Amplified is the natural conclusion of several months of pro bono consultancy for a bunch of wonderful organisations, which are working to make the world a better, fairer place in their own fields. Their questions and concerns, combined with my own third-sector experience, have motivated me to provide a concrete and coherent resource that they and others like them can draw upon to make their voices heard.

During my Brussels years, I got a real sense of how disproportionately influential the private sector is in shaping policy to meet its needs and priorities. This felt instinctively wrong to me, but it isn’t necessarily unfair. Businesses invest a huge amount of resources into monitoring policy developments and creating working relationships with relevant policy actors. They put in the hours. They have economic clout, and that gives them political weight. Of course they get results.

NGOs and social enterprises often lack such vast resources. In my experience, this creates a sense of despondency, which I can understand. Some compete well in the public sphere through the human stories they tell, which sometimes grab the attention of policy makers as much as any business lobby can. This needs to happen more. The truth is the non-profit sector must compete with business for access to the public and policy spheres, using its own methods and hooks. Some of the bigger organisations are already doing this, with varying degrees of success. Most are not even trying. It will be Amplified’s mission to give all of them the confidence and skills they need to put their priorities across effectively and imprint their brand of social change upon the public policy stream.