(highlight:: The Importance of Continuous Relationship Building in Successful Government Intervention
Transcript:
Speaker 2
And did you encounter challenges on the way to spreading your approach to different countries and even continents? 135 cities is quite impressive.
Speaker 1
Yeah, so I think we quickly realized that we needed to talk to a lot of cities to find those that are willing to do this. And I think there are two important factors here. One is to find someone who is interested in approaching this kind of problem or using this kind of process. The other is to find them at the right time. So oftentimes, you will find that someone says no to you now, but three months from now, they'll say yes. And what we found is that they don't necessarily remember you. It's not that they call you up and say, now I'm ready, but you need to stay on their radar and you need to keep having everyone on your radar. So to reach 135 cities, we actually engaged thousands of cities and conversations, and not just cities, but actually we found that no one is in charge of problem solving in a government. So we weren't just reaching out to procurement people. We had to build relationships with just about every department in a city. And so what initially we did over meeting people and calling people over the phone became quite a sophisticated communications platform, where we simply built a relationship through Much larger scale communications with this community and began to recognize patterns in their engagement with us so that we could, when they were ready, when the moment was right and When their interest was right, we could then engage them. So this is, the game of numbers here has been really important to us. It's not that all these cities just came to us, knocked on our door and we got started. We actually had to really build the field and the market for this.
Speaker 2
I can see a lot of persistence on your end then, and perhaps maybe you could estimate what was the average time for you to engage the government.
Speaker 1
Can you estimate such a thing? Yeah, so this can vary a lot, but I would say, and maybe more, has a recommendation also to others. I think it can easily take a year or two until you've both found the right person and until that person is ready to have the right kind of conversation with you. And I think what we found is that whenever we tried to make the conversation binary, meaning do you want this or not, we were losing the opportunity to keep coming back over time. So the way you structure the conversation, the way you build a dialogue, the way you listen very carefully to what these people have on their mind and how you can maybe help them with along The way is really important to then be there when they are ready or when they need you and may not remember you. So I think that has been important and that can easily take two years. In some cases it took five years, in other cases it took two weeks, but I would say preparing yourself for something that takes more than a few weeks and maybe even a year or two certainly Sets yourself up for thinking also about the sustainability of your approach and your organization and the kind of promises you might be making to your funders or partners or team about How quickly you may achieve different outcomes.
Speaker 2
A phrase comes to my mind from a conversation, from a recent conversation with a social entrepreneur from the Czech Republic, who said yes 50% of our success in changing some legislation And bringing about systemic change was knowing the technicalities, which law we wanted to change, how we wanted to change it, which were the people responsible for it. But then the other 50% was actually about cultivating trustful relationships with government counterparts and also with a broader alliance of stakeholders who were working towards That change that speaks to what you were saying.)
- Time 0:16:20
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(highlight:: The Importance of Continuous Relationship Building in Successful Government Intervention
Transcript:
Speaker 2
And did you encounter challenges on the way to spreading your approach to different countries and even continents? 135 cities is quite impressive.
Speaker 1
Yeah, so I think we quickly realized that we needed to talk to a lot of cities to find those that are willing to do this. And I think there are two important factors here. One is to find someone who is interested in approaching this kind of problem or using this kind of process. The other is to find them at the right time. So oftentimes, you will find that someone says no to you now, but three months from now, they'll say yes. And what we found is that they don't necessarily remember you. It's not that they call you up and say, now I'm ready, but you need to stay on their radar and you need to keep having everyone on your radar. So to reach 135 cities, we actually engaged thousands of cities and conversations, and not just cities, but actually we found that no one is in charge of problem solving in a government. So we weren't just reaching out to procurement people. We had to build relationships with just about every department in a city. And so what initially we did over meeting people and calling people over the phone became quite a sophisticated communications platform, where we simply built a relationship through Much larger scale communications with this community and began to recognize patterns in their engagement with us so that we could, when they were ready, when the moment was right and When their interest was right, we could then engage them. So this is, the game of numbers here has been really important to us. It's not that all these cities just came to us, knocked on our door and we got started. We actually had to really build the field and the market for this.
Speaker 2
I can see a lot of persistence on your end then, and perhaps maybe you could estimate what was the average time for you to engage the government.
Speaker 1
Can you estimate such a thing? Yeah, so this can vary a lot, but I would say, and maybe more, has a recommendation also to others. I think it can easily take a year or two until you've both found the right person and until that person is ready to have the right kind of conversation with you. And I think what we found is that whenever we tried to make the conversation binary, meaning do you want this or not, we were losing the opportunity to keep coming back over time. So the way you structure the conversation, the way you build a dialogue, the way you listen very carefully to what these people have on their mind and how you can maybe help them with along The way is really important to then be there when they are ready or when they need you and may not remember you. So I think that has been important and that can easily take two years. In some cases it took five years, in other cases it took two weeks, but I would say preparing yourself for something that takes more than a few weeks and maybe even a year or two certainly Sets yourself up for thinking also about the sustainability of your approach and your organization and the kind of promises you might be making to your funders or partners or team about How quickly you may achieve different outcomes.
Speaker 2
A phrase comes to my mind from a conversation, from a recent conversation with a social entrepreneur from the Czech Republic, who said yes 50% of our success in changing some legislation And bringing about systemic change was knowing the technicalities, which law we wanted to change, how we wanted to change it, which were the people responsible for it. But then the other 50% was actually about cultivating trustful relationships with government counterparts and also with a broader alliance of stakeholders who were working towards That change that speaks to what you were saying.)
- Time 0:16:20
-