By Alex Breckel, CEO & Founder
Oh, the allure of policy fixes.
An artfully crafted solution that jumps off the screen after long nights and early mornings of writing a report; a reform that eliminates that pesky tradeoff at the heart of the matter; a clever use of existing authorities that was under everybody’s noses for years. Policy answers are the bread and butter of climate advocacy, pursued by nonprofits of every stripe and supported by funders large and small.
Yet what good is an idea familiar to the few brave souls willing and able to read a 40-page policy playbook? How does a wonky idea become a default policy? How do hard problems and their solutions become legible to those with only a fleeting understanding of the industries, systems, and institutions in question?
This tension is playing out in all corners of climate and clean energy advocacy. We’re consistently told by funders that the most exciting and high-impact funding priorities are the wonky stuff: permitting reform, catalytic financing, market designs. Yet the hard work of convincing the public and policymakers to adopt those climate solutions – communications, public awareness, and organizing – are lowest on their list, rarely if ever showing up in their funding portfolios.
Talk to non-profits at the leading edge of designing those policy solutions, and you’ll hear a very different story. Policy solutions are important, of course, but by far communications and public awareness are at the top of their priority lists. We see in the numbers that these are exactly the things that funders aren’t supporting.
Funders love a policy wizard that can conjure solutions to complex problems. Important as wizards are, most funding portfolios are short on whisperers, with the rarer skill of convincing the public, voters, policymakers, and other advocates of the wisdom of good policy ideas.
And it’s not hard to see why. Policy solutions are concrete, providing detailed fodder for advocacy organizations pitching a funder, or an exciting hook for a program officer pitching their board. Meanwhile, communications strategies are diffuse, hard to measure progress (until you win), and rarely produces wins in any case. And years of preferencing wizards over whisperers has created lopsided non-profit priorities.
Moving from idea to practice requires that funders build a complementary portfolio of wizards and whisperers. This requires listening to advocates on the front lines to know when it’s time to market an idea, not just craft it. It means building and sustaining a field of capable whisperers. It requires finding new ways to demonstrate the return on investment of communications and messaging work – and convincing funding principals that it’s worth pursuing non-profit strategies with hard-to-measure ROI.
Headed into Climate Week NYC, I’ll be looking for the whisperers. Who are the individuals and organizations that can translate arcane climate policy challenges and their wonky solutions into legible, convincing messages with traction? And where are the funders willing to support them?