I’m calling “VX,” or virtual experience. Virtual meeting platforms and other tech tools must be selected with the attendee experience in mind. For example, are they easy to use? Do they integrate well with other tools your attendees are already using? Since many of your attendees are relatively new to online events, you don’t want them to feel overwhelmed and intimidated. And, as virtual events become the norm, your attendees will expect you to deliver an exceptional experience that’s on par with your in-person events.

Risk assessor. As an article posted on MeetingsNet discussed, COVID-19 has laid the groundwork for event professionals to get buy-in for developing a comprehensive risk management plan for their meetings. “Your organization and events team must understand its duty of care for participants, how to assess and minimize risk, what to do in emergencies (and how to train for them), and the right way to transfer or mitigate risk through contract language and, for some events, meeting insurance,” wrote Sue Hatch. Event professionals must be knowledgeable about how things like force majeure clauses, attrition, and event cancellation insurance works. After all, having that know-how could help your association remain financially stable should future in-person events need to be postponed or canceled.

Online education expert. Keynotes, panel discussions, and interactive education sessions are staples of in-person association meetings. But how can you best translate these experiences into a virtual space? Event professionals must be willing to be creative and take risks in order to deliver education to their virtual attendees that meets their needs. This may involve training speakers on how to deliver their content effectively in an online environment. In addition, planners will have to give some thought to how they will help create interaction in the virtual space that goes beyond a chat box. After all, your attendees don’t just want to learn; they also want to connect with their colleagues and ask questions or get clarification from speakers.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Samantha Whitehorne. 

Apple’s recent conflicts over the size of the cut it takes from iOS App Store developers potentially reflects problems the App Store could create for digital-only offerings such as virtual events. It’s a situation associations should keep an eye on.

If you’re a person who reads technology news on the internet, you’ve likely heard a whole lot about the iOS App Store lately—in part because one of the players in a high-profile conflict has been very effective at public relations of late.

Epic Games blew up the internet a week and a half ago by adding in-app payments for its extremely popular online game Fortnite that specifically worked around the App Store, preventing Apple from taking an aggressive 30 percent cut from the app. Apple responded by removing Fortnite from the App Store. Epic responded by filing a lawsuit against the company and almost simultaneously posting a parody animation of Apple’s famous “1984” ad. (It’s escalated from there.)

Over the weekend, Apple got into another conflict with a developer that associations are likely to know—the makers of the blogging platform WordPress, which was prevented from posting updates to its app until it added in-app purchases to the tool. Backlash ensued, and on Saturday, Apple backed down.

These situations both point to a potentially dynamic situation that could lead to courtroom battles in the coming months. It could also create headaches for app publishers, including associations. But buried a bit further down in the headlines is a conflict around this whole saga that associations should keep an eye on as they try navigating the digital world amid COVID-19.

THE POTENTIAL FOR VIRTUAL CHARGES

Here’s the gist: Apple is known for taking a 30 percent cut of in-app payments for digital services, but not physical ones. In other words, if you rent a cabin on Airbnb using your iPhone, Apple doesn’t generally take a cut, but if you take part in a class on Airbnb, as that company has been recently offering, Apple wants 30 percent of revenues. (Which, understandably, has made Airbnb unhappy.)

Facebook ran into this very problem around the time the Fortnite battle royale blew up, after it launched a paid online events service for small businesses. The company made a point of waiving the fees it might usually charge, which Android developer Google also agreed to.

But Apple chose not to go along with Facebook’s endeavor—a fact Facebook chose to publicize.

“We asked Apple to reduce its 30 percent App Store tax or allow us to offer Facebook Pay so we could absorb all costs for businesses struggling during COVID-19,” Facebook Vice President Fidji Simo, the head of the Facebook app, wrote in a blog post. “Unfortunately, they dismissed both our requests and SMBs will only be paid 70 percent of their hard-earned revenue.”

A lot of organizations known for specializing in physical events are making a transition to virtual alternatives at this time, and associations may find themselves mining similar territory to Airbnb and Facebook—after all, the structure of both of those offerings is very similar to what one might expect from a virtual event.

And at least one vendor that associations might have actually used in the past could be affected by Apple’s stance: According to a report from The Telegraph, Apple recently asked Eventbrite, the popular online ticketing platform, to plan to start giving a 30 percent cut in transactions for virtual events.

A PROBLEM FOR DEVELOPERS BIG AND SMALL

Now, you might be looking at this situation and wondering why you should have to worry about what these large companies, most with valuations in the billions, are doing on the App Store. After all, who’s going to feel sympathetic for Facebook right now, considering they were in the same congressional hot seat that Apple was just last month?

The truth is that companies of this scale are likely in a position where they can speak out, if not quite in the way Epic did. These companies, having developed successful iOS apps for years, likely have personal relationships with Apple that go beyond an automated approval. And despite that, they’re still running into aggressive responses regarding an aggressive fee.

I worry what smaller developers that don’t have personal relationships with Apple (or Google, which is also feuding with Epic) might run into at this time. And this may include associations, or the vendors associations use. (It wouldn’t be the first time Apple policy created headaches for association-sector developers.)

Because of this rule, in-app purchases for virtual events could lead to lower revenues on iOS compared to the web, or require that iPhone or iPad users pay a premium.

As I noted in my coverage of a recent report from Tagoras, many associations are dipping their toes into the pool of virtual events for the first time right now, and there is potential, given the rush of this situation, to fall into a trap like this around in-app purchases.

This saga is bigger than any one iOS developer, but it could create problems for associations that haven’t been following the headlines.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Ernie Smith. 

Business Events Perth has launched a new funding initiative to encourage organisations to host local business events, helping Western Australians safely meet again.

Business Events Perth chief executive officer Gareth Martin said Western Australia’s business events industry had been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and funding was now available to assist with business event costs.

“It’s safe to meet again in Western Australia and Business Events Perth wants to help the Western Australian industry get back on its feet and support local jobs in these challenging times,” Mr Martin said.

“We’re doing everything we can to kick start the local business events industry, which supports thousands of jobs across a range of local businesses, big and small, and we encourage any organisation that is thinking of holding a business event, conference or meeting to please get in touch with Business Events Perth.”

Funding of up to $30 a delegate is available, with total funding support determined by the event duration and number of delegates attending the event in-person. Eligible events include conferences, exhibitions or tradeshows, workshops and seminars, as well as corporate meetings and incentive group events with a business event program.

The offer is available for a limited time and valid only for new business event bookings for events to be held in Western Australia prior to June 30, 2021.

Tourism and Small Business Minister Paul Papalia encouraged organisations to safely plan their next business event at a local venue or use local suppliers and help support Western Australia’s business events industry.

“Many event suppliers and operators had all of their forward bookings wiped in a matter of days as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it’s really important that we do everything we can to help get business events back up and running again,” the Minister said.

“The State Government has launched a $5.5 billion WA Recovery Plan to help Western Australia emerge from COVID-19, which includes $150 million to support the tourism industry, and we welcome this complementary initiative from Business Events Perth to further assist the sector.”

To enquire about funding availability for your event, contact Business Events Perth’s Business Development Team on 08 9218 2900 or visit our website www.businesseventsperth.com

Media contact: Vivienne Ryan, Director Corporate Communications on 0412 682 129

Business Events Perth is a not-for-profit organisation funded by the State Government through Tourism WA and the City of Perth with over 100 members representing businesses throughout Western Australia.

With a new government looming, even if it’s only a reframing of the existing one, it’s important industry associations are well positioned to engage with key politicians and policy influencers on behalf of their members.

Understanding the policy, political and regulatory context impacting your sector and your members is important, especially in a Covid-19 world where business survival can be influenced by political decisions beyond your control.

But, the business of political decision-making, and the drivers that shape public policy and legislation, can sometimes seem complex.  It’s not always easy for associations and membership bodies to navigate the ‘Wellington Beltway’ and to engage with the right people, at the right time and in the right way.

Just seeking a meeting with the Minister won’t help.  There’s a process to be followed and some rules that should be adhered to.

The rules

Here are some simple rules for effective government relations:

• Know your issue thoroughly.  Be able to articulate your arguments clearly.  Have mitigations ready for counter-arguments.
• Learn the policy- and legislation-making process.  How and where does it start?  How does it progress?  What are the timelines?  Who’s involved?  What are their roles?  Where are the influence points and who are the influencers?
• Understand what’s possible and what’s problematic politically, and in terms of the policy landscape.  Frame your approach in a way that’s most likely to gain traction – don’t ask ACT to increase beneficiary payments, nor the Greens to support National’s roading policies.
• Know the people with whom you need to engage at all levels of the process.  Spend time building relationships.  Wellington runs very much of a who you know basis.
• Always propose, never oppose.  Go to the power-brokers with solutions to your problems; solutions that pass the ‘what is politically pragmatic and practicable’ test.
• Speak truth to power.  Don’t try and ‘spin’ an issue and don’t sloganise.  Be credible and transparent.  This helps to build trust.
• Build a solid and succinct business case that defines the issues and details their impacts, proposes solutions that are evidence-based, quantifies any risks with mitigations, outlines the full cost/benefit argument and explores how the solutions relate to government policy objectives.
• Use the media judiciously to help generate awareness of the issue and the solutions you are proposing.  But never to attack government.
• Build coalitions and support for your cause or argument.  Involve your members where possible; their real-life stories will be powerful. And engage key sector stakeholders.  Motivate them to support you and mobilise them into action on your behalf.
• Don’t forget today’s Opposition Parties.  They could be tomorrow’s government and you may need their support as well.  

Finally, be prepared for things to take time (unless it’s a gun buy-back scheme you are after).

The most recent lobby we undertook for a client took this government’s full three year term to generate the desired result.

Written by Daniel Paul, Director, The PR Company Wellington