The digital gap in public affairs

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of the public affairs sector. The organisations that spend their professional lives trying to change minds – that employ smart, articulate people to influence the most powerful decision-makers in the country – are often remarkably bad at communicating with everyone else.

The lobbying is sophisticated. The parliamentary briefings are thorough. The relationships with Spads and Select Committee clerks are carefully maintained. And then you look at the website, the social channels, the email communications, and something has gone badly wrong.

This isn’t a universal truth. Some advocacy organisations punch well above their weight digitally. But it’s common enough to be worth naming – and common enough that the ones who get it right have a significant and largely uncontested advantage.

Why it happens

Public affairs is, at its core, a relationship business. The work happens in meetings, over coffee, in the margins of party conferences. The people who are good at it are good at reading rooms, building trust, knowing when to push and when to hold back. That skillset translates poorly to digital, which rewards volume, consistency and a willingness to be direct in public – none of which come naturally to people trained in discretion.

There’s also a structural problem. Digital communications in most public affairs organisations is either an afterthought – bolted on to a team that doesn’t really prioritise it – or it’s handled by junior staff who lack the seniority to make strategic decisions about how it should work.

The result is a digital presence that reflects the organisation’s governance structure rather than its communications ambitions. Cautious. Comprehensive. Designed not to offend anyone. Which is to say, not designed to do very much at all.

What good looks like

The public affairs organisations that do digital well tend to share a few characteristics. They treat their website as a living argument, not an archive. They publish opinions, not just updates. They understand that the same message needs to land differently for a Westminster insider and a member of the public who’s just heard about the issue for the first time. And they’ve invested — not necessarily heavily, but deliberately – in building the infrastructure to support that.

That infrastructure is less glamorous than it sounds. A CMS that non-technical staff can actually use. An email list that gets properly maintained. A social strategy that someone owns and executes consistently. Analytics that connect to objectives rather than just measuring traffic.

None of this is complicated. Most of it already exists in affordable tools. What it requires is a decision to take digital seriously as a strategic function, not a support activity.

The opportunity

For organisations that are willing to make that decision, the opportunity is real. Most of your competitors – in the sense of organisations working in the same policy space, sometimes on the same side – are not doing this well. The bar is not high.

The organisations that can make a sophisticated argument in a parliamentary briefing and also communicate it clearly to a general audience, consistently, over time, are the ones that build the kind of public profile that makes the policy work easier. Journalists know who they are. Funders know their name. Potential allies find them rather than the other way around.

That’s not a nice-to-have. In a sector where credibility and visibility are the currency, it’s close to the whole game.

Upwards Digital works with public affairs agencies, advocacy organisations and civil society groups across the UK. Almost all our work comes through referral. If you’d like to talk about your digital strategy, we’re easy to find.