Why is There So Much Dumb Public Policy and What Can We Do About It?

0:00 You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. In today's episode, we take a look at the question, why is there so much dumb public policy and what can we do about it? 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.

0:43 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 this is a question that really matters. Even with all the recent chaos and cuts, there's still a ton of federal funding and state and local government funding that flow to nonprofits to provide direct services to a variety of constituents that you work with.

1:35 There's government money to address a service need in just about every arena, which is great. But the flip side of that is that more often than not, the rules that are attached to that money. The rules about who can be served, how they can be served, under what circumstances, how money can be spent, all of that. All those rules more often than not get in the way of actually providing a high quality service that is going to actually solve the problem. And it happens so often that we start to think that that's just the way it always is.

2:17 And in fact, it was a conversation I had recently with one of my one-to-one clients who expressed this exact sentiment. She had been dealing with a number of really stupid public policy problems. And one day in exasperation, she just said, public policy is just bad. It never works. And my initial reaction to that was to argue with her. But the fact is that a lot of the time it's true. The problem with operating from that frame that it's always stupid, it's always causes more problems than it solves. Is two things really. One, it presumes things can't be changed.

2:58 And two, it keeps you operating under a set of limitations that are tangibly impairing your ability to deliver the exceptional outcomes that you want to create. So in this episode, I wanna talk about both of those pieces. And take apart why so much public policy is such a mess. And then look at what can we do about it without devoting our entire lives to changing public policy. Because we have other work we have to do. But there really are things that we can do, and you'll not be surprised to learn that a lot of them center on our messaging and engagement strategies. So let's get into it.

3:41 If you like my client, have been disgusted and frustrated a good chunk of the time around the dumb public policy that you have to deal with. And you've been tempted to kind of just roll your eyes and find the work around so that you can get on with your work. Serve the people you serve, and just deal with the BS and accept it as a fact of life. If that's where you've been operating from, I totally understand it. But I wanna invite you to consider that there may be a way to shift some of that. Maybe not all of it, but maybe at least some of the things that are giving you the most trouble, causing you the most headaches.

4:24 And we can start with those. There is absolutely no shortage of examples of poorly crafted public policy that winds up actually getting in the way of the delivery of high quality services to benefit the people it's intended to help. We've all run into this. There's all kinds of examples all across the direct service landscape. If there's government money involved, there are going to be a lot of rules. For some obvious reasons. It's the taxpayer's dollars. The policymakers are trying to make sure they're being good stewards of those dollars and so on and so forth, and that's fine. Nobody has a quarrel with that. There needs to be clarity about who is to be helped, what's the focus of the services, how is that gonna work, how's the money gonna be spent, this, that and the other.

5:11 You gotta have that. I understand that. I don't think anybody in the Nonprofit space would say, no, we shouldn't have any rules. Just give us the money and leave us alone. Although, I understand the temptation to say that too, but you can understand why that probably wouldn't fly. So if we know there've gotta be rules and we accept that as a baseline. Then the question becomes, how can we make sure that the rules make sense in the context of making sure that the people who are supposed to be helped, first of all, are truly helped and that real impact happens. And secondly, that those providing the services, which are very often direct service nonprofits.

5:52 That you are able to do your work and help folks in the way that is the most effective, the most impactful. Without having to jump through a lot of ridiculous hoops or work around artificially created barriers, that slow you down and make it harder for you to deliver the impact that you know you can. There's a couple of core problems that cause these kinds of unhelpful, counterproductive policies to happen again and again. And we have to understand the causes so that we can affect it and change it. One of the most important basic problems is that the decision makers don't understand how stuff works on the ground.

6:37 In addition to that, they also frequently have an investment in the problem being simple. Because if the problem is simple, it's cheap and easy to solve. And they very likely also have multiple biases and unhelpful beliefs about the people being served and what their lives are like, and about what constitutes a quote, legitimate unquote service or a service that is germane to the core problem at hand. Some examples of these kinds of thinking things aren't legitimate or germane would be, childcare in the context of workforce development or tailored nutrition in the context of healthcare A classic example in workforce development is that, yeah, in theory, federal workforce development dollars can be used to pay for childcare, but only as the source of last resort.

7:32 Only if the participant in the program has already explored and exhausted and been denied for every other possible source of money, et cetera, et cetera. They make it really, really hard, and at which point, effectively it's not available. In addition, for that and many other direct services that stem from federal funding. Usually there's a set of rules at the federal level, but then there's also rulemaking authority that occurs at the state and local level as well. So you can wind up with three different layers of bad policy, each looking a little bit different based on what the decision makers involved are thinking about.

8:12 So this can get super messy. But the core problem doesn't change. The core problems are not understanding the work on the ground, having a bunch of biases and unhelpful beliefs about the people who are being served and about what constitutes a relevant or germane or legitimate service. When that happens, you wind up with policy that creates multiple roadblocks to accessing any of the ancillary services and also to benefiting fully from the original core service. The reason it happens is they just really don't get what the work is and how you make your outcomes happen.

8:54 They don't understand what is happening between you and the client as you help them. They don't get what that person needs. They don't get what's going on in their life. There are two main reasons why decision makers don't understand these core pieces. Other than the fact that they have never actually done the work, which the vast majority of them have no experience in direct service Nonprofit work. So that's already a problem. But we can't do anything about that, right? That's not a solvable problem. So we have to help them get it in other ways. Here's where the real problem hits. The reality is that the main reasons they don't understand is that no one has shared that information with them, perhaps at all.

9:40 Or if they have, they've committed a very common mistake, which is to share that information in very dry and factual terms. It might involve a bunch of statistics and data and percentages and say, so you need to understand that 40% of all workforce development program participants have childcare needs that if those aren't met, are going to make them unable to participate successfully in the program. And when you factor in for gender and you look at how many women who are in those programs have a childcare issue, the percentage jumps to something like 70%. And without this additional service, without the childcare assistance, they're not gonna be able to participate successfully in the program.

10:26 Okay. You would think that would be pretty persuasive, right. But there's so much missing from that kind of factual messaging. There's nothing about it that's not true. There's nothing about it that's wrong. It's just incomplete and totally not up to the task of not only informing the decision maker, but causing not only understanding, but engagement and a desire to make something change, to make it better. The other thing is that those kinds of narratives are often aimed at the wrong target because it presumes that more information and facts will fix the problem of the decision maker not getting it.

11:09 But we have to remember that there's a bunch of other reasons why they're not getting it, and the biggest of them is those biases and unhelpful beliefs. Remember that when a belief has been formed, the brain considers it to be fact. So giving someone a different fact is not sufficient to dislodge a belief. Because their reticular activating system will filter it out. So we have to break through that and connect with them other ways so that they can eventually let some additional information in and we can deepen their understanding. So we have to understand why they don't get it. And then we have to connect the reality of how stuff actually works with the emotional center of the decision maker's brain.

11:54 If we're just talking to the rational center, nothing's gonna change. They're not gonna get it. Because they have a filter in place that is not allowing that in. But when we can connect to the emotional center and engage that, then that allows for room to consider other perspectives. So that can include helping them understand actually who really is the constituency for this? Who is receiving these services? What is their life like when they are in the problem? And how does that play out as an emotional experience for them? What are they feeling? What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they smelling and touching? All of the sensory experience of being in that problem needs to come alive for that decision maker so that they really can begin to see the problem from the true perspective of the person who needs the services.

12:47 And not just a generic description of, oh, well these are single mothers with blah, blah, blah problem, or these are people with multiple chronic diseases who need these three things in order to not get too sick and wind up in the hospital all the time, or whatever you're working on. Those are facts, but they don't resonate. They are surface level. They are looking from outside in. And where we want the decision maker is to be on the inside of it. To feel it, to experience it emotionally, what it's like to be in that problem. And to begin to think about from a place of, gee, if I were in the situation, what would I be doing?

13:31 We have to create ways for the decision maker to understand the way in which the current poorly crafted policy is doing several things. One, it is making that person's life harder, not easier. It is moving them further away from solving the problem, not closer. And as long as they remain in the problem, they continue to be a cost. They can't move out of the problem until the services are successful for them. And the reason the services aren't able to be successful for them is because there are roadblocks that have been put in place by the policy.

14:12 They gotta see that from the inside and connect the emotional experience of what that is like, of the frustration of doing everything you can to abide by the rules and then still have obstacle after obstacle thrown in your path. Not by the whims of the world, but by the actual policy itself that was allegedly designed to help them. Helping a decision maker see all that and get that requires some serious visualization. Some painting of a picture, figuratively speaking, of how this all plays out. And to use the same imagery and emotional connection to hit on points of relevance that matter to the decision maker.

14:58 To hit on aligned interests. For example, this is an example I like to use a lot'cause it's super common and comes up in the majority of conversations with decision makers. Which is the financial impact. So one of the things that happens is that decision makers think they're being responsible and rational and being good stewards of the taxpayer's dollar and all those things. This is, it's super important to understand. They think they're making good policy. They did not set out to make crappy policy. They think they did a good job. They're proud of themselves. Like, yeah, look what we did. This is great.

15:39 Good policy. It's working. They don't know. So helping them to see that it's not working the way they intended is very important. At the same time, we as advocates need to be able to put ourselves in the decision maker's position and see the world the way they see it. They think they made good policy. And because they lack depth of knowledge and understanding of the problem being solved and all of that, they're making some decisions based on faulty assumptions and faulty information. But you know, how much do you love being told that you screwed up?

16:21 That this thing you worked on that you thought was pretty good actually is not so good? None of us really loves hearing that, right? So we have to be aware that when we're engaging these decision makers, they're kind of invested in that policy, if they had anything to do with creating it. One of the ways that we can do that is to connect to what their intent was..' Cause there's always an intent. Usually there's several. And depending on who you're dealing with and what part of the political spectrum they're sitting on. Maybe their goal was genuinely to help people get out of the problem because they believe that's important and they really have empathy and they want that to happen.

17:05 They just failed to do that very well. Others are very grudging about helping people at all. And feeling like we shouldn't have to spend government money on this at all, but if we're going to, by God, we're gonna make sure that nobody who's not entitled to this gets a penny. And we're not gonna let anybody game the system and get in there and get these wonderful goodies, without being fully deserving, blah, blah, blah. And anywhere in between. You can have folks who are just very focused on, we know there's a problem to solve. We are dealing with the fact that there are limited resources, and we wanna make sure that we help as many people as possible with the resources we have.

17:46 And this one is the source of more problems than you can imagine. Because here's what they're doing. They think, because they don't understand how this stuff works, they don't understand the depth of complexity of the problem and how you go about solving it and how you help people get out of the problem. They don't really get the details of that. They get the broad strokes. And so from their perspective of the problem being relatively simple, it makes perfect sense, if you have limited dollars, to structure the policy and the rules in such a way that as many people as possible will be touched by those services, by those dollars.

18:29 And that's when you get things like super unhelpful and counterproductive limitations on duration of service. Well, if we have this person stay in this program for six months then that's gonna cost X, Y, Z dollars. But if we say they can only be in it for three months, then we can help twice as many people. And if we cut it down even less than that, maybe if we make it only like eight weeks, then we can help even more people. So let's do that because we don't have enough dollars and we gotta make sure we're helping more people. And that's fine if you don't stop and think about, okay, wait a second, what's the difference in the experience and the quality of services, the level of support, et cetera, et cetera, that are associated with that longer duration of service?

19:17 And they rarely stop to ask the question, but what if it really takes six months to solve the problem? What if you actually can't solve the real problem in three months or in eight weeks? You can slap a bandaid on it, but you can't really solve it. That's an uncomfortable and inconvenient question when you're faced with limited resources and a desire to help as many people as possible. So many bad policies and rules come from that one issue. So when we're talking with a decision maker about fixing that, one of the first things we have to do is acknowledge their good intent.

20:02 Acknowledge that yes, it is challenging when there's limited resources and you have to figure out how are we best going to help as many people as possible? Completely fair question, completely fair objective. Then you begin to pull them into how that plays out. Let's say we're talking about a six month duration of service versus a three month. To be able to walk them through the participant's experience of that and what's getting solved and how their life is changing if they are able to be in it for the full six months, which is how long it takes to really solve the problem. Versus what their experience is like when they only have three months.

20:43 And what gets left out, what falls through the cracks, what never gets resolved, what doesn't get addressed, how many different aspects of the problem go unsolved. And how does that then impair that person's ability to emerge from the service at a place of thriving, or a lot closer to thriving than they were when they started. And to be able to play that out in detail, but pull in the emotional experience of it. When you do that, it also allows you to speak from the participant's perspective in terms of how they're approaching their involvement in this work.

21:23 Because they're an active partner in it. Services aren't something we spray onto people to fix something. Virtually every social service there is requires the participant's involvement, cooperation, engagement, and partnership for it to work well. There's behavioral change involved, there's capacity building. There's all kinds of stuff that happens as part of the delivery of these services. And if you try to rush that, surprise, you don't get as good a result because behavioral change takes time. Learning takes time. Health impacts take time.

22:05 There's a ton of metaphors you can use to help them get that. You can use something that would be relevant in their life, that they would have an actual stake in. Anything that would take the decision maker some time to learn how to do and to change a behavior, So you could say, let's say you go to the doctor and they tell you that you've gotta make radical changes to your diet in order to solve an impending health crisis, or maybe one that's already begun to happen for you. And you're like, okay. I know that I need to do that, but like, that's hard. There's a lot of moving parts.

22:45 I usually eat out. Or I usually get takeout. I usually pull a prefab thing out of the freezer and stick it in the microwave. I don't have time to cook. I don't even know how to cook. How am I gonna do all that? And if there's a program available that will teach you how to do all that. How to plan a super healthy meal that's gonna address your specific dietary needs for your health condition. How to plan those meals, how to shop for them, how to prepare them at home, and how to do that in a way that doesn't take all your time. Then you can go deeper and say, if they told you, we have a program that'll teach you that. You can do it online or you can do it in person and it's like four hours a week total.

23:28 And know it's for two weeks. If you're starting from scratch and you don't know how to cook, how confident do you feel that you're gonna be able to master all those things in a span about eight hours of support? What if you screw up one of the recipes? Then what? And what if you can't find the ingredients? All the things. Is two weeks of support to do a major life change like that. Is that gonna feel doable? How supported are you gonna feel in that? How successful do you think you're gonna be in making those changes? But what if you had that support for a couple hours a week, every week for six months? Where you could ask questions, you could check in, you could come and do some in-person cooking sessions.

24:11 You could work with other people. You could, kind of share the journey with some other folks. How doable does that start to feel? Okay. And why? Why does the short one not feel doable? And why does the longer one feel doable? So I grabbed this one out of a hat. But there's all different kinds of metaphors and parallel experiences that are relatable for the decision maker. Education is another one. You can say, well, what if your kid's school sent a note home. And said, we're doing AP calculus and your kid is a great candidate for it. But we don't have a lot of funding, we don't have enough instructors to cover all the kids who need AP calculus.

24:51 But we wanna make sure you get it, so here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take that semester long AP calculus course and we're gonna compress it into three weeks. And we're gonna rotate kids through so that by the end of the semester, every kid who is eligible for AP calculus will still get their AP calculus, and it'll be great. What are the chances that your kid is gonna have a productive experience trying to learn a semester's worth of AP calculus in three weeks? What's that experience gonna be like for them? How stressed out are they gonna be? How frustrated? How much are they gonna feel like they're just drowning all the time? And how much of it is gonna stick? That's another metaphor to help somebody see why taking a thing that takes a while to work.

25:35 Compressing the timeframe so you can help more people is not only not particularly helpful, but in fact may actually cause harm. So you could make up metaphors for this all day long. And it's always helpful for it to be aligned in some way, connected a little bit on some angle to the thing that you do. But at the very least, it needs to be relatable to the decision maker. Something they can get their head around. A problem they might actually experience. Because if it's something they don't believe they'll ever experience, they'll tune you out. But when you can engage them with a metaphor and bring in that parallel experience, that is analogous to the thing that they have done with the policy to your participants.

26:17 That's how you begin to help them see. So there's many, many ways that we can do this, but the bottom line is that they have to be able to internalize the reality of the impact of their policy decisions. The other thing we need to be able to do is to paint the picture for them about how it could and should be working. You describe how it's working now, what is the experience of the people who are receiving the services. And to some extent, possibly the experience you're having as well. If there are significant barriers that you're having to divert staff time to work around or deal with. If it's having negative impacts on your ability to deliver the service then you can talk about that as well.

27:02 But it's mostly about the participant'cause that's who the program is supposed to benefit. And then we wanna be able to paint the picture about what it would look like if things were working the way they should. And you then connect the difference between those two to a specific piece of policy language or a set of them. You paint the picture of how it works when you're able to deliver your services without being hampered. How that flow happens, how the outcomes are greatly improved, how much more dramatically people's lives are improved. And how much bigger a return on the investment there is because you're actually solving the problem for good and not just slapping bandaids here and there to try to spread thin resources even thinner.

27:50 You help them experience emotionally, viscerally, sensorially, the way things are now. And the way things would be if it were working the way it's supposed to. And then you tie that difference to the problematic policy and say, here's why there's this disconnect. Think about doing it that way, and how much different that decisionmakers ability to hear you would be, and ability to really grasp the impact of the policy. Versus using sort of white paper language, where you're coming in with your policy analysis of, well, you know, this policy is designed this way and these pieces of language are causing this problem and da da da da.

28:37 And believe me, I have written a lot of those kinds of analyses over the years. Lots of them. And there is a place for that. But it's as a follow on. It's after you've done all that engagement. After you've brought the decision maker to understanding that there is a serious flaw in the policy. It's having a serious negative consequence that affects something they care about. And now they're upset and now they wanna fix it. That's when you come in with, okay, so we've done the analysis. Here's where the specific policy elements are problematic.

29:19 Here's what will fix it. Let's talk about how we get that done. But too often we wanna go in with that last part first. And we already know how that tends to turn out. It tends not to result in policy change. So I invite you to think about this. Consider how you could engage your decision makers differently when you run into the inevitable, poorly crafted policy that's causing problems for you and the people you serve. Instead of throwing up your hands in frustration and disgust and saying, these jokers never seem to get it right. And I've told them 57 times that their policy is wrong and they should change the language to blah, blah, blah.

30:02 Try this instead. And leave your, how you fix it, till the end. After they've engaged, after they've bought in. After they've really internalized the reality that the policy isn't working the way it should. And that they care and want to fix it. Give that approach a try and watch your results start to improve. Before you go, I have some news I think you're gonna want to hear. To kick off the new year, i'm gonna be offering a brand new program designed to help you take your advocacy results to the next level. I've designed this program to focus on a handful of the most powerful and effective strategies for engaging your money and policy decision makers in a way that gets you the results you want.

30:50 We cover lots of different strategies and techniques here on the podcast, and I've heard so much wonderful feedback about the value folks are getting from that, which is awesome. But I also hear that it's a lot. And what I hear more and more is just gimme the things I absolutely have to have. Tell me what's gonna be the most effective, the most powerful, and let me focus on that. So that's what I've decided to do with this new program. It's laser focused on a set of core strategies that are incredibly powerful and universally effective. It doesn't matter where you live, it doesn't matter what service niche you're in.

31:31 This is the shortest path to success. I'll be teaching those core strategies and supporting you with lots of coaching and weekly conversations, all designed to equip you to get the results you want. I am limiting this to the first 10 founding members who step up. I'm limiting it because I wanna make sure that you get exactly what you need from the teaching and the coaching. And as a founding member, you'll have the opportunity to direct the focus of the coaching as we go. Think about how many times you've been frustrated with a decision maker not getting it, not getting the true value of your work and its impact.

32:14 This is where we fix that. So come on in. Shoot me a message on either LinkedIn or the podcast website. I'll put those links in the show notes. And let's make a plan to work together in the new year and start getting you those next level results. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.