CPRT Mini-Workshop: Beyond the Audit: Trade Associations & Positive Policy Engagement

As business leaders seek alignment between their political engagement and their companies’ stated mission and values, leading companies are increasingly auditing their trade association memberships. As unveiled by The Good Lobby Tracker, benchmarking around engagement with trade associations is increasing. In some cases, as in the recent high-profile Unilever trade association assessment, this analysis reveals both the complexity and the tangible set of actions required for alignment. 

Yet mischaracterizations of trade associations as monolithic or caricatures of them as “good” or “bad ” ignore their diversity in everything from governance to mission and point to overly simplistic implications for responsible engagement or disengagement. In reality, trade associations frequently must grapple with multiple conflicting mandates and end up on the sidelines of issues relevant to member companies due to a lack of strategic processes to analyze member needs against policy advocacy.  

Given this, how can companies conduct meaningful trade association audits? How can they ensure the audit process generates tangible actions and guides productive engagement? And, as companies engage, how can they recognize and support good trade association governance? 

To help your company develop and act upon more effective ways to engage with trade associations, we invite you to join our October mini-workshop, “Beyond the Audit: Trade Associations & Positive Policy Engagement.” We will welcome Richard Roberts, researcher and strategic advisor and Inquiry Lead on corporate advocacy at Volans, and Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor of Law at HEC Paris and Founder of The Good Lobby.

Please join us for an action-oriented session, where we will explore: 

• Raters’ expectations for trade association audits based on The Good Lobby Tracker 
• Insights from the Unilever audit from Volans, who assisted in the process  
• An activity for managing your own audit to generate tangible actions and productive engagement 
• Open questions about trade association governance, and possible avenues to support positive trade association governance 
• How the Erb Principles for CPR can be used to guide trade association processes and alignment 

We invite executives in Risk Management, Public Affairs, Legal, Communications, Sustainability, Human Resources, DEI, and other affected functions, as well as CPR champions and academic experts from other sectors interested in a constructive, non-partisan, principles-based discussion.

Light pre-reading and data-gathering suggestions will be provided one week before the session.

To enable privacy for executive participants, this session will be hosted as a webinar and no participants will be recorded.

Elizabeth Doty is the Director of the Erb Institute’s Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce (CPRT) a peer-to-peer forum for executives who want to help their companies apply a more proactive, integrated and principled approach to civic and political affairs.

Richard Roberts is Inquiry Lead at Volans, a sustainable business think tank and advisory firm. He leads Volans’ work on corporate advocacy and climate policy engagement, which includes conducting trade association audits for clients. Richard led the team that did this for Unilever’s first climate policy engagement review, helping set a new best practice for such disclosures in the process. He also leads an ongoing project focused on mobilizing trade associations as a force for good, as part of which, Volans is collaborating with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) to create detailed guidance for companies on how to assess, align and activate their associations.

The founder of The Good Lobby, Alberto Alemanno is Professor of Law at HEC Paris and Visiting Democracy Fellow at Harvard University and author of more than a dozen books including “Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society.” His commitment to bridge the gap between academic research and policy action led Alberto to establish The Good Lobby, a nonprofit whose mission is to equalize access to power, by enhancing the advocacy capacity of civil society while making corporate lobbying more ethical, responsible and sustainable.

The CPRT is strictly non-partisan and does not advocate, promote or support any political party or candidate. While members and partners may express their views freely, we do not endorse or advocate particular policies or legislation but may provide thought processes for evaluating proposals based on CPR principles.