Trade Associations Editing and Proofreading Services

A trade association speaks for an industry whose members compete with each other and disagree about almost everything except that they would like less regulation and lower costs. Its public positions have to be agreed by companies of very different size, and the version that everyone signs is frequently the version that says nothing. Government departments know this, and an association that arrives with a position statement carrying no specifics is treated as a lobby to be managed rather than a source to be consulted.

We edit what trade associations and industry bodies produce — policy positions and consultation responses, technical submissions to regulators and standards bodies, member briefings on regulatory change, industry codes of practice and their compliance guidance, benchmarking and sector data reports, member surveys and their analysis, government and parliamentary briefing material, press releases and media comment, member recruitment and renewal material, event and conference programmes, training and qualification material for the sector, competition law compliance guidance for meetings, and secretariat governance and committee papers. Our editors are conscious that everything an association writes is read by members who compete with each other.

The position statement that survives member consultation without becoming meaningless is the association's central craft problem. Consultation among competing members produces reversion to the lowest common denominator, and the resulting document — supporting proportionate regulation that balances the needs of all stakeholders — gets filed. We work on these so the association distinguishes what its members actually agree on, which is usually more than they think, from what divides them by size or business model, and states both; because "our larger members support X, our smaller members cannot absorb the cost, and here is the threshold that would resolve it" is genuinely useful to an official and cannot be produced by anyone else. We make the technical evidence the association holds do the work rather than the assertion of industry concern, since the data is what a department cannot get elsewhere. And we write the drafting so it cannot be read as an agreement between competitors on commercial matters, which is the exposure associations create for themselves in exactly these documents.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including member data, positions in development and committee papers. We are editors rather than legal, regulatory or competition law advisers, and we offer no view on any policy position or on competition law compliance — that requires your own counsel. What we can do is make submissions specific and useful rather than defensively vague.