Starting from 2024, Finland will be the first Nordic country to establish a statutory transparency register. The law applies to organisations and persons professionally engaged in lobbying and its advice. It applies to national-level lobbying, meaning the parliament and the ministries.
Transparency register was part of the Government Programme of Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The aim is to improve the transparency of decision-making, combat inappropriate influencing and strengthen citizens’ trust in the central government and democracy.
The Avoimuusrekisteri.fi service will operate under the authority of the National Audit Office. Lobbyists will be able to register with the service from the beginning of 2024.
Lobbying activities and related consulting will be reported to the transparency register twice a year: the activities carried out between January and June will be reported in July–August and the activities carried out between July and December in January–February.
Lobster’s tips on how to prepare for the transparency register
With the help of Lobster, your organisation can gather and report the political stakeholder meetings conveniently.
1 Train your organisation’s personnel to identify reportable lobbying activities. At the same time, it is also good to familiarise your team with the good advocacy practice.
2 Implement a tool for gathering the information on lobbying activity within your organisation. When this information is collected centrally in a uniform form, reporting becomes a lot easier. With the help of Lobster, your team can conveniently coordinate and report meetings with political stakeholders, so that you can easily compile the information required for the transparency register into an activity report.
3 Train the advocacy team on how to use the tools needed for gathering the information. Lobster deployment always includes free user training and support for your team.
4 Create an easy channel for reporting random advocacy meetings. If there are people in your organisation who very rarely have meetings with influencers, the risk that they will not be reported increases. Establish a low-threshold notification channel such as e-mail to collect this information..
5 Note the EU General Data Protection Regulation GDPR. When information is collected about political contacts, this database is a subject to GDPR. GDPR applies to all political stakeholder information from databases to Excel lists, both on paper and in digital form. The collected information should be limited to the stakeholders’s role as a political decision maker. When a stakeholders leaves a political position, it must also be assessed whether there are gounds to keep any information related to the person.
6 Create routines to keep the stakeholder database up-to-date and GDPR compliant. When stakeholders information is managed centrally in Lobster, you can easily see what information accumulates over time. You can see how many stakeholders are in your organisation’s data and whose data has recent activity. With Lobster, you will also receive an immediate notification when a stakeholders in your organisation’s data moves away from a political position. This way you can assess whether there are still grounds for saving the stakeholders’s data. If there are no grounds, for example, in relation to reporting in the transparency register, the information should be deleted.
How Lobster can help
Many of our customers are now preparing for the upcoming legislation and the requirements it sets regarding the reporting of meetings with political stakeholders. As the information on these contacts need to be collected, now is a good time to get to learn how this information can be used to make advocacy work even more effective.
If your organisation is considering how to prepare for the future transparency register, please contact us. We will be happy to tell you how Lobster helps both in transparency register reporting and GDPR-compatible political stakeholder information management.
Interested? We will be happy to tell you more. Schedule an online demo of Lobster.