When are budget submissions worth your time? (Part three)
What else could you be doing instead?
As US President Joe Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Budgets are the foundation of the policy agenda. If you’re an organization that cares about public policy, can you afford not to weigh in?
There are three main factors to consider when deciding whether to make a budget submission: what you’re trying to accomplish with a submission, how to operate within a crowded process, and what else you could be doing instead. This short series of posts takes each in turn.
Writing a budget submission takes time away from other things an organization could be doing. This may be delivering services, attending to core business needs, building capacity as a team, or improving governance.
More than that, every hour spent writing a budget submission is an hour not spent on other policy work.
Earlier in this series, we said the most effective budget submissions are specific enough to be measured, and likely to have champions within government. By writing submissions that follow these approaches, organizations can use the budget process to advance their policy goals.
But not every policy goal needs a budget mention, and certainly not every year. And not every organization needs to be the one to develop the recommendations that make it into the budget.
Influencing public policy from outside government can take many forms:
- Some organizations convene their peers and create deliberative spaces to think through pressing problems, without ever putting themselves forward as the leading advocates for solutions.
- Other organizations dedicate their policy time to researching and understanding issues better, to create the conditions for innovative policy.
- Some seek to empower people with lived experience to make a difference in the policies that most impact them.
- Others focus on activating their communities or the public to bring attention to pressing issues.
A functioning policy ecosystem requires organizations that do all these things and more. But it does not require every organization to do every activity, and it is rare that any one organization can excel at more than a handful of these.
Your organization may be an important player in the policy ecosystem whose time is already, and best, spent doing something other than engaging directly with a government during its budget cycle.
A quick test
To decide whether writing a budget submission is worth your organization’s time relative to the other things you could be doing, think about the value your submission would add overall. Try asking yourself “If my organization doesn’t make these recommendations, who else will?” If peer organizations are adequately representing the ideas that would be in your budget submission to government, then it may be wise to use your precious hours of effort elsewhere — for example in building the coalition to sustain pressure for change, or in doing work to develop earlier-stage ideas that might be ready for the next budget cycle or the one after that.
Some final thoughts
The budget is a powerful tool for governments to plan their work for the coming year and communicate about their priorities. Budget submissions can also be powerful tools for organizations that care about improving public policy by sharing their expertise.
But only sometimes.
Policy cycles, like the seasons, come and go predictably each year. Organizations like yours do not need to follow suit. Deciding whether or not to draft a budget submission can be a decision that exposes broader strategic questions about what you value, and where you are valuable. Our advice is to let the answers to those questions guide your choices.
