Bijal Rama takes a look at her experience of party conferences and how bringing your beneficiaries along can help get the attention of MPs...

Last month I was lucky enough to be selected to represent Girlguiding at the Labour Party Conference, where I discussed our new report – Girls Matter – with MPs.

It highlights eight calls for change, aimed at the decision makers in the next government. It was a great experience and one that we will be repeating, but it does raise an important question - how useful is lobbying MPs at Party Conferences?

First, a little background. For the past three years, I have been part of Advocate, a national Girlguiding youth panel that discusses the issues girls care about and seeks change. It was created in 2009 and we now have 19 members aged between 14 and 25 from across the UK. The intention is to provide young member input into the Girls’ Attitudes Survey, an annual poll conducted by Girlguiding about girls’ attitudes, ideas and opinions. From the results, we highlighted recurring issues faced by girls across the UK and this became the ‘Girls Matter’ report.

When looking at the issue of party conferences, it’s worth consulting our data. nfpSynergy's political research team found that the value of charities lobbying at Party Conferences is questioned by MPs. Only 18% of MPs agreed “meeting charities at party conference is the best time and place to meet them”. However, as a Girlguiding member and youth volunteer, I feel the experience was extremely useful for our cause, mainly because Girlguiding uses beneficiaries as advocates at the conference. This was broadly down to three reasons.

Firstly, Girlguiding contacted MPs prior to the event to arrange meetings. This meant that the other members and I could personally meet a number of them and talk about the report and why it is important to us. This meant MPs had an allocated time when they could have a meaningful discussion about our cause and this stopped us having to chase them around the conference.

Our Charity Parliamentary Monitor shows the value of this, with one example coming from when we asked MPs about who impressed them at party conferences. One Labour MP said that Whizz Kids “used a young person to interview me instead of talking policy at me, [which] brought the issue alive.”

A good starting point when trying to arrange meetings with MPs is to contact those more likely to be sympathetic to your cause. For example, Girlguiding got in touch with MPs who were members of the APPGs on Body Image, Women in Parliament and Sex Equality.

The second reason was that although our report is backed up by a lot of statistics, I found that MPs were much more engaged with the conversation when we were talking about our own experiences of the issues. This made them more likely to pledge their support to our calls for change. In fact, MPs say that using real-life examples instead of statistics makes lobbyists stand out to them.

Finally, Girlguiding also organised a fringe event chaired by Chief Executive Julie Bentley. The panel included three Girlguiding members (including me), Eleanor Mills, Editorial Director at The Sunday Times and Angela Eagle MP, the Women in Journalism Chair. Unfortunately, due to being held up at a previous event Angela could not make it, but having members on the panel generated a lot of questions and discussion around the report and the issues it raised.

All of our speeches centred on personal experiences and this shocked and prompted the audience into a strong discussion. It’s great to have an MP speak and take questions at your event, but what I’ve learned is not to pin your hopes on them being there. Having beneficiaries speaking saved the event and losing the MP didn’t have too much impact on its success.

Experiences like these show just how powerful bringing beneficiaries to party conferences can be. A lot of the MPs we talked to, even just in passing after events, asked us how they could support our campaign.

If your organisation attended party conferences, please use the comments box below to share your thought on what did and didn’t work well for you.  

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