We are awash in a world of data representing a significant untapped source of value for the public and the private sectors. Governments produce and publish copious amounts of national and local data with increasing levels of detail. They use this information to guide their plans and evangelize their policies. All this digital information is publicly available and remains an untapped source of insight and value.
If you are a business or a nonprofit, association or NGO, digital government affairs service offered to you center around a few themes:
- Legislations & Regulation Trackers: Some vendors offer tracking of open-source legislation and regulation databases, importing this public data, and making them search-friendly. Increasingly governments are providing similar data service to their citizens as well. This has spurred greater access to information, greater demands for participation, and has ultimately diminished the exotic value of legislation and regulation trackers1.
- Leadership Directories: Some vendors create public sector leadership directories keeping up with movement of government officials.
- Political CRM Tools: Some vendors offer political engagement tracking functionality much like a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) tool but applied to documenting public sector engagements for an organization’s internal visibility and use.
- News Analysis: Some vendors offer news analysis where a team of journalists or political scientists keep up with a country or topical development and write news summaries and briefs for those not in touch with day-to-day events. They generally dispense advice in the form of tagging a country as negative/risky, neutral or positive. Analysis is often political and qualitative.
- Statistical Charts: A few vendors gather government statistics and publish that as infographics to give some perspective for comparing countries with one another.
Providers offer these services under a subscription or a retainer. Some associations offer the above services through their in-house experts to their members.
These services simplify the labor-intensive tasks government affairs professionals must do. However, public domain access to such information is improving, better government-provided data sources come online, and more sophisticated search engines catalogue this information for easier retrieval.
Leapfrogging the Current Digital Government Affairs Frontier
A key layer of analytics remains untapped. It is more quantitative and requires skills beyond databasing and AI language processing. At Government Analytica we dig deeper and go beyond databasing government information and news collection and summaries. We go directly to the underlying national, regional and local statistics and leading quantitative economic and social indicators from government sources. We then combine this data with models based on political economy, social sciences, public policy, macro and micro-economics, demographics, and several other fields.
We develop an analytical strategy to prominently showcase, in quantitative terms, “Public Value”. What our clients need to differentiate themselves is a winning edge, an insightful perspective, backed up by data and evidence that their proposal has merit and will create public value. Making public value quantitative and defensible and incorporating it in government proposals gives greater confidence to policymakers to put their political capital and support behind these proposals.
In these blogs we will highlight the many ways in which public value can be made quantitative. Through practical examples we will show the outcomes and their integration into advocacy strategies. Stay tuned as we bring you a fresh new perspective on how to use public value analytics.
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