Three Big Mistakes that can Turn Your Great Policy Win into a Bust

0:00 You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. In today's episode, we share three big mistakes that can turn your great policy win into a bust. So, stay tuned. If you wanna have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I'm Kath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive Nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter.

0:41 It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner and to have them. Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. Hey there folks. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because I know how much work it is to score a big policy win.

1:22 If you're working toward one right now, I am cheering you on. And I'm affirming that you're gonna get that policy win. So the last thing I wanna see happen is for you to make one or more of three common mistakes that can wind up greatly diminishing that win. That's what we're gonna focus on today. And I'm gonna help you make sure that your big wins, stay big wins. Whatever you're working on that's a policy change. Typically legislative policy at whatever level of government. Sometimes administrative policy, also usually in government. Getting that legislation or other policy that you've advocated for, getting that done, getting that to the finish line is a huge win.

2:11 And it's worthy of a ton of celebration. It's a really big deal. And, it's only the beginning of your advocacy work. Because now you need to make sure that policy gets implemented the way you intended. The bottom line is that implementation is a critically important piece. If you want your policy to be implemented as you intended, it will take a lot of advocacy work to make sure that happens. And here's why. First of all, policy is never perfect. Whatever the process was for getting the policy in place.

2:52 Whether you wrote it all yourself and the decision makers adopted it wholesale, in which case congratulations. Or more typically, if there were many hands in the drafting, and lots of compromises along the way. Whichever it was, the truth is there are holes in the policy. Those holes can take a couple of forms. There'll be things you didn't think of, little details that didn't get written down, or things that you thought were obvious and so didn't get spelled out specifically. And if it's been a compromise heavy process, then there are gonna be gaps as a result of the compromises.

3:35 So there's always holes. The second thing is that policy writ large has inherent limitations. You simply can't write policy for every possible eventuality and have it still be workable. If you get too in the weeds and too detailed, it winds up being so cumbersome as to be kind of unworkable and it doesn't leave any room for people on the ground to make it work well. There's always gonna be stuff that you envision happening, but that you can't necessarily write down every last thing. And beyond that, if again, you're in a situation where there were a lot of compromises in the development of the policy.

4:19 It's likely that there are some significant escape hatches for those who don't wish to follow the policy. And those can get built in in ways that are hard to detect sometimes. And that leads me to the third thing, which is that not everyone will be interested in complying with this new and wonderful policy that you helped make happen. There will be people who are being made to do things that they don't wanna do. And they'll resist that. Shocking human behavior. That resistance can take a lot of different forms, but a lot of times, folks just kind of ignore the new policy and continue business as usual and wait for somebody to slap their hand.

5:04 And I'll tell you a little secret. A lot of times that hand slap never comes. Now. In addition, if there are government agencies involved. Let's say you've gotten some legislation passed. Whether it's city council, county board, state legislature, there's some agency that probably is charged with implementing that policy. And the reality is there may be some people in those agencies who are resistant to the policy and don't really wanna follow it. They kinda like things how they are. You can imagine how that would create a whole bunch of implementation problems. If the agency charged with carrying it out is like, eh, maybe not.

5:44 I don't know. I don't know if I wanna do that part. So those are the reasons that focusing on implementation details is so important to ensuring that the fantastic policy you worked so hard to get in place is actually gonna do what you wanted it to do. And make the changes and improve things in the way that you designed it to do. The three biggest mistakes that advocates often make that will really undermine and possibly completely torpedo successful implementation of your great policy are: Number one, assuming that the policy will automatically be implemented as intended.

6:25 It's like, well, we wrote it all in there, now go do it. Our work is done. We can go back to providing services. 'Cause we worked really hard on this thing and now let's just let the people who have been assigned the responsibility in the policy, let'em go do their thing so we can get back to doing our thing. That is a super common mistake. And given what I've just explained about why there are hazards waiting to trip up your policy when it goes to be implemented. You can see how walking away from it once the policy's done and assuming it'll take care of itself would be a huge mistake. The second big mistake is expecting the policy to do more than it's capable of.

7:07 And what I mean by that is, again, going back to how there are very likely some gaps and holes in the policy. There may be some things that, you know, got a little watered down in compromise process or what have you. There's a big difference between the spirit and intent of a policy, versus the letter of the law. When you either initiated this policy change yourself, or you got on board with a larger movement making it happen. You were really clear about what you were envisioning, what the change would be. That's the spirit and the intent of the policy. But then there's the what's actually written down, the letter of the law, as it were.

7:50 And there's often quite a bit of gap between those two. we have to be realistic about realizing that our grand vision is probably not fully represented in the letter of the policy. And so we're gonna have to be attentive to how that's going to play out. If we're not on top of it, we could go along thinking that we got the thing passed, the spirit and intent are gonna happen. And then we get really disappointed when a year later we realize, oh, that's not happening at all. The third mistake, and these are all obviously connected to one another. Is not having a plan and defined roles for how advocates will monitor implementation.

8:38 A corollary mistake to this that's closely related is thinking that implementation monitoring is somebody else's job. This can come up in a number of different ways. If it was a coalition or alliance that helped make a policy change happen, there were a lot of advocacy players involved. And it's not uncommon for members of the coalition or alliance to think, oh, well, such and such organization spearheaded this. So they'll obviously, you know, take care of any monitoring that needs to happen. But even if it was just your organization that worked with a policymaker and got this done all on your own. There still needs to be, just like there was an advocacy plan to get the policy enacted, there now needs to be a plan for monitoring the implementation and addressing enforcement issues if those are built in.

9:29 I probably don't have to explain why that's so important. Because generally speaking, if there's not a plan, things tend not to happen. Those are the mistakes we wanna avoid. So basically, we need to do the opposite. The three major things that advocates need to do once the policy has been enacted. Well, four things because the first thing you do is celebrate like crazy'cause you just did awesome work and that is great. But beyond the celebration, the three big things that advocates need to have on their agenda are: Monitoring for how even really well designed policy plays out on the ground.

10:09 And there's two reasons for this. You wanna make sure that it's working as intended or as closely as possible to that. But this is also an opportunity to make it better. Because we know there are inherent limitations in policy. You can't put everything in there, especially not in the first iteration. And because there are lots of players involved in actually implementing the policy, there are gonna be things that unfold that might have been really difficult to foresee. But once they happen, you can go, oh wow, I never imagined that anybody would interpret that that way. Or, huh, well that's another way to do that, but that's not the best way and we probably ought to go clean that up.

10:58 So as you begin to observe how things are being implemented, you get to identify the stuff that's working great. And the stuff that's not. That's kind of not quite clicking or is just being misinterpreted consistently. All kinds of things can happen that even with well-designed policy wind up being a little funky once things actually start being rolled out. The more you can pay attention to that and take really good notes on that, then you can go back to your policymaker allies who helped you get this thing passed in the first place and say, Hey. You know, here's some stuff that's working great. We did a good job on that.

11:39 But oh, we're noticing some things that aren't being implemented as intended. Let's talk about how we shore that up. And maybe the answer will be through amending the policy. Maybe the answer will be through issuing additional guidance or creating some regulations, what have you. It depends on what the problem is. But if you don't do the monitoring, you won't ever know. And you won't have an organized way to go back and fix the inevitable holes and problems that will occur. Another thing that is really important to monitor for is whether the key players are doing their part fully. And this is where when I referenced government agency people or whoever else is involved.

12:24 And sometimes there are a lot of different types of players who each have a role in the implementation. They've all gotta be doing their job and doing it sincerely to make the policy actually come to life. You gotta have eyes on that. And it's a judgment call that you will make within your own context as to whether for any key players who may not be fully doing their part, what's the reason for that? Sometimes it's that they really don't understand what they're supposed to be doing, because maybe part of the policy wasn't clear or didn't get communicated clearly to them. Sometimes it's because they're genuinely resistant and are sandbagging. Sometimes it's something else.

13:05 So you may have to have some conversations with those folks before you go back to your policy makers to talk about how to fix it. The other thing that can happen is there may be something in their way that nobody thought of while the policy was being crafted. But when they go to implement it, they go, oh, wait a second. There's this huge boulder in our path, and we're having to figure out how to get around that because it's not addressed in the policy and we're not sure. We've got conflicting orders, we've got conflicting priorities, whatever it is. Again, those are things that can be cleaned up. But you've gotta be paying attention and talking to people about if stuff isn't getting implemented, what's going on, what's in the way.

13:48 And then going back and working with your policymaker allies to improve it. And then the third thing, which is never fun, but may be necessary. And that is to push for enforcement where there is genuine non-compliance. Whether it's determined non-compliance, like I don't want it, and you can't make me. Or whether it's kind of passive non-compliance of, oh yeah, here's another directive from so and so, such and such source. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We always ignore all their stuff. We'll just ignore this and see if anything happens. So whether it's forceful or passive, non-compliance means your policy isn't getting implemented at all in that little corner of the world.

14:36 And that has to be addressed. Hopefully your policy built in some remedies for that. But if it didn't, then that means you've now identified a hole in your policy, which is that there's no enforcement for compliance. And you may have to use more carrots than sticks if that's the case, until you can fix the policy. This is really a situation in which you're a little bit the traffic cop and you're flagging violations. Because the other thing that is always operating here, and that I haven't said up to this point, but I wanna flag it. Is that for the most part, once policymakers have enacted a policy, they're kind of done with it. They're on to the next thing.

15:16 If it's their baby and they really fought for it and really wanted to make it happen, then maybe they're also paying attention to implementation. But a lot of times, policy makers are not that focused on implementation, and it's up to the advocates to bring implementation issues to their attention so that you can work together to find the solutions. A couple other things to be aware of around monitoring is that if it happened that in the crafting of the policy, no monitoring role was assigned anywhere. Sometimes it's assigned to a government agency or a quasi government agency.

15:57 If there's no monitoring role assigned to one of those, then it absolutely falls to the advocates to monitor how well things are being implemented. And very importantly, it's not just about implementing the technical details. It's about whether the desired impact is happening. Are they being implemented in a way that's producing the results that caused you to wanna have the policy in the first place? Now, if a government or quasi-government entity was assigned a monitoring role, don't assume they will do that monitoring well or thoroughly. They might, but advocates really need to monitor the people doing the monitoring.

16:42 Again, to make sure that things are being implemented as intended. And very importantly, that the policy is resulting in the impact it was designed to create. And if it's not, then it's time to talk to those officially assigned monitors. And if they're not responsive, then it may be time to escalate that back to the policymakers to address that further. I would kind of expect that about now you're thinking, that sounds like a lot of work. And we barely had enough bandwidth to get the thing passed. Now you want me to monitor it too? Ugh, this sounds horrible. This is where if you had a coalition or an alliance that did the work to get the policy passed, then the monitoring work should also be shared.

17:29 And that's where we go back to how important it's to have a plan with assigned roles. You're gonna follow up on this, you're gonna follow up on that. We're gonna meet once a month or once every two months or whatever it is. And we're just gonna keep checking in with one another. I've done this at both the state level and at the national level. And at one point when I was working at the national level, I was part of the leadership for several different coalitions, monitoring several different pieces of federal legislation. And we were able to do that with not a huge number of core members of our coalitions. The coalitions had different compositions. So it's like Coalition A, coalition B, coalition C, and some overlap, but not a lot. Because like one thing was in workforce development and one thing was in healthcare, and one thing was in education.

18:14 There were different things that we had to pay attention to and different sets of expertise that needed to be at the table to inform the monitoring. So this is absolutely doable, but it goes a lot easier, and actually better quality monitoring, when you have multiple perspectives and multiple sets of expertise contributing to the project. And even if you put that policy in place all on your own, it's probably a good idea to recruit some other individuals or organizations to help you with the monitoring. The other thing is that although I highlighted the possibility that there could be people in those government agencies who are resistant.

18:59 Chances are very good there are also a number of people in those agencies who really love your policy and want to see it implemented. They agree with your intended result and they really wanna see that happen. So they're your allies and they can help you a ton. They can give you all kinds of inside information about what's really going on. They can help point you to what levers to pull to help make things work better. So you absolutely wanna build those relationships if you don't already have them. And if you do have'em, talk with those folks regularly so that they know you're on the case and that you can help each other. It's more brains and more hands helping with the project.

19:41 Share the load, share the work, and take advantage of multiple angles of expertise and perspective. I can tell you from personal experience and from clients all over the country that I've worked with, who have been focused and intentional about the monitoring piece that follows a big policy win. That when you do this and you're consistent with it, the results you get out of that policy are so much bigger, so much more impactful, than if you finish the advocacy phase where you got the policy passed and then you walk away hoping that someone else will make sure that it gets done right. If you think about the investment you've already made of your time and your energy and probably some money into getting your policy enacted, it is a hundred percent worth continuing that effort into the monitoring phase to make sure that you get the full benefit of all that original work.

20:40 And that the people the policy was intended to benefit get the full benefit. 'Cause that's really what it's all about. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.