Our external affairs strategy
We have been reviewing how we conduct our external affairs work, following discussions with our Council and Campaigns Advisory Group. This work is the process of engaging with government and other organisations to ensure that decisions are informed and improved by the appropriate use of data and statistics that are reliable, used responsibly, and relevant to society's most important questions.
Our new strategy moves us towards a model of working that places greater emphasis on building relationships with stakeholders across government, parliament and civil society. It means that our focus will increasingly be on:
Through working constructively with officials in this way, our intention is to be able to inform decision-making before the consultation stage.
This, we think, is the way that we can have maximum impact as a Society. We have had some success with this approach already, our continued behind-the-scenes engagement with the UK Statistics Authority led them to inviting us to partner with them on the UK Statistics Assembly earlier this year and through that partnership we were able to influence aspects of the event.
On each external affairs campaign we are working on, we will assess at the start the impact that we want to have and how we can most effectively achieve that. While, in most cases this will start with attempts to build relationships and influence in that way, there will be other cases where a media-facing campaign might still be more appropriate. We will also continually assess whether our discussions with stakeholders are achieving what we want them to – if not, we will try alternative approaches.
It is also important to note that a key part of our external affairs work involves promoting public understanding of aspects of statistics and empowering people to meaningfully engage with questions around how data is used in decision-making. It is not enough just to raise these with civil servants and politicians, and we will continue to highlight the importance and relevance of statistics and data science to the wider public, with the aim of encouraging more people to become active and informed participants in this type of conversation.
Through this approach, it is our intention to more effectively influence government proposals before they reach the consultation stage. If we are successful, more government consultations will be informed by statistics and data before they are published. This means that we will not place the same emphasis on responding to those consultations. We encourage members (either individually or as sections) to respond to consultations in your areas – and we will continue to publicise open consultations to help you identify them as well as flag specific consultations to relevant Society groups. We also plan to publish a guide, templates and links to example consultation responses to support members who aren’t familiar with the process.
We plan to start leaving a bit more time between writing letters to decision-makers and publishing them. Our view is that we can have greater influence through initiating private dialogue and that the recipients of letters often respond more positively to this type of approach. However, the Society carries out this work on behalf of our members and it is important that you are aware of what representatives of the Society are saying on your behalf. So, we plan to start publishing quarterly policy updates that will summarise our engagement as well as publishing letters at an appropriate time.
If you have comments, questions or suggestions please contact policy@rss.org.uk.
April 2025