October's Ottawa Lobbying Update #3
October's Ottawa Lobbying Update #3
last month's top-consultants and lobby-firms
Each month, Queen Street Analytics publishes four reports on the government relations landscape in Ottawa, analyzing noteworthy patterns across (#1) the most lobbying-active sectors and organizations, (#2) the most lobbied government institutions and public officials (DPOHs), (#3) the most active lobby-firms and lobbyist-consultants, and (#4) the most lobbied-on and discussed subjects, themes, issues and topics. Our approach is not journalistic and we don’t report on anecdotes or on the news cycle. Instead, we use statistical and machine-learning enabled analytics to uncover patterns, trends, and opportunities, giving our subscribers an enhanced toolkit to navigate the government relations landscape.
In our newsletter#3 for the month of October we look Ottawa’s most active consultant lobbying firms last month. “Last month” is a somewhat fluid concept in this newsletter, as we strike a balance between considering data that is as current as possible but also as complete as possible. For registrations, last month means just that, i.e. September. For communications, however, it takes the government roughly until the end of October to have a complete picture of September, and we therefore discuss the August and September data side by side.
The CliffsNotes version:
Sussex Strategy Group is currently topping the September firm-leaderboard for filed communications with 22. In August, Sussex came second on the leaderboard with 35, behind Capital Hill Group’s 45
Alik Angaladian at Maple Leaf Strategies is currently topping the September consultant-leaderboard for filed communications with 8, while Dan Lovell at Sussex Strategy Group topped the August leaderboard with 21.
Rubicon Strategy, Crestview Strategy, and Hill+Knowlton top the firm-leaderboard for new registrations in September.
Andy Singh at Rubicon Strategy easily tops September’s consultant-leaderboard for new registrations, with 9.
See last month’s newsletter #3 for a broader investigation into which sectors hire consultants and which do their lobbying in-House:
1. Lobby-Firms’ and Lobbyists’ Communication Leaderboards
As of Oct 15th, September shows 263 in-House communications filed vs 146 involving consultant lobbyists; and these drew from 99 and 81 registrations respectively. In contrast, the (complete) August data show 1049 in-House communications filed vs 451 involving consultant lobbyists; and these drew from 381 and 295 registrations respectively.
Exhibit 1 shows the number of communication filings in September (data incomplete) and August (data complete). Sussex, Impact and Crestview currently top the leaderboard for September, after having come in at 2nd, 4th and 8th in August, when Capital Hill Group and StrategyCorp came 1st and 3rd on the leaderboard.
The surprise package in September is Impact Public Affairs, which Exhibit 2 (a snapshot from LobbyIQ) shows ranks only 15th on a twelve-month lobby communications leaderboard, but currently sits at second for the month.
Which individual lobbyists drove most communication filings activity?
Exhibit 2 shows the individual lobbyists’ leaderboard for September/August 2023. Interestingly, the individual leaderboard is topped by Alik Angaladian from Maple Leaf Strategies, i.e. a firm that ranked 15th on the August firm-leaderboard, and ranks 4th in September only because of Alik’s activity. Alik filed 8 meetings for September thus far (column 3), all associated with a single registration.
Readers who seek a closer look at the registrations that drove the leaderboards in Exhibits 1 and 2, can do so on LobbyIQ’s lobby-firm dashboards.
2. Lobby-Firms’ and Lobbyists’ Registration Leaderboards
Next, we have a look at which lobby firms topped the leaderboard of new registrations posted in September 2023.
For this purpose, we explicitly exclude registration-renewals, and we take care not to double-count multiple registrations per firm-client pair (i.e. when individual consultants’ file separate registrations).
Exhibit 4 shows September’s leaderboard, listing the number of new registrations (NewReg) as well as the number of those that represents a novel relationship, i.e. where there was not already a previous registration between a lobby-firm and client.
Rubicon Strategy, Crestview Strategy, and Hill+Knowlton top the firm-leaderboard for new registrations in September, and in all three cases the majority of new registrations signify a genuinely new client-relationship.
Rubicon’s top-position is impressive, seeing as Exhibit 2 ranks it only 16th by twelve-month communication activity. One part of the explanation is that Rubicon tends to generate more registrations relative to communications in general, i.e. it appears to focus more than other firms on broadening its portfolio of clients: Exhibit 5 shows that when we re-sort firms by number of active registrations on LobbyIQ’s dashboard, Rubicon actually ranks 11th overall on that metric. A second part of the explanation is that one consultant at Rubicon had a bumper-month in September, bringing in nine new registrations and topping the individual registration-leaderboard, as we will see in Exhibits 7 and 8 below.
Exhibit 6 breaks down the new registrations of the top-5 firms on Exhibit 4’s leaderboard. The NewRel-column is the same as in Exhibit 4, and the last column indicates when multiple consultants filed registrations for the same firm-client relationship (which we do not want to double-count in our firm-leaderboard).
We recommend LobbyIQ’s lobbyfirm-dashboards as the best tool for taking a deeper dive into the data underpinning Exhibit 6. For example, Exhibit 7 shows a snapshot of the Active Registration exhibit on their dashboard for Rubicon, from where users can open up each registration for further details.
Exhibit 7 shows that nine of Rubicon’s ten new registrations were filed by the same consultant, Andy Singh. This observation provides the perfect segway into our consultant-leaderboard for September’s registrations, displayed in Exhibit 8. Unsurprisingly, Andy Singh easily tops that leaderboard with his nine new registrations, while Hill+Knowlton’s Neil Brodie comes in at second with 4.
In next week’s fourth and last monthly newsletter for October, we take a look at some machine-learning enabled text analytics on lobby meetings’ subject matters and "hidden themes," as well as the most issues that drove government-internal discussions in Ottawa in September.
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