Is it time to sign off from letter writing?

If you've worked in the charity sector for any length of time, you'll know what I’m talking about.

There’s a change in government leadership, a policy gets announced (or not), a funding cut lands, a crisis emerges.

What happens next? Someone suggests writing a letter to government.

A draft is circulated. Organisations add their names. More signatories are gathered. LinkedIn celebrates the growing number of names (separate argument could be had here on quality vs. quantity!). The letter is published and for a day or two, it feels as though something significant has happened.

Sometimes it has. But overwhelmingly, the slow and generic reply suggests it hasn’t.

Increasingly, I wonder who these well-intentioned letters are really for. Are they designed for real influence, or are they for us – as a sign to ourselves that we’ve attempted to reach out? Is it because the door feels so closed to us that the only way to gain access is to put something through the letterbox?

It’s an uncomfortable question to ask because open letters have an important place in our work. And, hey, it’s worth acknowledging we’ve done them too.

When done well, with purpose and a clear, targeted audience, they can demonstrate consensus, show solidarity and reassure communities that organisations are speaking with one voice.

At the right moment, they can create political pressure that genuinely shifts a debate. But are the endless letters now better at creating visibility or demonstrating consensus, rather than inspiring and motivating real change?

It’s important we ask ourselves why we’re doing it, and what doing them signals about where we are in terms of influence.

Meaningful influence is built by investing long before we say anything publicly. That feels never more true than now, as the dust starts to settle from the changes created by the new Burnham administration.

Influence comes from building trusted relationships long before you need them, and having evidence that can help frame, explain and solve real problems.

It’s important we don’t just start with what we want to achieve, but by also understanding what ministers, officials and decision-makers are trying to achieve, their pressures and constraints. An influencer needs to start by finding common ground and establishing a shared language, and then move on to identifying overlapping priorities and mutually beneficial options. Small wins early on matters in building influence for the long term.

As a sector, we’re often reliant on goodwill and support. So, it matters that we frame arguments in ways that resonate beyond our own sector to build movements.

It means creating compelling narratives that travel outside of our echo chambers, and engaging new and unfamiliar partners to mobilise previously untapped audiences and advocates.

It also means recognising that sometimes our voice probably isn’t the one that needs to be heard to make the case.

It’s being an organisation that people seek out, rather than tune out.

Driving influence with government (even at a local level) can feel a bit like David taking on Goliath. If you believe in the idea of strength in numbers, having more Davids makes sense, right?

Yes.

But the question is, who are the people you need alongside you?

Power is more distributed than it used to be. Public opinion matters. Funders matter. Businesses matter. Journalists matter. Regulators matter. Institutions matter. Influence is built through convening diverse, but authentic, networks.

To achieve that means investing in insight, not just opinion. In real, trusted relationships, not just reach. In convening unlikely alliances, not just familiar coalitions. In telling stories that people remember, rather than publishing statements that people briefly acknowledge before moving on.

Moving from letterbox access to genuine influence requires us to make ourselves too compelling, too memorable, too coordinated to ignore.

The charity sector understands problems often before they happen, and often before they even appear on political agendas.

We bring evidence that no one else can. We have extraordinary stories of human experience. We represent and support millions of people, right across the country. We need to have greater confidence to stand in our power.

I understand the appeal. I know that when we’ve written letters in the past, it’s because it gives us something to do when we often felt powerless. It created a visible moment of unity.

For many organisations, especially those with limited resources and people, it can feel risky to invest time in the behind the scenes work like building relationships, testing messages, developing evidence. Yet those quieter activities are crucial to having real influence.

None of this means we should stop writing letters. There will always be moments when a public intervention is exactly the right response. The challenge is to stop treating them as the inevitable response.

Civil society exists to change the world, not simply to comment on it.

Before we ask, "Should we write / sign this letter?", it is important we ask ourselves a different set of questions:

• What decision are we trying to change?
• Who really influences that decision?
• Why should they care to think differently, what evidence do I have?
• Whose voice carries the greatest credibility?
• What conversations could happen first instead?

We should also think about other ways to gain access. The Civil Society Covenant, which launched last summer, gives us an opportunity to move beyond transactional engagement.

Both civil society and government (at all levels) have already proven it can open real doors for influence by establishing a stronger expectation that charities and civil society organisations are involved earlier, more consistently and more meaningfully. This is where influence lives.

No, it’s not always going to be perfect, or consistent. It’s ongoing work that we need to commit to.

But we have an opportunity, now, to turn that ambition into everyday practice, moving from tactical engagement that is reactive to strategic relationships that are genuinely collaborative. The Covenant works both ways, so early, pragmatic and collaborative engagement is important for both sides.

I get the irony that this feels like a letter to the sector about not writing letters. The real challenge isn't whether we should write fewer letters. It's whether we want to become genuinely harder to ignore.

That won't happen because we've collected another hundred logos beneath a statement, or by adding another letter to the in-tray of a new minister.

It will happen because we've built relationships before we need them, earned trust through evidence, framed our arguments around shared problems, and shown up consistently enough that decision-makers seek us out rather than simply respond.

Civil society has never lacked passion. It’s never lacked expertise. Our next challenge is to become every bit as sophisticated about influence as we are about advocacy.

At NCVO, a big part of achieving our new strategy (Together for a Stronger Society) is about driving meaning advocacy and influence and supporting the sector to have it too.

We need to help make sure members and the sector have the skills and the tools, whatever their size, whatever their mission, for building real influence, early and strategically.

If we can do that, perhaps the measure of success won't be the number of organisations that signed a letter.

It’ll be something much more meaningful: the better decisions this incredible sector has helped shape, early on, so that no one needed to write one.