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Automating Transparency Register Reporting: How Smart Organisations Use Lobster to Save Time and Ensure Compliance
Reporting government-level lobbying activities in Finland to the Transparency Register is here to stay. However, the new bulk reporting interface for the Transparency Register is finally arriving, so now is the perfect time to ensure your organisation’s reporting is timely, accurate, and as effortless as possible. Lobster automates the entire process. When your organisation’s advocacy…
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GDPR-Compliant Stakeholder Data: A Simple Maintenance Routine for Political Stakeholder Tracking
In today’s data-driven world, GDPR compliance isn’t just a legal requirement—it’s a commitment to ethical data management. For organisations tracking political stakeholders, such as legislators, officials, and key decision-makers, maintaining accurate, up-to-date, and compliant data is essential. It’s not just about avoiding fines; it’s about building trust, ensuring transparency, and safeguarding your reputation. Why GDPR…
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CSCR is Coming, is your organisation ready?
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is an EU regulation that broadens and deepens sustainability reporting requirements for businesses. It focuses on improving transparency around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, requiring detailed disclosures on companies’ impacts, risks, and contributions to sustainable development. CSRD also includes specific provisions for reporting on political conduct and lobbying…
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Lobster’s New Summary Report: Get a Comprehensive View of Your Lobbying Efforts
Managing lobbying activities can often feel fragmented and difficult to track. Amidst numerous meetings and various projects, it’s easy to lose sight of where your efforts have been focused and which contacts have been the most significant. To address this challenge, we at Lobster have developed a new summary report that provides a clear overview…
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Navigating Transparency: SuomiAreena 2024 and the New Finnish Lobbying Laws
Welcome to SuomiAreena 2024, where lively discussions on politics, culture, and societal issues meet the summer days of Pori. This year, there’s an exciting twist: it’s the first SuomiAreena happening under the new Finnish Transparency Register law. We’re stepping into a new era of transparency in lobbying, and trust us, it’s more straightforward than it…
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The Transparency Register is Coming – Is Your Organisation Ready?
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…
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Introducing Pinning to Timelines
How are your team’s lobbying actions related to what goes on in the world around you? And how are the stakeholders reacting to your lobbying efforts? Lobster now allows pinning news, tweets, and links to other online resources on project timelines to build a full picture of what is going on. Pinning is easy and…
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Bring Your Political Monitoring into the Digital Era
Political information is scattered to thousands of different sources and documents. Twitter discussions, political newsfeeds, stakeholder activity, legislative projects, votes, and parliamentary questions… Manually tracking all the relevant information can eat up your working hours. Lobster provides a powerful window to political information We monitor automatically the activity of the political stakeholders and organisations in…
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Update Comments for Better Team Communication
A Central part of Lobster’s user interface is the Update Comment. Update comments will help your team members communicate the progress being made. The comments you write will be visible to your team members in the notifications menu, notification emails, and in the weekly email digest. How do Update Comments work? Every time you edit…
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10 Benefits of using Lobster
Now that your organisation has started using Lobster, what are the ways this new tool can make your work easier? We listed a few: 1 Easy access to up-to-date political stakeholder data will save your precious timeThe core of Lobster is the stakeholder data, which is kept meticulously up-to-date. With the key information in one…
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What is the GDPR footprint of your advocacy work?
Any organisation that does effective advocacy work tends to accumulate stakeholder data of politicians and officials over time. This information is often related to documenting past meetings or to the planning of future advocacy work. How should this information be managed to stay in GDPR compliance? Storing stakeholder data, whether on paper or in digital…
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The Danger of the Forgotten Stakeholder List
In a recent case, France’s personal data protection agency CNIL fined US firm Monsanto 400,000 euros for a GDPR violation. The company had compiled personal data files of politicians, journalists, activists, and scientists seen as being influential in the debate over glyphosate use in Europe. While compiling stakeholder lists is not in itself illegal, it…
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Successful Lobbying Teams Plan, Measure and Learn
Lobbying is often seen as art rather than science, as an intuitive process based on ad hoc improvising and mobilizing informal political connections. Reality is far different, at least if we ask Iskander De Bruycker, Assistant Professor in EU Politics and Policy at Maastricht, and Aaron McLoughlin, who is a Senior Advisor at FleishmanHillard. In…
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Lobster’s Stakeholder Profiles – All the relevant up-to-date information in one package
The core of Lobster is the up-to-date Stakeholder Data, which currently consists of over 5000 Finnish and over 6000 EU stakeholders, politicians and officials, and their organisations. Although we are currently focusing on Finland and the EU, we are currently expanding to cover Sweden and Norway and offer limited data packages on both countries. Our stakeholder…
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Lobster’s Twitter integration: Never miss an opportunity for conversation
Recently we integrated Twitter to Lobster as it is an important platform for political conversation. With the help of Lobster, it is now easier to keep an eye on both stakeholders and topics that are relevant to your work. Lobster tracks the tweets of the 6000+ political stakeholders in our master data as well as…
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Lobster reports: The Big Picture of Your Organisations Stakeholder Activities
One of the key advantages of Lobster is that you can see everything that is going on in your organisation, at a glance. Whether you are writing an annual report or planning future activities, you need to see the big picture. Which organisations and stakeholders has your team met recently? Who were they not able…
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Calendar Exports Now Available at Lobster
At Lobster we try to listen carefully to our customers to find out what makes their work easier. Today we are happy to present a feature that many of you have been asking for: the calendar export. We know it sounds like a small thing, but when you are actively planning many future meetings, it…
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Action and how to create one
Actions will become very familiar to Lobster users as they are at the core of the lobbying work. Actions are stakeholder meetings, events, campaigns and other internal or external meetings related to your lobbying projects. Adding actions to Lobster will give your team a heads up on upcoming stakeholder meetings, in case they have an…
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TODO and how to create one
TODOs help your team plan future activities by delegating tasks to different team members. Each TODO is connected to a Project, and therefore, TODOs helps to structure the progress of projects. To create a new TODO just click the circle with + button on the top right of any page and select Add new TODO…
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Project and how to create one
Projects are where most of the work happens. This is where you plan, coordinate and track the progress of your lobbying campaigns. All actions such as stakeholder meetings are reported as part of a project. In Lobster, a project is always part of a larger theme. Compared to a theme, a project has a more…
