Grant's Best Practices: Supporters, Opponents? Engage!

“Get the policy right and the politics will follow” was a favorite saying of an elected official with whom I had the privilege of working.  While it may be true that support can generally be found for sound public policy, I have learned through experience not to let the “politics will follow” portion of the phrase lead to complacency.  There is nothing inevitable about building and maintaining critical support.  It takes planning and effort.

When California’s initial “Secure Choice” legislation was signed into law in 2012, I was assigned to work with the newly created board to conduct a feasibility study and to pursue legislative authority to implement the program.  Steeped as I was in research on the retirement savings gap and lack of access to workplace savings plans, I was convinced that a state-administered program to encourage workers to save more for their own futures is good policy.  With the naïve enthusiasm of a true believer, I was not worried about the politics. 

As it turns out, I probably should have been more worried.  People who didn’t agree with our thinking wrote op eds and responses to our initial request for information that minimized the scope and scale of the retirement savings problem and questioned whether a California program was necessary.  They raised concerns about a range of potential challenges, and the need for government involvement in the retirement savings space.  Even proponents were not completely aligned.  Early on, they disagreed about how the program should be structured and administered.

These differences of perspective gave us an opportunity to engage - to understand where others were coming from. Along the way we made adjustments here and there to accommodate the good thinking of others without compromising the key elements that would make CalSavers function well for users when launched.

In hindsight it is quite clear that success – in terms of getting authorizing legislation across the governor’s desk and receiving meaningful input to guide the design of a program that would be workable for California’s employers and workers – depended largely upon building productive relationships with groups who had a stake in the board’s efforts and the ability to influence the outcome.

I learned a lot about stakeholder engagement through my work with the small team at the California State Treasurer’s Office who helped to lay the foundation for the program now known as CalSavers and led by Treasurer Fiona Ma and Executive Director Katie Selenski.

As is often the case, some of the most important lessons are learned in the process of doing something new.  And I believe one of the most significant opportunities when the CalSavers board first embarked on their work was understanding the importance of planning for effective stakeholder engagement. 

We realized that a greater investment in planning for stakeholder outreach efforts from the outset could pay dividends by allowing us to be more strategic and proactive and less reactive.  Thinking about your own stakeholders and how to stand in their shoes?  Understanding who the key stakeholders are will be the topic of the next edition of Grant’s Best Practices. 

💥💥💥

You can reach Grant Boyken at grant.boyken@massenaassociates.com

This piece was featured in the September 10, 2020 edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here.