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Sydney-headquartered advocacy group Tanck has successfully secured $2 billion in funding outcomes for social sector organisations since it was founded in 2020, with executive director Angus Crowther urging clients not to pin their hopes on one particular political party.
Crowther, who co-founded the consultancy with Neil Pharoah, says social purpose organisations often make the mistake of thinking "we can only talk to this party because they’re the only one that cares about us".
"I think you actually need to be trying to persuade people on both sides of the aisle of the merit - the value of what you’re doing," he tells Business News Australia.
"There's a common value between the people on the right and the people on the left. It’s just expressed differently, so when we bring that together, that's how we're able to help clients build relationships with people across all parties.
"I would like people to feel hopeful and optimistic about politics and the possibility of what you can achieve if you know how to navigate those systems, because there's so much negativity around it, and there are so many compounding and competing problems in our society."
Crowther clarifies the Tanck team, now comprising 12 people, are not lobbyists but rather share political knowledge and skills to help "transform social purpose organisations into their own best advocates".
What the social entrepreneur finds motivating is helping people see an opportunity and "seize it", emphasising the consultancy works with so many organisations whose work "really matters".
There are numerous examples of these successes with real world impacts, although Crowther is hindered by his own policy to let clients own the spotlight.
"One piece that's always stayed with me was we worked with an organisation that supports children that have a parent in prison," says Crowther, who won the 2024 Australian Young Entrepreneur Award - Sustainability & Social Responsibility.
"What was happening at the time was a state government was cutting around $1.5 million of funding from their program, which would have meant that they’d have to get rid of the psychologists that they employed to support these kids and the parents. That service would have disappeared.
"What we were able to do was to turn that around, get that decision reversed, so that funding was maintained. I love that in terms of being able to safeguard funding."
Crowther points to another win in the first half of 2024 that helped one non-profit client in the training and skills space, which especially helps those from marginalised and disadvantaged backgrounds, in securing a Commonwealth tender worth more than $500 million.
"That was a huge uptick on what they’d received previously – they’re a good operator, but being able to help them expand the scope of where they deliver services is what's increased the value of that tender as well," he says.
"We've also done work in the birth trauma space - there was a charity recently that had been operating for a couple of years but basically with no money, where we helped them secure a couple of hundred thousand dollars of seed funding from the Commonwealth Government, which has made a big difference for them."
For other clients though, it's not necessarily about just securing funding but all kinds of positive outcomes, such as helping with project approvals or policy arrangements.
"That one is really hard to quantify. We worked with a national training organisation that were predominantly based in NSW. We helped them, under the Berejiklian Government, get a first-of-its-kind 10-year strategy, and they got into that strategy. Outcomes like that are equally important," he says.
Crowther says while the consultancy is focused on progressive issues and progressive courses, it's important to note that prior to Labor being in government both federally and in NSW, most of the money secured for clients was from Coalition governments.
He says approaches to different parties can be either quite nuanced or completely different, depending on the issue.
"If we're dealing with a pitch to a Labor government, we're always thinking what are the values that motivate them and sit beneath all of their decisions as opposed to the Coalition, and increasingly now as opposed to the Teals," Crowther explains.
"How is it that we can frame what it is that our clients are trying to do in such a way that it appeals to their particular worldview and ideology while remaining consistent with the values of the client's organisation, so that there’s never a betrayal in that space?
"By growing their influence with government, we ensure that organisations can better inform policy and decisions that affect them, while delivering valuable insights directly to government."
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