Archive for: Policy Dinners

I recently met with a possible client, and as part of a larger communications strategy, I suggested his business consider hosting a small policy dinner with an elite group of writers and scholars. I was met with a strange reaction – laughing.  He understood op-eds, speeches, even conferences. But a dinner? How is that going to help advance our issue campaign?

White House Writers Group has been organizing policy dinners for years, but using a meal as a platform to influence opinion has a much longer history in the nation’s capital. Dinner parties in Washington have been the source of politics and politicking since the days of Thomas Jefferson. As Catherine Allgor, the author of Parlor Politics writes, “Historians have long recognized the political advantages of Jefferson’s dinners, calling them part of his statecraft.”

Jefferson was strategic with his dinner parties, giving them throughout the political “season,” or Congressional session.  He typically hosted guests from one political party at a time, careful not to mix Republicans and Federalists.  But these were not official state dinners, the way we’re accustomed to hearing about today. Rather, they were intended to be much more “democratic” and generally reflected the president’s casual, Virginia hospitality.  Jefferson’s dinners espoused democracy, always using a round table, for instance, to encourage easy conversation, intimacy, and equality.

The act of breaking bread with others helps merge the personal with the political, engage in debate, bridge differences, and move opinion.  And in Washington, it appears, we have a long tradition of using food to advance political change.

When considering communications strategy, most people think of television, radio, publications, and the Internet — this even though research has long found that face-to-face communications is often, perhaps always, the most effective.

When targeting elites, we at WHWG are big fans of policy dinners.  We gather between 10 and thirty of the kind of people our client wants to reach.  They may be D.C.-based journalists, or part of the Washington policy world (usually not current office holders but people office holders consult), or industry elites around the country (high tech or financial leaders for example), or even policy and political leaders in London or Brussels.  We hold the dinners at private clubs or fashionable homes or in the private dining areas of first-class restaurants.  We attract guests with a featured speaker (usually the client’s CEO or a globally acknowledged expert on the issue we want our guests to think about).  At least one member of the client’s staff is present, too. Read