Author: Penny

As the title of my blog suggests, I am a freelance PR working mainly in the public and voluntary sectors, on projects from small scale copywriting to big social marketing projects. In my time I've worked for government departments, the BBC and a range of other organisations of various stages of dysfunctionality. Now I'm trying to get to grips with the world of the micro-business and facing up to the recession with a fair bit of trepidation.

Singing the public sector blues

It’s unlikely that 38Degrees will be organising flashmobs to protest about the cutting of marketing and consultancy budgets in the public sector.  There won’t be a harrowing Boys From the Blackstuff sequel showing the  impact of unemployment on the PR consultant communities of north London.   Newsnight’s package last night about the potential impact of cuts to services in Sheffield has already been called “lefty bollocks” by one esteemed Tory blogger, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for an outraged  backlash from the commentariat either.  But, other than the Guardian (inevitably), no-one much seems to have noticed that cutting the government comms budget is going to have a hefty impact on the private sector too.  Lots of small consultancies  mixed public sector with private sector work.  It helped them to stay in business so that they could employ their own staff and sub-contract printers, designers, writers  and event management companies.  It paid for ad space in print and on TV, direct mail, web development , exhibition stands and a multitude of other things.  The money got spread around and (whisper it) a lot of the campaigns it paid for did a lot of good.

It’s not that I didn’t expect cuts to comms – an obvious target if ever there was one, and much more sobering cuts were also made yesterday.   I’m just concerned about what happens when you take £270m worth of business out of an industry containing a large number of  SMEs that’s just coming out of a recession.

Look on my works ye mighty and despair

Strange feeling reading the papers since the election result, as though the whole of my working life for the past few years has been written up on a giant etch-a-sketch  and is now being slowly erased.  I have, over the past few years, worked in different capacities on or alongside Every Child Matters, Building Schools for the Future  and the QCA amongst other things for the DfES;  on support for victims of sexual violence (Home Office ) and on equalities legislation ( GEO )  All of it now seems potentially to be threatened,  gone or going.  I am the Typhoid Mary of government communications.

I suppose this is the inevitable result of working with the civil service – as someone once explained it to me we’re the chauffeurs, Ministers chose the destination, we just get them there the best way we can.  The destination on my stuff has evidently changed, so mirror, signal, manoeuvre and off we go again – even if  lots of good stuff seems to be being jettisoned along the way.  How much weirder it must be to have been one of the Ministers and now watch the whole thing being dismantled as you are plunged into irrelevance and obscurity.

A Department by any other name?

Intrigued by Michael Gove’s instant decision to change the name of the Dept for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to the Dept for Education before he’d opened his first red box.

I was at DfES when it took responsibility for children’s issues, and led some of the early work on communicating the Every Child Matters programme.  It took a LONG time for the Department to get out of its  “education, education, education” mindset and start to think about children’s services as  an equal part of what it was about.  I remember an excruciating planning meeting looking at the  strategy for the whole Department, which focused so exclusively on schools’ standards that those of us working on children’s policy complained of feeling like the mad relatives locked in the attic that no-one wanted to talk about.  Eventually things changed –  some might argue it went too far the other way (though not, I’d guess,  thousands of children in care who still have much worse chances in life than their more fortunate peers).

So, does this symbolic name change mean that children’s services are being shoved back in the Departmental attic?  A quick google to find things Gove has said about children’s services reveals much complaining about Baby Peter but not many policy clues, and a rather worrying willingness to dismantle what’s been put in place.

There’s another blog post (or possibly a rather dull book) to be written about what worked and what didn’t on Every Child Matters, and I agree that there are levels of bureaucracy now in place that might well stand in the way of positive action.  I’d be happier if I could see some more definite thinking about what the Tories want to do in this area – and some recognition that children’s policy isn’t just about supporting families through the tax system.

24 hour news, a modern curse

So, having stayed up all Thursday night to watch the results, and having been glued to TV, radio, newspapers, blogs and (especially) Twitter ever since, I now find myself watching a live stream of nothing happening in front of a teal blue door as the future of the government is not announced – yet. Is there a medical name for an unhealthy obsession with events you have no power to influence?

Look, will you please just vote?

everyvotecounts

I’m not sure I completely buy the “there’s no need to be afraid of a hung parliament” schtick that’s been going around since Cleggmania first hit.  I don’t believe our politicians are grown-up enough to act in the nation’s interest and come together in the kind of coalition people seem to have in mind when they talk about it (interesting how “hung-parliament” elides neatly into “coalition government” in so many articles about the subject).  I’m  pessimistic enough to fear squabbling, back room deals and horse-trading on an epic scale and a re-run of the ’70s when sick MPs were carried through the lobbies on stretchers to keep the government of the day in business.  But even that is better than what we have now.   I’ve  never seen a better argument for political reform than this –  tactical voting guidance for how to vote if you’re in a Lib/Con or Con/Lab marginal,  a Lab or Lib seat with a very small majority, a new constituency created by boundary changes or one of the oddities where minority parties have a shout.  I’m lucky that my personal preference and the tactical necessity in this constituency point the same way so I can vote for what I want with a clear conscience.   But if a hung parliament is the way to get political reform so that we never have to do this again, then bring it on.  And, please vote.

Voting for a hung parliament

I find myself  praying nightly for a hung parliament. Partly because I  want to see some long overdue political reform, but mainly, I have to confess, out of  morbid curiosity to see what happens when the old system finally implodes.

On a purely personal level it will probably mean another election soon (the Tories are already tapping up their donors, apparently).  As purdah has stopped much of the work I’ve been doing in its tracks and put a serious dent in my cash flow, that won’t be good for business. (Although I suppose no one within touching distance of the public sector will be able to afford to do anything at all soon, so I’ll be forced to diversify either way!)

For once I wish I was back inside a Department just to see this unfolding from the inside.  The one general election campaign fought  when I was working in Whitehall felt like a foregone conclusion.  Lip service was paid to the possibility that things might change, but no-one really believed that it would.   I remember writing lots of pointless briefing on the state of policy for new Ministers who I knew wouldn’t be walking through the door, and doing lots of compare-and-contrast of party manifestos to prepare colleagues for change that we knew wasn’t going to happen.  It must feel very different in there now.  For fellow obsessives, here’s the BBC’s take on what happens in a hung parliament and what Gus O’Donnell has said about  the roles civil servants might play.

The good stuff for April

Social media tools for small businesses, unearthed last month…

 

This is the Morden World

To R’s school a couple of nights ago for parents’ evening (how weird it is to be doing as a grown-up the things you remember your parents doing when you were the child).

Apparently she is topp at Hist and Geog, German, Maths, Tech, Science and RE (where she is trying to convert  the other kids in her class to atheism).  She can almost play Fairy Bells on the piano and may not be able to recite The Brook, but has put together an anthology of her own peotry (all right, all right,  I’ll stop with the St Custard’s stuff now)

There are, of course drawbacks.  As her (otherwise fantastic) English teacher pointed out in her report:  “Her spelling is her Achilles heal” (the title is one of hers, but with teachers like that…); but she knows she needs to work at it, she’s getting better, and she is  filled with enthusiasm for EVERYTHING the school has to teach her. She’ll do just fine.

Obviously I can’t speak for all schools in Tower Hamlets, but the ones I know about are pretty impressive.  Don’t let Michael Gove spook you.  Education isn’t in crisis because children can’t recite the dates of the Kings and Queens of England.  They’re  learning different things these days, that’s all.  And they learn them in different ways because the world is changing.  I hate the New Labour managerial-speak of enrichment activities and learning outcomes just as much as any other literate person,  but I do understand that different doesn’t necessarily mean worse.

Bigotry and outrage

Turned the Today programme off, violently, at ten past eight this morning, but not before shouting things at James Naughtie that, had they been picked up on Sky, I would certainly have had to apologise for.

I lost it when Naughtie said that, by agreeing to the leaders’ debates, Gordon Brown made the election camapaign into a personality contest so must accept it when his personality becomes the story of the day.  The idea that the media have been diligently following policy issues for years until being forced to talk about personalities by the sight of politicians debating in public is as hilarious as it’s infuriating.  The papers have been desperate for something like this to happen to liven things up. They’ve finally got the gaffe they’ve been waiting for.  Watch them make the most of it.

How to get the best out of working with a freelancer

I enjoyed PR Week’s piece about good practice in client/agency relations.  They should do an0ther with ideas about the agency/freelance relationship.   After all, there can’t be many agencies who don’t rely on bringing in specialists to beef up their teams on occasion, yet I’ve only ever once been asked by an agency for my opinion on how they worked with freelancers.  Lots of agencies are delightful to work with, and some of them have become really good friends as well as clients.  But there are still things that drive me nuts about even the nicest of clients. So, if you want to keep in the right side of the freelancers you subcontract, how about:

1.  Paying us on time.  Within thirty days is fine – sooner is always nice.  At least one agency I know about (no names. no pack drill) demands payment from their clients on receipt of invoice but won’t pay contractors for 60 days. Now, that’s just not playing fair.

2. Not asking us to do work for free – although this can be a tricky area and there isn’t  a hard and fast rule.  For example,  I’m happy to do some time uncharged on things like brainstorms for pitch presentations if I think that there’s a possiblility of work coming up in future – or if it’s with a client who gives me enough other work to make it worth my while.  But at least one (former) client of mine has a  habit of asking me to look at ideas they are preparing for pitches in areas they know I’ve specialised in, as a favour.  They don’t offer to pay me for time spent on the pitch, and they don’t offer me any work if they get the job because it’s all done in-house.  Why should I give them my time and experience for nothing?  They are, after all, the commodities I sell to make a living.

3. Let us know what happens next.  I’ve done a lot of work on putting pitches together for agencies, come up with the ideas, drafted the documents, waved the team off on the day.  It’s depressingly common to have to go back to my client to ask whether they won the business or not.  I always ask for feedback on what I did and  I’d like to learn from them – if only they’d tell.  Only one agency has ever asked me what I thought of their pitch team and process.  Unsusprisingly its one of the agencies I like working for most!

4.  And of course the real basics.  Brief us as well as you brief your own staff and treat us like part of the team – for the duration of the contract that’s exactly what we are.