Create an advisory panel or working group

Guide
Written By Alexis Ditkowsky

A technical advisory panel or working group is an important mechanism by which stakeholders such as the private sector and civil society can contribute to the policymaking process. The working group may also include representatives from the public sector.

Video overview (English)

Watch the guide overview.

The composition of the group will depend upon several factors, including the phase of the policymaking process that the working group will influence and the level of buy-in from the government regarding the primary objectives of the working group.

The working group may provide opinions, conduct research, draft reports, or undertake other activities aimed at influencing the policymaking process.

Multilateral organizations or development partners can create a working group, support the infrastructure of the group, make introductions to decision makers, build participants’ knowledge of key technical topics, and take stakeholders’ recommendations forward. Public-sector decision makers can use working groups to obtain stakeholder input on important policy questions.

+ 1. Background

This guide complements our guide on stakeholder consultation and was informed by our experience convening an advisory and working group in 2021 (“CEMAC Panel”). The CEMAC Panel was established to connect civil society financial inclusion experts with regulators and policymakers in Central Africa. The Panel’s goal was to influence the policymaking process through concrete recommendations on how to improve access to digital financial services and financial consumer protection for women in the CEMAC region. The key output from the Panel was a report that was shared with the regional financial regulator to consider as they draft the Regional Financial Inclusion Strategy.

We hope this guide will be useful for:

  • Regulators and policymakers who want to ensure that the experiences of stakeholders, including end users, private-sector entities, and civil society are centered in public decision-making processes.

  • Development organizations who have “convening” power and are able to bring the private sector, civil society, and government together to increase the benefits of policy and regulation for the whole society (and the underserved in particular).

  • Consumer advocates who wish to engage with policymakers on behalf of consumers.

+ 2. Define the working group’s objectives and governance structure

As a convenor of the working group, start by defining the group’s objective(s). This will be influenced by several factors, such as:

  • The phase of policymaking when the working group is established;
  • The challenge(s) that the group is expected to address; and
  • The nature of the convener (e.g., extent of subject-matter expertise and ability to influence decisionmakers).

Once you have defined the working group’s objective, you should elucidate your Theory of Change and discuss the role of the working group in achieving the intended outcome. Finally, agree upon key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the working group’s success.

Next, consider the composition of your working group. List relevant stakeholders whom you would like to include in the group and draft terms of reference for their support, clearly defining expectations and the level of effort required. In addition, consider any stakeholders with whom you would like to engage but not invite to join the group, and design an engagement plan for this.

You should now be in a good position to ascertain the required investment of time and resources on your end. Make arrangements to meet these requirements by allocating funds, recruiting personnel, and/or reaching out to partners and colleagues for additional support.

  • What issues do you hope the working group will address?
    • Why is a working group an appropriate mechanism for addressing these issues?
    • What is your mandate? From whom?
  • What is your theory of change? How does this working group lead to your desired outcome(s)?
  • What are your specific objectives?
  • What are your key performance indicators (KPIs)?
  • How will the working group’s work connect back to the work of regulators?
    • What deliverables (reports, presentations, draft legislative texts, etc.) will strengthen this connection?
  • Whom do you hope will comprise the working group?
  • What time commitment do you expect from working group members?
    • How long are their “terms of service”?
    • How frequently do you expect to meet?
    • What types of independent or group work do you anticipate outside of meetings?
  • What is your team’s administrative capacity?
    • Will you need to hire additional staff or interns to keep everything on track?

+ 3. Recruit and select participants

By now, you should already have a tentative list of stakeholders, or at least types of stakeholders. Based on this, define the eligibility criteria for participation. This may include, but not be limited to:

  • Age
  • Education
  • Sector
  • Job function
  • Geography

For example, here are the eligibility criteria from the CEMAC Advisory Panel on Women’s Financial Inclusion:

  • Any person aged at least 18 years domiciled in one of the countries of the CEMAC zone (Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Chad) wishing to participate in UNCDF's efforts in favor of enabling regulations for inclusive Digital Financial Services;
  • Any representative of associations, federations, or groups that, by their objectives or constitution, are focused on the issue of financial inclusion and the empowerment of women, and actually have activities in the CEMAC area.

A. Define your selection criteria and selection process

If you have a good sense of the desired working group composition, everything else in this stage becomes a lot easier. Your application questions will be appropriate, your recruitment efforts will be more focused, and you can move more quickly through the screening and interview stages.

With the CEMAC Panel, we realised after publishing our call for applications that we wanted to ensure a mix of rural and urban experience. Had we realized this sooner, we could have included a question in our application and ensured appropriate outreach to under-represented communities.

B. Invite potential participants

Your approach to inviting potential participants will depend upon the nature of your working group. You could publish a call for applications on a public channel if you would like to solicit applications from private-sector and civil society organizations. Alternately, you might prefer to send the invite to a select group of stakeholders you have already identified. The call for applications should contain:

  • The objectives of the working group
  • Terms of reference or a charter (see our tool below)
  • Eligibility criteria
  • Expected duration of engagement
  • Role of participants
  • Expected timeline and a provisional calendar with key meeting dates
  • Materials required to apply
  • How to apply
  • Application deadline
  • Outline of the selection process
  • Anticipated selection decision date
  • Email or contact phone number for additional information
  • Information on compensation (if any)
  • Mode of engagement (online, in-person, or hybrid)

Here are sample questions from the CEMAC Panel online application form:

  • First name
  • Family name
  • Email address
  • Gender
  • Country/Countries
  • Organisation or affiliation
  • What is your experience in women’s economic empowerment or digital financial inclusion?
  • Why do you wish to join this panel?

Tips:

  • Use an online form to automatically collect responses in a spreadsheet (e.g., Google Forms, Airtable, SurveyMonkey).
  • Use online tools such as Google Campaign Tracking to learn which outreach methods are most effective.
  • Share the call for applications widely within the target region. We found personal email outreach within UNCDF and within our networks very effective. LinkedIn was also an important driver of applicants.

Be sure to share information with participants that may help them decide on their participation in this working group. Following is some of the information that was shared with prospective participants of the CEMAC Panel:

  • Participation in the Panel is voluntary and honorary and does not give rise to any remuneration.
  • The members of the Panel shall serve for a period of twelve months. After the expiry of this period, they may apply for an additional term and, if selected, remain in office for another twelve-month term.

C. Selection process

Once you have received the applications, you should evaluate the application against your selection criteria.

If interviews are part of your selection process, you should schedule these and select a panel for these interviews. Interviews can be relatively short, but we recommend taking the time to better understand an applicant’s motivation and experience. Interviews are also useful for clarifying expectations and answering any questions that an applicant may have.

During the interview process, you may also identify candidates who aren’t appropriate for the panel but could contribute to your work in other ways (or vice versa).

Once you’ve selected your participants, you’ll need to notify all of the applicants.

For candidates who were not selected, you may want to suggest other ways they can engage, including the opportunity to contribute to specific issues.

For candidates who were selected, you will likely want to:

  • Share next steps;
  • Request a photo and short bio (including permission to use them publicly); and
  • Request that they agree to the working group’s participation and community standards.

You may or may not choose to make a public announcement of your final decision. If you opt to make a public announcement about the selected participants of your working group, use the photos and bios you received and create a short blog post announcing their participation and the purpose of the working group. Working group members can then share their participation with their networks (here’s an example from the CEMAC Panel).

+ 4. Operationalise the working group

A. Set up platforms

When operationalizing the working group, consider which platforms would be most effective for your context. These platforms should help you communicate effectively and efficiently with the participants and help the participants succeed in their assigned roles. For example, the selected platforms should help you to:

  • Conduct video calls for when sessions need to be conducted online;
  • Collaborate on working documents using shared drives;
  • Facilitate regular communication with participants; and
  • Keep working group activities on track using project management tools.

For the CEMAC Panel, we used:

  • Shared Google Drive folders and documents
  • Zoom for video calls
  • Outlook for scheduling meetings
  • WhatsApp
  • Slack (although this wasn’t very popular with panelists)

The CEMAC Panel was convened virtually. Doing so enabled us to include participants from six countries with minimal interruption to their day-to-day lives. It also enabled participation from people who might otherwise struggle to travel due to personal or professional obligations. If the working group will meet in-person, be sure to book a venue for this and make necessary arrangements. You may also need to organize interpreters and translators if participants speak different languages.

B. Allocate roles and responsibilities

At this point, you will need to allocate roles and responsibilities within your own team and among the participants. Roles to allocate may include:

  • Sending out meeting invitations;
  • Developing and sharing agendas for each session;
  • Taking notes during sessions and meetings;
  • Assisting with designing presentation decks;
  • Drafting reports;
  • Drafting blog posts; and
  • Acting as the first point of contact for all participants.

Most likely, you will want to set a recurring internal meeting to manage the workload.

C. Know where you’re headed

Frequently refer back to your terms of reference or the charter for the working group. How do you plan to connect the work of the working group back to influencing regulatory and policy change?

Keeping your theory of change and your relationship with stakeholders you would like to influence – such as regulators and policymakers or a specific government entity – front-and-center will help you stay focused as you kick off the working group.

D. Determine the structure of your convenings

Your topics, goals, and working group composition will inform the most effective structure for your convenings. In many cases, full participation is appropriate. But if the objective of your working group touches on many complex issues, you may opt for a combination of full working group convenings and smaller working groups focused on specific topics.

For example, with the CEMAC Panel, we created four working groups:

  1. Regional Financial Inclusion Strategy: Gender Dimension in Politics
  2. Regional Financial Inclusion Strategy: Gender Dimension in DFS Offerings
  3. Consumer Protection and DFS: Capacity-building
  4. Consumer Protection and DFS: Communications

At every stage, keep focused on the final audience (e.g., regulators and policymakers) and the final deliverable(s) (e.g., presentations, reports, draft legislation).

E. Organize your convenings

To the greatest extent possible, set your meeting schedule in advance and ensure that most participants can attend each meeting (for example, lunchtime meetings or meetings at 6 pm worked best for CEMAC Panelists). Try to send the agenda and relevant materials at least several days in advance. Have clear objectives for each meeting and structure your time with the panel to achieve those objectives.

For in-person meetings, encourage participants to attend in-person but allow for participants to dial in remotely if necessary.

Keep the sessions interactive and engaging. Especially with virtual gatherings, try to vary the format every 10-15 minutes (e.g., switch back and forth from full group to break-out groups). Also keep in mind that virtual participants miss out on the socialising and networking that come more naturally during in-person meetings. Devote time each meeting, even if it’s only 5-10 minutes, for different members to connect with one another through “icebreaker” activities and/or through collaborative work in support of the meeting’s goals. This approach can also be used for in-person meetings.

At the end of each meeting, leave time for Q&A, next steps, and a short feedback survey for participants to share what they learned and what the organizers can improve upon next time.

For example, the feedback survey we used with the CEMAC Panel had the following questions:

  • How satisfied were you with today's session? (Single select)
  • What aspect of the session went well? (Open-ended)
  • What aspect of the session would you improve? (Open-ended)
  • Do you have additional comments? (Open-ended)

Finally, it’s important to respect the time of participants and guests. Try to end meetings a few minutes early, if possible.

F. Offer additional capacity-building opportunities

Leverage the working group to help participants improve their understanding of the key issues and potential solutions to consider. You may organize presentations on related topics, including examples of how certain topics or challenges were tackled by other countries or groups. You may also offer participants the opportunity to build skills that will strengthen their ability to advocate for policy or regulatory change. This is a great opportunity to bring in guest speakers and external experts.

Such capacity building initiatives will both benefit your participants and enable them to more effectively contribute towards the objectives of the working group.

For example, members of the CEMAC Panel were invited to attend two optional workshops:

  1. A one-hour workshop on stakeholder negotiation with the FLPFI program at Tufts University.
  2. A one-hour course on the regulatory framework for consumer protection in the CEMAC zone by Yvette Rachel KALIEU ELONGO, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Dschang in Cameroon.

G. Create final deliverables

You should aim to have structured the panel meetings and the individual work from participants to lead directly to the final deliverables that you identified early in the process. The reality is usually a little more complicated, but most likely you’ll be fairly close to where you need to be. It is common for final deliverables to evolve depending upon the content of working group discussions and the agreed-upon solutions, and you may opt for a different format for your final deliverables.

At this stage, your internal team may need to consolidate the drafts created by participants or develop an additional output that was not initially identified. For example, with the CEMAC Panel, our team restructured the recommendations from the working groups into a report for regulators and infographics for participants.

+ 5. Develop an advocacy strategy

How do you ensure that your working group's hard work is properly considered by regulators and policymakers? An effective advocacy campaign will ensure that the key messages of the working group are conveyed to the intended audience.

While the specifics will vary from one panel to the next, you should be well positioned at this stage to identify opportunities to exert additional influence.

Here are a few questions to help you get started:

  • What have you learned about the priorities of relevant policymakers and regulators?
    • How can the working group’s outputs support those priorities?
  • Are there any internal advocates that you can support directly or indirectly?
    • Are there additional materials or materials in different formats that would be useful to your advocates?
  • What follow-up conversations can you arrange? Who should be present?
  • Are there other stakeholders that you or the participants can enlist to support your goals?
  • What communications activities will you lead? What communications activities will the participants lead?

+ 6. Present to decision-makers

This step can take multiple forms, depending upon the goals of the working group. For example, you could invite decisionmakers and other stakeholders you would like to influence to a working group meeting, ask working group members to connect individually with their contacts, have the convening organization share draft materials via email, and any number of other configurations.

In the case of the CEMAC Panel, we invited regulators and policymakers to a special panel meeting where several participants were tasked with presenting the entire panel’s recommendations. During this session, we asked regulators and policymakers to complete a poll after each section. The poll asked them to select the recommendations that aligned most closely with their priorities. It also asked them to share any additional feedback. We then used this poll to help guide the full-group conversation and to follow up with regulators and policymakers after the meeting.

+ 7. High-level advisory toolkit

The tools below will help you to manage the advisory panel in a way that meets your needs. They are simple and self-explanatory, and we hope the templates will help save you time and effort.

Each tool can be used independently and should be customized to your specific context. When used collectively, these tools can increase the efficacy of the advisory panel and will help you to:

  • Develop commitment structures to ensure participation, gain upfront buy-in, and clarify the expected outcomes from the consultation;
  • Use governance models to help develop consensus and manage the advisory panel;
  • Leverage meeting agendas to enable structured dialogue and focused discussions; and
  • Ensure all members of the advisory panel participate and are heard.

Charter template (Word)

This template can be used to ensure that panelists have a shared understanding of the scope and purpose of the advisory panel. The suggested structure and content is intended as a guide. This resource includes both a template of a working group or advisory panel charter and a sample charter. Please adapt, amend, and improve so it can be useful in your specific context.

Agenda template (Word)

When stakeholders feel valued and heard, you will learn more about the topics relevant to your work and will develop relationships that you can use in the future.

This resource includes both a template agenda and a sample agenda. Please adapt, amend, and improve so it can be useful in your specific context.

Meeting notes template (Word)

This resource includes both a template for meeting notes and sample meeting notes. Please adapt, amend, and improve so it can be useful in your specific context.

Remember to be aware of whom you enlist to take notes – oftentimes female team members are asked to take notes even if they are in more senior roles.

UNCDF Policy Accelerator Toolkit

This guide is part of the UNCDF Policy Accelerator Toolkit. Watch a video overview in English or French to learn more.

Watch the overview in English.

Watch the overview in French.

 
Alexis Ditkowsky
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