The Lobbying for Good Movement

(Illustration by Mike McQuade) 

Nonprofit leaders perceive lobbying, as it is currently practiced and understood, as corrupt conduct that exerts undue influence to the detriment of fair, impartial, and effective policymaking. The popular imagination associates lobbying with dodgy deals in smoke-filled back rooms.

But lobbying can actually be an antidote to such secret bargaining. A right that democracies guarantee, lobbying is about providing ideas and sharing concerns with policy makers to make them—and the whole policy process—more responsive. It enables society to tackle the root causes of the major challenges facing us, not their symptoms. In fact, lobbying is one of the most effective ways to enact political, economic, and social change.

To be sure, lobbying today is dominated by major corporations and special interests. It blocks progress on numerous critical issues, ranging from climate action to AI regulation. Only a handful of nonprofits lobby, and only a few of them know how to do it effectively. In the United States, only 31 percent of nonprofits report engaging in advocacy or lobbying over the past five years, which is less than half of the percentage of nonprofits that reported ever lobbying in 2000 (74 percent).¹ In Europe, only a tiny fraction of meetings of public officials take place with nonprofits.² By failing to speak up for the most disadvantaged, underrepresented people and interests they serve, nonprofits are forfeiting their constitutionally protected right to lobby. This default magnifies the impact of special interests that already dominate the policy process. It also reinforces political inequalities by further delegitimizing lobbying in the eyes of the public, and ultimately undermines trust in the political process.

It does not have to be this way.

Today a diverse group of actors—from nonprofits, social enterprises, and civic tech initiatives to a handful of sympathetic philanthropies, as well as some companies and investors across the world—is challenging this prejudice against lobbying. The growing lobbying-for-good movement is crafting a new public understanding of what lobbying really is—the fastest and most powerful way to scale innovative ideas or programs for social good. In a vibrant democracy, lobbying is the way to make the day-to-day practice of governments more directly responsive to popular aspirations.

Demystify

Nonprofits and other social change practitioners, such as social entrepreneurs and philanthropies, have their reasons for staying away from lobbying. How could an activity perceived to be as selfish and corrupt as lobbying ever help to advance the mission of a noble nonprofit? Tellingly, even when they lobby, nonprofits and philanthropies avoid using the word, preferring the less loaded “advocacy.”

Instead, the social sector should reclaim lobbying as a legitimate form of political innovation, defined by Johanna Mair, Josefa Kindt, and Sébastien Mena as an “ongoing collective effort based on shared commitment to democratic principles and to mobilize a critical mass of people and ideas to effect political change.”³ By embracing lobbying for good, the social sector can transform how we practice democracy and promote social change.

A variety of organizations are already attempting to demystify lobbying and make it more commonplace and benign. The Open Government Partnership (OGP)—a unique, multistakeholder collaboration among governments, legislative bodies, civil society, and the private sector advocating for open government worldwide—provides a fitting example. Since its creation in 2011, OGP has championed lobbying as a “legitimate activity, allowing different interest groups to demonstrate their views to public officials.” In the view of its 75 member countries, “in a strong democracy, this practice can strengthen the quality of policymaking and public debate and supports free speech.”⁴ To demystify the practice, OGP is promoting the adoption of regulations to enhance its transparency and accessibility.

Other nonprofits across the world are pursuing similar efforts. For example, the Coalition on Human Needs is an alliance of national organizations in the United States working together to promote public policies that address the needs of low-income and other vulnerable populations. To do so, it is encouraging US citizens to take action on some of the most pressing anti-poverty policies by helping them to communicate more persuasively—with each other, with the media, and with policy makers. Similarly, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL)—a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on climate change—encourages volunteers to build relationships with elected officials through meetings with congressional leaders, to publish letters and op-eds, and to organize through hundreds of local chapters across the United States and internationally.

This new understanding of lobbying is not a prerogative of the social sector but is joined—and partly shared—by the private sector. Although many companies may have conceived lobbying as a privileged instrument to advance their narrow self-interests, others are heeding public expectations that they lobby for positive social change.

“Customers will increasingly hold business accountable for their environmental impact,” says Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp. “CEOs need to reduce climate pollution within their own company operations, and they also need to unleash the most powerful tool they have to fight climate change: their political influence.”

Companies are listening to such demands. “We want to—and do—use our voice to advocate for the policies that we think the world needs,” says Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa.

These companies and organizations exemplify a worldwide trend reclaiming lobbying as a legitimate activity open to everyone that enables different interest groups to communicate their views to public officials. In their view, lobbying is a fundamental democratic practice. First, it can strengthen the quality of policymaking and public debate by providing a wealth of information to policy makers to shape legislation. Second, lobbying also sets the policy agenda by drawing policy makers’ attention to problems both old and new and sharing possible solutions. Third, lobbying also plays a democratic-control function by holding decision makers accountable and nudging officials to do their job.

Moreover, lobbying helps everyone—including nonprofits and citizens themselves—to feel and become part of the policy process by maintaining an additional channel of contact between elected representatives and the public. As famously noted by Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, participation has an intrinsic value for citizens who learn by being exposed to—and being part of—collective decision-making and refresh their sense of self-efficacy and autonomy.⁵

Democratize

To free lobbying of its many misconceptions, we must make it accessible to everyone. For many people and organizations, especially those unfamiliar with how government officials craft policy in capitals, from Washington, DC, to Brussels and beyond, lobbying seems to be an activity that is out of reach. But a new wave of civic tech outfits has been trying to enable ordinary citizens to lobby their representatives.

Take Cicero, which calls itself “the most accurate database of elected officials and legislative districts in the world”; VoteSpotter, which tracks votes by US federal elected officials and state officials in select states; and Parliament Watch (Abgeordnetenwatch), which helps enable ordinary German citizens to lobby their representatives. These initiatives share the goal of reconnecting and facilitating citizens’ access to their elected representatives by providing crucial information, such as their voting track record. Other efforts are seeking to improve citizen access to government via apps that facilitate the submission of Freedom of Information Act requests. Examples include UK-based WhatDoTheyKnow and AsktheEU in the European Union.

Many different approaches to democratizing lobbying have arisen. CrowdLobby, for example, uses a crowdfunding model that, according to its motto, gives “everyday Americans access to one of the most effective political tools in history: lobbying.” NOSSAS, a Brazilian nonprofit initiative that was named Meu Rio until recently, offers strategic and advocacy advice to the citizens of Rio de Janeiro to organize lobbying projects directed at the local government. The Good Lobby, a nonprofit that I founded in 2015 in Brussels and that has offices in Madrid, Milan, and Paris, relies on pro bono skill-sharing to match European nonprofits who need advocacy help with experts, such as academics, lawyers, and corporate lobbyists.

Such outfits act as good-lobbying shops that advance diffuse or minorities’ interests and represent the voices of those who would not typically be able to participate in the policy process. They push initiatives that would otherwise not scale, and provide the skills and strategies needed to reach public authorities. They typically generate a more substantive effort or commitment than a standard online campaigning platform—be it Change.org, Avaaz, or GetUp. Rather than initiating or supporting a cause via an online signature, the new good-lobbying shops give nonprofits and citizens the chance to lead a campaign or contribute to it by sharing their skills.

These new organizations ultimately represent a new form of lobbying that doesn’t hire lobbyists or mobilize the usual lobbying strategies but rather empowers nonprofits and citizens to have a say in the policy process. For example, campaigning organizations such as WeMove Europe have successfully challenged Monsanto’s most successful and controversial herbicide, glyphosate, across Europe through an unconventional combination of transnational petitions and flash mobs. The organization helps individual EU citizens to reach out to Members of the European Parliament via easy-to-use emailing interfaces. Likewise, this new approach to lobbying has enabled other nonprofits, such as Eurogroup for Animals—a lobbying association made of more than 60 leading animal-rights organizations in Europe—to shape the legislative agenda, by pushing the European Union to prohibit cages for farm animals and ban fur farming.

Level Up

Even once it is demystified and democratized, lobbying faces further challenges. Because of public prejudice against it, governments are attempting to reduce the outsize influence of the few by restricting access to policy makers. Their efforts include demanding registration requirements and reporting obligations and placing limits on both for nonprofits’ ability to lobby, including spending caps and other restrictive rules.

Leveling up lobbying by facilitating nonprofit and citizens’ access to it may prove a better strategy for addressing political inequality than the current approach limited to restricted lobbying.

Though perhaps well intentioned, this restrictive approach is already producing some major, unintended consequences. First, curbs to lobbying have expanded, not curtailed, corporate influence at the expense of other voices. Lobbying rules are increasingly construed as violating freedom of speech or the right to petition the government, because they inherently curtail political engagement and sometimes unduly criminalize ordinary day-to-day practices of influencing. The free-speech argument grounded the majority decision in the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which invalidated caps on political spending donations made for the purpose of so-called independent expenditures—spending to support or defeat a candidate that is made independently of candidates or political parties. By making corporate political donations virtually unlimited, this ruling has granted an unparalleled level of corporate influence on the US government and likely worsened, not improved, nonprofits’ access to policy makers.

Lobbying laws also lag the rapidly evolving practices of influence. Limits and other restrictions on access to policy makers ultimately incentivize and reward elite influence practices, such as astroturfing—fake grassroots operations funded by corporations and the wealthy.⁶ Policy makers end up exposed to fewer, not more, interests while devising new policies.

All in all, this restrictive trend in lobbying is defeating the efforts of governments around the world to increase participation and access to the political process. By further dissuading nonprofits and social change actors from entering the political arena, it only distorts the lobbying that does occur. In response, we should both question and reverse the dominant cultural and regulatory stance toward lobbying.

If the political system favors the privileged, then leveling up lobbying by facilitating nonprofit and citizens’ access to it may prove a better strategy for addressing political inequality than the current approach limited to restricting lobbying. In fact, this thinking has motivated some reforms—for which a number of leading organizations and initiatives have advocated—that can mitigate and potentially overcome the stigma of lobbying. A growing number of governments increasingly encourage all stakeholders to present their views on policymaking. In the United States, three-quarters of all cities have developed opportunities for citizens and nonprofits to participate in strategic planning. The European Union has also created multiple opportunities for public consultation and participation. These range from the European Citizens’ Initiative—a mechanism that allows at least seven citizens from seven different EU member states to propose new policy ideas that can be taken up by the European Commission if they gain the signatures of at least one million EU citizens—to citizen assemblies gathering randomly selected citizens to provide advice on new or ongoing initiatives to EU institutions. To support community participation worldwide, the World Bank has invested $85 billion over the past decade.

Reformers are suggesting even more radical ideas. Former US labor secretary and public policy scholar Robert Reich proposes the introduction of lobbying vouchers from the public purse to give people a more direct and equal role in shaping public policy and legislative decisions. Under such a system, eligible voters would receive a certain amount of vouchers that they could allocate to nonprofits they favor or redeem through volunteer work for the same organizations (e.g., $100 per year per individual).⁷ By giving people resources to support the causes they care about, lobbying vouchers might diversify the range of voices involved in lobbying and reduce the disproportionate influence of wealthy interests.

Another idea I have been promoting is lobbying aid.⁸ In the same way the state pays for a lawyer for people who cannot afford one to represent them in court, government could also pay for a professional lobbyist to represent a given cause. The expense could be paid by the revenue generated by a lobbying tax analogous to that proposed by US senator Elizabeth Warren when she ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary. Under her proposal, companies that spend more than $1 million per year on lobbying would get hit with a 60 percent tax rate on their lobbying expenditure, and those spending more than $5 million would see a 75 percent tax rate.

Meanwhile, several companies have been experimenting with ways to enable employees to engage in political advocacy and lobbying on behalf of nonprofits whose causes they favor. A proven one is civic time off, whereby companies allow employees to take paid time off for a variety of civic activities and duties, including election day and volunteering for an organization advocating for their favorite cause. The US nonprofit Time To Vote has gathered hundreds of companies, including Abercrombie & Fitch and Google, to extend paid time off for their more than two million US employees. As recognized by the US Chamber of Commerce, civic time off today tends to transcend voting by enabling employees to volunteer in supporting nonpartisan election activity, such as championing organizations they believe in.

Another growing practice is the pro bono initiative, wherein employees volunteer their advocacy skills, such as legal work, to nonprofits. Such work enables professionals to make a positive impact on society by sharing their expertise, including through lobbying, with those who may not otherwise have access to them. For example, members of the Global Pro Bono Network are pro bono service providers that coordinate skill-sharing volunteer projects across 36 countries. The network also promotes civic engagement aimed at addressing pressing global challenges and answering community needs. Examples include promoting future generations’ interests before public authorities in the European Union and advocating before local authorities in India for single-parent children, orphans, people with disabilities, and widows.

Reformers are championing other ideas to mitigate power disparities in lobbying. Some of them are rethinking the design of and access to public consultations, a critical avenue for lobbying governments. For example, public policy scholars Lee Drutman and Christine Mahoney propose a new public consultation system they call “POST-MAP-ASK.”⁹ It enables all advocacy groups to submit their policy positions and papers to be posted on the US Library of Congress’ website (POST), entrusts the Library of Congress to create a tool for congressional offices and the public to find these positions and navigate where groups stand (MAP), and enables relevant congressional committees to request comments from groups and parties that are missing (ASK). Similarly, I proposed concrete measures to diversify and expand participation by directly inviting specific stakeholders identified as underrepresented to contribute to the consultation.¹⁰ In this way, the lobbying system could be opened, help inform public policy, and improve democratic practice. Ultimately, only within solid guardrails will the new lobby power function well in the first place.

Fund

For lobbying to become a socially accepted, inclusive, and vibrant democratic participatory practice in the ways we have described, it requires support, both financial and through other available means. While nonprofits tend to be portrayed as chronically understaffed and underresourced, the reality is more mixed.¹¹ Too often, nonprofits choose not to lobby not because of a lack of resources but because they wish to allocate resources to other areas. Most foundations, in turn, tend to stay away from lobbying because they do not wish to be perceived as too political. Moreover, philanthropies often misinterpret nonprofit law to dissuade their own grantees from using their funding in a way that might be construed as lobbying. For example, foundations add to their grant agreements clauses that prohibit the grantee nonprofit from lobbying or other types of advocacy.

(Illustration by Mike McQuade) 

This restrictiveness paradoxically leads foundations, which view themselves as preferring systemic change to mere service delivery, to surrender one of the most effective mechanisms available to them to spur systemic change. This error may not only cause their grantees to fail in their own missions but also curtail their ability to maximize the overall social impact of their investments.

We lack sufficient data on how much money foundations allocate to support lobbying efforts by grantees. Yet a few notable examples stand out. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has advocacy teams and provides grants to a variety of nonprofits, such as Malaria No More, and global networks, such as the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, to strengthen global advocacy against malaria. The Open Society Foundations have historically supported multiple lobbying groups, recently to promote equal access to COVID-19 vaccines, including by giving financial support to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organizations and activists campaigning for vaccine equity.

Advocacy appears a promising avenue for nonprofits and foundations to achieve their goals. The question is whether the lobbying-for-good movement and its impact-driven, system change ethos can overcome philanthropies’ traditional diffidence to supporting lobbying work and find room in donors’ theories of change and impact frameworks. They may resist because of the inherent tension between the shorter-term time horizon of grants and the more long-term nature of lobbying. Political change takes time and is chaotic and nonlinear, impeding efforts to evaluate advocacy and lobbying against reliable metrics.¹²

Restrictiveness toward lobbying leads foundations, which view themselves as preferring systemic change to mere service delivery, to surrender one of the most effective mechanisms to spur systemic change.

How do foundations establish a causal connection between a lobbying effort and a political outcome? How do they attribute the success of an advocacy project to a particular organization or network of organizations? A quantitative approach, relying on the number of meetings and other interactions with policy makers, can’t capture the added value of lobbying efforts. While this proxy-based approach works fine for evaluating service-delivery programs, such as food banks, it does not do justice to all potential benefits stemming from an advocacy effort and risks giving credit for results that are produced by others. In short, this approach can be too narrow and too broad at the same time.

Philanthropies might find a more promising approach in construing lobbying not as an activity for their grantees to deliver but rather as a capacity they must nurture. Thus, for instance, foundations may expect their grantees to have the capacity and ability to draw advocacy plans with interim goals, including the preparation of a stakeholder map of all critical actors—be they present opponents or potential allies—in the grantee’s advocacy landscape, so that the grantee includes them in coalition building and communication strategies. Foundations can then evaluate the quality, feasibility, and execution of such plans in achieving their goals or at least fitting the purpose for which they were formulated.

To be sure, measuring advocacy capacity—as opposed to measuring advocacy outcomes—raises its own methodological challenges. But it provides a new and needed conceptual baseline to assess the efforts of nonprofits and foundations in lobbying for good. Moreover, as of today, evidence of whether and how capacity building may, per se, lead to an enduring improvement for the beneficiary remains limited. However, only greater emphasis on it through sustained investments and advocacy experimentation may enable us to collect more data and improve our understanding of capacity building’s actual contribution to an organization’s lasting ability to effect change.

Make Accountable

The lobbying-for-good movement was prompted and remains driven largely by the nonprofit sector. Yet the business community is facing pressure to reconsider its own lobbying practices and perhaps join the movement, as the public increasingly questions self-serving corporate lobbying. Consider the 50-plus banks that signed net zero pledges under the 2023 Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), only to get caught providing loans to fossil fuel companies for expansion while failing to divest themselves of their existing investments in fossil fuel projects. Today investors, employees, and customers increasingly scrutinize the companies they invest into, work for, or buy from, by tracking not only their environmental and social footprints but increasingly also their political footprint, including their lobbying, political donations, and other forms of influence on government. Such footprints can reveal the disconnect between what companies say they want and what they lobby for.

The idea that companies might attempt to influence regulations to favor their bottom line is not new.¹³ What’s novel, however, is the public’s growing awareness that such a decoupling of corporations’ sustainability activities from their lobbying behavior might underpin the lack of progress on numerous critical issues, such as the failure to act on the climate emergency or on extractive economic models. As many stakeholders have come to realize that the way a company behaves politically is as important as its operations,¹⁴ a growing lobbying accountability ecosystem is emerging.

While companies make environmental commitments, such as net zero targets, InfluenceMap—the world’s leading database of corporate lobbying for climate policy around the globe—holds major corporations accountable by monitoring whether their lobbying efforts align with or contradict those commitments. ClimateVoice provides similar information to the employees of multinationals to help the workforce catalyze bold advocacy and create a tipping point for policy change.

These nonprofit initiatives share a determination to spotlight how companies lobby for climate policy. This in turn makes them accountable to the public for the ways in which they exercise their lobbying power and may lead them to support—or at least not oppose—ambitious policy targets. In short, they nudge companies to lobby for good as the most effective way to attain their self-imposed targets.

Yet today’s lobbying accountability ecosystem extends well beyond climate policy to other sustainability goals and beyond. A panoply of third-party initiatives demands not only greater transparency and accountability but also sustainability in the way companies exercise their lobbying efforts. Some of the initiatives are commercial in nature, such as environmental, social, and governmental (ESG) data and rating providers (e.g., Sustainalytics, S&P, Moody’s, RepRisk, and MSCI). Others are nonprofit, such as sustainability reporting standards (e.g., Global Reporting Initiative 415 and Corporate Disclosure Project) and initiatives that offer guidance on how positive corporate lobbying ought to look, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/UN Principles for Responsible Investment and the World Benchmarking Alliance. Together these efforts assist interested stakeholders—including investors, companies, trade associations, and nonprofits—in plotting a path toward greater corporate political responsibility and sustainability across all policy areas. Ultimately, no company can declare itself sustainable unless it fully accounts for its environmental and social impact, as well as its political footprint.

To maintain their license to operate, companies are increasingly called upon not only to reassess their lobbying practice but also to shift toward self-imposed forms of good lobbying.

As a result, a growing universe of “lobbying for good” standards and initiatives encourages companies to share information beyond legally mandated disclosures, such as those generally imposed by lobbying regulations. In this way, the market may be ahead of the state in grasping the realities of corporate lobbying. Indeed, these initiatives require companies to provide more granular information on their corporate political activities than that required by law in the United States, in the European Union, or across member countries of the OECD. By acting as standard setters of the lobbying-for-good movement, these initiatives shape best practices that together define what the movement stands for and entails.

First, virtually all initiatives require companies to report more than what they currently disclose, be it about their lobbying spending, political donations, or other indirect forms of influence, such as their membership in trade associations. Yet only a few of them move beyond these procedural obligations to place more substantive restrictions on them. For example, Standard & Poor’s mandates that companies disclose and publish their lobbying positions before they engage with government. This rule enables all stakeholders—not only governments—to know what position a company is taking on a given policy.

Second, while most initiatives focus on greater transparency and accountability, some of them advance a more principle-based approach to lobbying. Thus, for instance, initiatives such as the Erb Principles for Corporate Political Responsibility at the University of Michigan provide a congruent approach that aligns policy and public affairs with purpose and sustainability commitments. They require companies not only to strive for alignment between their political activities (including those of trade associations and other third parties influencing on their behalf) and their commitments to purpose, values, stated goals, and stakeholders, but also to, in the words of initiative leaders Thomas P. Lyon and Elizabeth Doty, “ensure their political activities do not cause or contribute to adverse impacts on environmental sustainability, human rights, or the public good.”¹⁵ Similarly, the Principles for Responsible Investment Expectations on Corporate Climate Lobbying guide investors who wish to engage portfolio companies on their direct and indirect lobbying practices related to climate policy. To gain a better understanding of such efforts, we recently created The Good Lobby Tracker to map all initiatives advising investors and companies on greater corporate political responsibility and sustainability across all policy areas.

The emergence of these initiatives suggests that to maintain their license to operate, companies are increasingly called upon not only to reassess their lobbying practice but also to shift toward self-imposed forms of good lobbying. Yet as regulators in many jurisdictions, from the United States and United Kingdom to the European Union and Japan, are contemplating the integration of mandatory standards for ESG reporting into conventional financial reporting, these governments may also mandate the disclosure of corporate political-related information. Consider the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s March 2022 climate-related disclosure guidance or the April 2021 EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive as the best illustrations of a new wave of ESG disclosure rules. The lobbying-for-good movement may eventually become legally entrenched.

Lobbying for Good Lobbying

Anyone in the business of social change must understand the importance of influencing public policy and embrace lobbying as a fundamental democratic instrument of social and political change. That’s what the lobbying-for-good movement is about. Participants intend to create a transparent, accountable political process in which every voice counts and influence is not restricted by wealth, birth, or social standing.

To succeed, the movement must change the public narrative about lobbying, enhance the advocacy capacity of the nonprofit sector, and make corporate lobbying more transparent, accountable, self-aware, and responsible. Even though philanthropies have historically shown reticence in supporting political work and lobbying by their own grantees, they must realize that lobbying could be one of the most powerful tools available to achieve the systemic change they claim to promote. Although companies in the past may have focused their lobbying efforts on narrow for-profit interests, they face a public today that demands they become more politically responsible when engaging with governments by disclosing more of their lobbying and reorienting it toward the public interest.

As a result, through social-norm shifts, voluntary engagements, and legislative reforms, the movement is set to turn lobbying into an essential practice for social change. For this to occur, lobbying must become accessible to—and owned by—the many, rather than the few, and exercised by everyone with greater transparency, accountability, and personal responsibility. In this way, lobbying can become an essential approach for systemic change. It is time we all lobby for good lobbying.

Read more stories by Alberto Alemanno.