The 2024 elections are coming—and bringing change. Whatever the outcome in November, the new year will bring a new presidential administration and leadership in the Senate regardless of party control. And new leadership means new risks for your operation.

Dentons' multidisciplinary team of legal, regulatory, and policy experts can proactively identify potential impacts on your operation—everything from workforce and supply chain resilience to data and cybersecurity, licensure, and investments—as this new picture of federal policymaking emerges in Washington. By assessing your team’s policy and regulatory priorities against the new makeup of Washington and key states, we can ensure you have the connectivity and strategies in place to gain a return on your advocacy investments.

Through an evaluation of your partnerships across advocacy, think tank, and association investments and their relative importance in the changing landscape, we can advise how to potentially rebalance and better allocate to areas that will deliver maximum return on your investment. Dentons’ public policy and regulation team’s former administration, congressional, and state level experts can also provide the connectivity to transition teams and other staffs to build relationships as early as possible.

Imperatives For Your Advocacy Work

As you prepare for these changes, it’s critical that you: 

1. Have a clear strategy and goals to promote and protect your license to operate that could be impacted by legislative or regulatory hurdles. 
2. Have the right advocacy partnerships in place to pull the levers needed to keep you front-footed for growth. Now – not during or after confirmations or Hill leadership elections – is the time to build relationships critical to your company’s success.
3. Optimize your inputs with think tanks and associations to ensure they are productive, engaged, and generating returns.
4. De-risk your company from affiliations, both domestic and foreign, that are or could become problematic. Determine what vulnerabilities exist in publicly available political giving of your leadership and corporate giving.

How We Can Ensure You’re Set Up For Success

Dentons has an integrated, data-centric methodology to help organizations measure and evaluate their advocacy partnerships and their effectiveness in positioning you for success.    

Informed by our US and global experts from the highest levels of federal and state governments, our approach works with you to identify, analyze, and evaluate current and future stakeholders. 

To assess your advocacy, we bring together a multidisciplinary team of individuals that blends strategic planning practitioners and researchers with government relations and regulatory experts. And we work to make the most of your internal resources, delivering a plan and interface that can be clearly understood and effectively utilized by your teams.

Assessing Your Advocacy Improves How You Work

Improved Allocation of Investments: By examining your advocacy priorities, your partners, and who is proving to be truly helpful in advancing those goals, you can allocate investments in a way that can bring a greater return on your investment. 

Advocacy Management: In many larger organizations, various advocacy partnerships are managed and owned by disparate functional divisions or geographic regions of companies or organizations. Developing a full, organization-wide map can be a starting point for greater cross-functional collaboration and coordination on issues and crises.  

Coalition Building: Advocacy evaluations for past clients have helped to clarify which advocacy partners are true partners in alignment and effectiveness, which should be more episodically and strategically utilized, and which were not worthwhile maintaining. When approaching a new advocacy priority or imperative, the map also helps clients quickly identify ideal partners based on policy alignments or any other criteria. 

With offices in more than 200 locations across 80 countries and a robust, bipartisan public affairs practice in Washington and every state capital, Dentons is uniquely positioned to provide an enterprise-wide risk audit as you optimize your advocacy strategies for Washington’s new power structure. Please contact our team to learn more about this unique offering.