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AI and Public Affairs

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:00:00 GMT

- Why, what, how, and what not to do?

Tim Berners-Lee once said:

“It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.”

And the wielding of which power is what Public Affairs Professionals need to hammer out.

It’s difficult to imagine.

I’m not talking about using AI for general use cases such as summarising a text, or asking ChatGPT questions to which you get a kind-of-okay answer. Useful, but easy. It’s not really bursting into the higher echelons of lobbying virtuosity.

I’m just asking you to imagine: what would you really want to achieve in the area of professional public affairs?

Automated stakeholder-issue mapping for your policy or dossier?
Detecting political patterns between MEP Amendments and Commission Public Consultations?
Stance analysis of MEPs, officials, on specific issues, dossiers, amendments, etc.
Prediction of future legislation
PA evaluation and KPI measurement

These are, at least to me, the more interesting use cases we as Public Affairs Professionals could imagine.

And if we can imagine them, and can describe them in sufficient detail, then it may be possible to solve them. So, where do we start then?

Digitalisation and AI: Why?

Let’s first establish that the business case for digitalisation of public affairs is about improving the Return on Engagement (RoE). The RoE is a function of the Outcome of Engagement divided by the Cost of Engagement (CoE):

We can increase RoE by increasing OoE and / or decreasing CoE.

In normal words:

We can increase the lobbying outcome by increasing the effectiveness of our engagement
We can increase the lobbying outcome by decreasing the cost of our engagement (i.e. increasing our efficiency)

Digitalisation and AI lend themselves to helping both numerator and denominator. Some examples:

Effectiveness (OoE)

Improve member / stakeholder experience
Deliver better narratives, messaging
Increase opportunities to engage / win
Increase governance and compliance
Machine readability of positions, narratives

Efficiency (CoE)

Reduce analysis time
Gain influencing advantage
Increase team collaboration
Improve employee performance
Higher process efficiency

Digitalisation and AI: What?

If we accept the why question, the next question is how? There are several lenses we can look through to imagine and discover Public Affairs use cases that are interesting to solve.

There’s the Policy Process lens: look at the policy process from start (societal problem, public consultation) to the end (Plenary debate, Trilogue) and choose which part you have the most trouble with, or spend the most time on, analysing and understanding.
There’s the Task Automation lens. Look at your (professional!) agenda and see which task recur most often. Then automate those.
There's the Collaboration lens. Take a flip chart and draw your lines of collaboration. With your colleagues, with your clients, your trade associations, etc. Look at the data flows between them (side note: you’ll probably discover a lot of powerpoint decks and excel sheets being pushed around). You’ll find a ton of use cases where digitalisation and AI can take over.
Finally, there’s the Decision-Making lens. Look at the last couple of months and list the large and important decisions you and your (leadership-) team made. Did you make the right calls? Did you have the correct data, intelligence at hand to actually make a good decision? Personally I find this lens the most interesting one, because decisions lead to high profits (or losses) and AI can really improve our decision making through the likes of pattern detection etc.

Digitalisation and AI: How?

Once the What is answered, the How gets much easier to answer. First, selection of the data you want to solve your use case is of course critical. There is so much data about, that it really takes skill to choose and find the data that you need. Second, and only as the last step, choose the technology and type of Artificial Intelligence that is going to use the data to solve your use case.

Digitalisation and AI: what not to do?

Why do things often go wrong? Many organisations make big mistakes: they start with pulling in a lot of data. They then get swamped and lose sight of what they need it for. Building a DATA LAKE is very 2010. Building solutions ON TOP of a web of (open source) data is the way to go.

Other organisations think that buying the latest tech, the shiny software and the promising subscriptions (such as daily monitoring / policy updates / flashy dashboards) is going to cut the mustard for them. But getting fire-hosed a mountain of data to you via daily emails brings more workload and frustration than it alleviates. Do you actually do things with that data? Remember: there’s already enough data. The question is: how to turn it into intelligence.

Digitalisation and AI: Keys to success

Having built a startup in the area of Digitalisation, AI and public affairs, I've learnt some lessons on my way.

First and foremost: stick with the order in which to do things: defining your use case, select good data, and close off by choosing the tech / AI that is fit for purpose.

Whilst your going through these stages, bear in mind:

⇒ Keep a clear business impact and objectives as your north star

⇒ Start small and move fast

⇒ Track progress and report

I hope this helps you with imagining the power of data for Public Affairs.

Tim Werkhoven - founder Lobium.ai

AI-driven Public Affairs

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 12:49:02 GMT

Polpo: AI-driven Public Affairs

The online world is growing, streams of political information have become digitalized, how could the Public Affairs domain benefit? Much has already been said around the use of online and social media in order to enhance public affairs strategies and campaigns. Yet, not much attention has been given towards chances of digitalization for automation of the more labour intensive parts of the Public Affairs workflow. How could smart systems be used to keep track of important political topics and stakeholders, in light of large volumes of online information? And how to deal with the risk of information overload?

To address these questions, we founded the AI-driven political monitoring start-up Polpo. Our goal is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide tailormade automated monitoring services to respond these challenges. For an automated system to deliver accurate monitoring results, it is crucial to understand political context. Being able to recognize different meanings of exactly the same word. For instance regarding “energy”. An MP stating “we went on a working visit to New York last week, I really get energy from that city”, refers of course to a different “energy” than an MP stating “we should really work on new ways to produce energy”. At the core of AI-driven monitoring, therefore should be an algorithm able to understand political context. In doing so, users are given the tools to receive accurate monitoring results and prevent information overload.

We believe this is only the start of what Artificial Intelligence will bring to the Public Affairs domain. More and more, currently largely manual activities such as doing stakeholder analysis or summarizing information will be automated with the use of Artificial Intelligence. Similar as has been the case in other information heavy domains, such as customer care were Artificial Intelligence in the form of advanced text analytics has resulted in the automated analysis of large volumes of textual information. The Public Affairs professional will experience comparable efficiency gains.

In our view, however, automation by smart systems not only increases efficiency but also provides enhanced analytical insights. The possibility to create real-time insights into various political topics and stakeholders creates new more data-driven angles for public affairs strategies. Altogether, AI-driven Public Affairs will increasingly play an important role in supporting Public Affairs professionals to achieve their goals in the near future.

Caspar Pille, co-founder Polpo

About Digital Public Affairs

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 13:33:28 GMT

Public Policy Analytics, Engagement and Influence

In an always-on world, news, stories and opinions proliferate around the globe in milliseconds. Today's audiences are connected as never before, able to search, publish and converse in real time, across time-zones and regions. (Political) organisations and businesses can no longer rely on the tried and tested policy and media relations activities of the past to engage with their audiences.

As public affairs is aims to influence public policy, digital public affairs uses digital means and tactics to reach public affairs goals. It is important to understand it is not just moving public affairs activities to an online environment. Instead, the nature of the internet (and social media) makes digital public affairs means a different ball game.

This website will further explore how digital transformation has changed public policy analytics, engagement and influence.

Perhaps it is better to use Digital Transformation instead of Digitization of Digitalisation when addressing the changes in the Public Affairs practice.

Digital transformation*
digital transformation is defined as changes in ways of working, roles, and business offering caused by adoption of digital technologies in an organization, or in the operation environment of the organization. This refers to changes at several levels, including the following:

Process level: adopting new digital tools and streamlining processes by reducing manual steps;
Organization level: offering new services and discarding obsolete practices and offering existing services in new ways;
Business domain level: changing roles and value chains in ecosystems;
Society level: changing society structures (e.g., type of work, means of influencing decision making).

*P. Parviainen, M. Tihinen, J. Kääriäinen and S. Teppola, “Tackling the digitalization challenge: how to benefit from digitalization in practice,” International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63-77, 2017.

Reaching citizens online

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 13:25:29 GMT

Originally posted in 2014

Many political organizations, politicians and interest groups are anxious to learn how to best reach citizens online. I have researched how youth organizations (based in the United Kingdom) do so, both on their websites and then later on social media. It’s been interesting to gain insight into choices about web presence while keeping in mind how these organizations think about young people as citizens.

I looked at two types of organizations: both those connected to government, and those focused on single issues like the environment or animal rights. Whatever the focus, I found that all organizations subscribed to a similar web strategy. The overarching goal of web content was a wish to create engaged citizens. This was accomplished in two ways: First, web content was used to provide information to young visitors. Second, organizations pursued an “inform then involve” approach to get youth engaged and participating.

However, in a practical sense, both steps of this strategy consisted mainly of information provision. All organizations used their websites for one-way communication designed to educate young people about their mission and current projects. I found only small attempts to be interactive, like through polls or encouragement to email the organization. This was also the case for the “inform them involve” approach: Organizations provided calls to action, and opportunities to sign up for campaigns, but youth were not given the opportunity to express their opinions or ask questions in a virtual space.

Perhaps one would assume this would change in an interactive environment like social media. As organizations adapted to Facebook, they still saw its purpose as a place to provide information. Some did encourage interaction from visitors when asking them to “like” the organization. Facebook pages provided more transparency, though the interactions with citizens were quite rare and superficial. What Facebook seemed to add was access to previously private conversations – when they were facilitated.

Whatever the stated purpose of the youth organization, the ultimate goal was to create engaged citizens. But can this be accomplished without dialogue? The importance of online presence – particularly on social media – will only increase over time. But with evidence of an apparent hesitation to embrace online interactivity, what does this say about willingness to ease control of the message? And if such interaction is realized, what are the consequences for the philosophy – and even the legitimacy – of youth and other political organizations?

About the author: Janelle Ward is Lead UX Researcher at Mendix. Her research and consultancy expertise has focused on user-centered research in digital environments. During her 15 years in academia she researched the political youth user experience and the practices of dating app users. Janelle is also an avid fiction writer. To learn more please visit janelleward.com