It's time to embrace Policy Comms in the Brussels Bubble

Eight months ago, I set out to build a new type of Comms team at Centre for Future Generations (CFG) . This piece lays out what led me to trying something different and what we have learned so far.

In the past couple of years, a new concept has risen to prominence in policy and advocacy circles: "policy comms". It is one of those terms that has been floating around on my feed for some time but it really had a breakthrough year in 2023 when both Politico and Public Affairs Council released flashy reports with highly-publicized events on the topic.

So what is it? Well, that's a slightly difficult question to answer.

It's very much an emerging concept - it may have had a breakthrough last year, but it remains niche in the grand scheme of things. It is perhaps easier to walk through the key factors that led to its rise*.

The past 10 years has seen at least a partial collapse of the neoliberal consensus. We now expect governments to wade into the big issues. Brussels in particular has been hyperactive when it comes to climate, technology, and industrial policy, legislating at break neck pace not just for the 400m or so EU citizens but also to shape global markets. This shift in operation is partly in reaction to broader shifts in geopolitics, as we gradually tilt from a unipolar world in which US hegemony is taken for granted. At the same time, businesses and entire sectors have become increasingly internationalised - where once the biggest company in America or China might rely on domestic markets, the never ending quest for growth forces them to go beyond their own borders.

All of this has meant that Brussels has become more critical to more people - as you might imagine for the de facto source of global regulation - but the unique challenges of being impactful within the Bubble also forced organisations to rethink how they actually go about doing European affairs work.

First of all, existing communications paradigms don't quite fit. Getting to the handful of policymakers you care about is something like B2B marketing, but the lack of a clear bottom line makes it hard to use the tracking and measurement methods that tends to define that line of work. On the other hand, B2C methods are broadly ineffective because the audience is so constrained and - because of the nature of the European lawmaking process - the only parts of your audience who are really tied to the opinion of the masses (MEPs) don't actually write the laws.

Organisations began to realise they needed a secret third thing - when I was working for Edelman, I used to describe myself as a "B2P specialist" but that never quite stuck.

While that realisation crept in, all those external shifts brought hordes of new lobbyists, activists, academics, union officials and diplomats to Brussels. The competition for the attention of those few policymakers you care about has ratcheted up massively. Lobbying in Brussels is still relatively young** but there has been an explosion of interest since the Juncker Commission and the dawning of the age of the Brussels Effect. The relative impact of your big meeting with [Insert Commissioner Here] is quickly diminished when that same Commissioner is meeting with hundreds of other groups to talk about the exact same issues - especially when some of those groups are global industrial behemoths. Showing up and caring about EU affairs isn't the comparative advantage it used to be.

At the same time, public relations has gone through something of an existential crisis as the media industry writ large has nigh on collapsed. The spin doctor figure that rose to prominence in the 1990s no longer seems relevant as fewer people read, write or edit mainstream news outlets. Why bother going via a third party when your organisation has all the publishing tools and channels at its fingertips? As I wrote about last time, this opportunity to seize the means of publishing production is another change factor that orgs in Brussels are getting to grips with. Public relation is now as much about the ability to produce good videos for social as it is about maintaining relationships with top reporters.

In essence, it's no longer good enough to hire a couple of lawyers in Brussels and call that a European Affairs team.

What is actually needed is something both more strategic and more tactical, something that helps you stand out, but that is laser focused on getting to the right people at the right time.

Enter "policy comms" - a category that is in some way an effort to collapse the divisions between all the narrowly defined comms and marketing jobs already out there.

When I started at Centre for Future Generations (CFG) I proposed a sort of experiment in policy comms. ICFG was - and remains - a young organisation. I joined eight months ago when there were around 15 full time staff, most of whom had joined in the six months before that. We were very much figuring out how things worked and how to structure an organisation for growth and impact within the Brussels bubble.

My proposal was to build an integrated comms and public affairs team. My reasoning was simple - integration does away with potential friction found between the risk-averse, lawyer-led public affairs team and the extroverted, metric-obsessed comms folk. Any and all external relations should be funneled through one team made up of complementary specialists who are focused on influence above all else. In a way, it's such a simple idea that it's surprising to me that it's still considered novel.

As of this month, the inaugural Comms & PA team is in place***. This is an exciting milestone and I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the lessons learned up to this point, partly to help myself take stock and partly because I know many other organisations are policy comms curious - so hopefully the below will be of interest.

Encouraging signs

• Candidates are really excited by the prospect. Having met with dozens of candidates this year and read cover letters of many hundred more, it's striking how much hunger there is out there to work in an integrated team. I have had pushback in the past about this approach because of fears that specialists wouldn't want to work outside their lanes; but I have found quite the opposite. Specialists want to own their space but not be confined by it. They want to learn from other specialists and broaden their horizons. Above all else, they want to be connected to a bigger mission - influence - rather than judged on basic deliverables.
• We already punch above our weight. In the last month alone we have launched out-of-home ad campaign, backed that up with social and other media buys, held our first public event, generated significant media interest in our most recent report, released the org's first videos, all the while putting more day-to-day think tank content than ever before. This has been planned and executed by just three people****. With our Public Affairs Director Ognjenka Manojlović now onboard, the skies the limit!

Things we need to work on

• Internal communications. Just because I have been on a journey to recontextualise my work doesn't mean everybody else has. I earmarked establishing the value of this new integrated team to my colleagues as one of four priorities for the year, but, in truth, I probably haven't spent as much time and effort on this as I should. Happily, the impressive number and range of outputs is beginning to speak for itself, but there's much more to be done to explain the why of what we do.
• External expectations. Every new paradigm suffers from growing pains, and it is often when we come into contact with external partners that this becomes most apparent. Hopefully soon it will not be considered strange for, say, an Events Manager to represent the broader Comms & PA team, but right now it's still something we struggle with.

There is, of course, much more to come. The experiment is in its infancy. The former digital marketer in me is screaming out that we don't have enough data to really draw any conclusions just yet. But I know from speaking to many other advocacy and comms folk in Brussels***** that this experiment is something that other organisations are thinking about, so I wanted to provide some hands-on learnings.

Please watch this space for further updates. Behind the scenes, we are working on even larger projects - but you'll have to come back in six months to hear about those.

Let me know in the comments if your organisation is doing something similar - what have you learned? And, if yours isn't integrating, what exactly is holding you back?

This is part of a monthly series aimed at examining the underlying narratives of European affairs, with a healthy dose of media criticism along the way. Read the previous article here.

These are personal takes and do not represent the position of my employer.

*This write up was partly prompted by an invitation from Talos Network to deliver a workshop on policy comms for their most recent cohort of bright young minds. My thanks to them for the invitation!

**It is generally accepted that formal Brussels lobbying began only in the 1980s and Paul Adamson is regarded as the OG professional lobbyist in town. Adamson was profiled back in 2001 by Politico's predecessor publication in which a young Nick Clegg (MEP at the time) says, "He took the Parliament seriously before anyone else did and people here loved that.” Adamson is still active. You always know if you're at the right afterwork event if you see him quietly schmoozing by the canapes.

***That is, the team as originally envisioned. We are currently in the process of adding a Development officer, somewhat ahead of schedule, but the original plan was to bring in Digital, Events and PA specialists as a first wave.

****Naturally, this was all done in close collaboration with program staff and in-house experts - we would have nothing to promote otherwise! - but the three of us were the only ones fully dedicated to these efforts.

*****Shout outs to Maria Linkova-Nijs , Brett Kobie , Rhys Bucknall-Williams , Jacques Foul , Hannah Broadbent , Garvan Walshe , Gabriella Overödder , Laura Shields and various others who have been sparring partners on this topic.