The most important lesson from building and activating third parties for policy work: you cannot delegate caring

I remember an awkward meeting from early in my consulting career, managing an interest organisation. We had a long conversation about possible activities and areas of cooperation, but the reality of the situation, that none of it would actually happen unless someone paid for it, clearly hadn’t registered with the person I was talking to. It’s the kind of interaction I’ve kept in mind years later, once I was the one sitting on the other side of the table.

Because that is roughly the lesson I’ve taken from years of working with third parties, think tanks, interest organisations, consultancies and others, both building them and buying their work. Activity and results can be bought. Caring cannot.

A consultancy, paid well and briefed properly, can deliver excellent work: a strong report launch, good media amplification, real stakeholder interest and plenty of openings for further dialogue. But once the final KPI is delivered, that is typically it. It doesn’t matter that there’s good momentum, or that the project has created opportunities clearly worth following up on. If you want to capture that potential, you usually need to keep paying for it.

This isn’t because consultants don’t want to care. It’s simply how the model works. Their job is not to keep pursuing your policy objectives indefinitely once nobody is funding it, and even the most engaged among them will eventually run into that constraint. The upside is control: you can be precise about what you want delivered, when, and to what standard.

An independent third party works differently. A think tank, interest organisation or individual genuinely interested in your field may well keep going after the project ends, taking initiatives, developing ideas and building relationships of their own accord. But they’ll do it on their own terms.

The trade-off follows from that. The more control you want over the output, the more likely you are buying execution rather than commitment. The more someone else comes to genuinely care about an issue, the less you can expect to steer exactly how they pursue it.

Both have their place. Consultants are often the right tool for the here and now: clear, professional work with real leverage over delivery. People and organisations who actually care matter more for the long game, when you’re trying to shape an agenda several steps ahead, or build an ecosystem of people still interested in an issue long after the project budget has run out.

Where this tends to go wrong is expecting one model to behave like the other: briefing a consultancy as though loyalty will outlast the invoice, or briefing a genuine ally as though they were on retainer.

Third party advocacy needs to be designed around which relationship you are actually building, what you expect from it, and where ownership of the outcome sits once the money stops moving.