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.

Evaluation

Interesting piece in PR Week about the evaluation of PR campaigns and how long agencies can or should keep using the advertising value equivalent figure as a measure of success. The piece repeats all the reasons I’ve always mistrusted AVE as a measure – just colonising space in a paper for an article is no guarantee that anyone reads it, agrees with it or acts on it; it doesn’t offer a means of measuring social media comment; and for obvious reasons it can’t measure one of the key activities of a good PR – keeping bad stories out of the papers. How much might it have been worth to the BBC if the PR response to the Ross/Brand row had been niftier and those acres of press coverage about declining moral standards hadn’t been printed? How could you have measured it if it had happened?

Evaluation gets even harder when the campaign you are evaluating is trying to generate long-lasting behavioural/attitudinal change, as many of the campaigns run by government are. It takes years to achieve real social change – it’s taken decades for drink-driving to have become socially unacceptable, for example.  No client is going to pay for tracking research over a decade to prove whether or not they achieved their objective.  And no agency could wait that long to be paid. Who decides that social change has taken place?  As an agency, how do we demonstrate that the change was due to us and wouldn’t have happened anyway? Ultimately we’re forced back on easy to measure indicators: the delivery of materials on time/  budget, target take-up rates of info packs or testing kits among certain sections of the audience, an agreed level of media coverage measured through AVE or WOTS (weighted opportunities to see – which can generate their own meaninglessly surreal statistics, apparently there were 1.4billion WOTS for stories about bird flu in this country (pop 60m) during the last time we had a health scare).  On the occasions when I’ve been sitting on the client’s rather than the agency’s side of the process, I’ve always had my doubts that I’d be able to really measure the success of what I was being offered. COI were making a big noise about their new evaluation process, Artemis, a while ago – does it work?

Hating the Daily Mail – a game for all the family

Read over someone’s shoulder on the tube an ad  in Metro for today’s Daily Mail:  “What to do when your daughter is obsessed with her weight – AT JUST SEVEN?” .  And I think we can all agree that poor body image, an obsession with weight and diet and an unhealthy fixation on being thin are a curse affecting women from an increasingly young  age.

Can I suggest that one answer for the writer of the article is “don’t ever let her look at the Daily Mail”?  Yesterday’s Metro (seen the same way, I never actually pick the damn thing up) carried an ad for the Mail crowing:  “The brilliant article all women should read – what’s YOUR fat age?”  Apparently Carol Vorderman is really 48 but has a fat age of 50 – evidently got some work to do, eh Carol?  I looked at the site to get the link and saw that the top picture on the home page is of actress Kirstie Alley (or “bloated yo-yo dieter Kirstie Alley” as they describe her) grimly promising to get back into her bikini.

Why any woman should read the Mail – far less write for it – is a mystery to me.  It hates us for being too fat and too thin; for worrying too much about our weight and for not caring enough;  for going out to work thus neglecting our children and for staying at home and wasting our potential.  It thinks we dress too young for our age and too frumpily, and  is constantly on guard to warn us about the horrible diseases of mind and body that we poor weak creatures are prone too.

The Mail is so successful among women that we must really like this stuff.  Perhaps the female equivalent of Englishmen  who like to be spanked is women who like to be told by Paul Dacre that they are rubbish. I remember reading an interview by Irma Kurtz, who used to write the agony column for Cosmo in the UK and US edition.  She said that the big difference between the two sets of readers was that while  an American would ask “why on  earth is my boyfriend treating me like this?” the Brits would ask “what did I do wrong to make my boyfriend treat me like this?”  But at least the Mail is always on hand to  point out our errors. As it said in my favourite  Mail headline of all time, last summer “Why single women who say they’re happy are lying“  (trying to find the link I put “single women who think” into the Mail search engine and the page crashed…)

Peace at last

My email system has died.  I can send stuff out but no-one can get stuff  to me  – which suits me temperamentally rather well.  I will have to fix it, in fact it has prodded me into sorting out a proper  domain name/website for the business which I have been putting off for reasons of incompetence and sloth for about a year.  But,  Lord the relief of turning on the system and not finding hundreds of offers to “increase my manhood”, sell me a fake Rolex or an MBA, or do whatever it is those guys who write to me in Russian want me to do.  It can’t last.  But surprisingly the answer to that perennial question “what on earth did we do before email?” is “coped really well, actually.”

Nostalgia and armadillos

Stewart Lee ranted about modern TV and in particular the current state of Channel 4 (a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home) on his show a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I have been nostalgic for the days when I worked at C4 and we did good stuff.  Arts programmes about the arts, that made you think ; documentaries that changed the law , added to the gaiety of the nation, and that were fought over in court.

Of course, it might  be that Channel 4 is just the same rag bag of good stuff and tripe that it always was and what I’m really nostalgic for is being 27 again.  But what the hell.  It’s my birthday and I’m allowed to have the odd madeleine moment about TV  programmes of the 1990s if I want. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, here’s a tribute to the only armadillo in history known to have introduced an arts programme (and subsequently to have died of a broken heart). 

Never trust a man with a red velvet smoking jacket

… a life lesson learned from an article I read in Vanity Fair about the wealthy victims of Bernie Madoff and his associates in America.  The article is recommended for the sound of outraged rich people coming, shrilly, to the realisation that bad things can happen to them too.  Along with some fab bitchiness from the heights of US society, the article points out the danger of having all your eggs in one basket.  The people who were financially wiped out were the ones who trusted Madoff with everything they had rather than spreading the risk.   In freelance terms that’s the same as allowing yourself to be dependent on one client for too much work.  I got burned that way before when I was doing almost all my work for a part of Channel 4 which disappeared in an unexpected corporate restructure.  The realisation has hit recently that this concentration of work is happening again, although as the market shrinks the possibilty of spreading the risk is less than it used to be.  I will, however, do my best to diversify, otherwise I might end up having to sell the furs and the jewels and give up the membership of the Palm Beach country club…

It just goes to show

I liked David Mitchell’s column in Sunday’s Observer about the torrents  of personal abuse and naked aggression that seems to be unleashed in those who post comments on newspaper articles and blogs.  His suggestion is that the sane and reasonable among us should post “It just goes to show you can’t be too careful” whenever threads seem to be taking a nasty turn, in the  hope that it will exert a calming influence.  Pleasingly his column is now the most popular on the Guardian site with a string of more than 1400 posts, all saying the same thing, meandering over a couple of pages of virtual space.

Not that I’m a victim of this myself, in this safe and stodgy backwater of wordpress’s empire; but for various reasons I’ve been looking at the message boards on a number of sites about civil liberties and the “surveillance state” recently.  Frankly I’ve rarely come across a bunch of people I would like less to be trapped in a lift with – and it depresses me hugely because it’s  a really important subject and the Convention on Liberty which kicked off my recent reading was addressed by almost every person in public life I still respect.  Some of the comments however – jeez.  When did reasoned argument, respect for the facts and a willingness to see another person’s point of view cease to be the way that political points are made?  (I know I sound like Colonel Blimp as I type this, but one of the points of  that rather wonderful film is that we  lose the civilty that Blimp stands for at our peril.  I  cling defiantly to my status as a crusted bore.)

I love the idea that technology offers a democratising tool by which everyone can take part in public debate.  But blimey, we need to get our acts together and start using it like grown ups before the whole process is so degraded that it is easily ignored.

Parental choice

At 7am tomorrow we will find out which secondary school our daughter will go to next year.  The closer the moment gets the more I am convinced that the whole concept of parental choice  in schools is a callous joke.  I don’t feel I have any choice in which school R goes to and it’s an illusion to suggest that I do.   I can express a preference, but I can’t make a choice for the obvious reason that not everyone can go to the one local school which is regularly lauded by OfSTED as one of the best in the country and which is consequently first choice for every parent in the area.  (This isn’t leafy Surrey, by the way, it’s gritty east London which somehow makes the achievement even more remarkable) As a friend of mine said yesterday, the only way you can be sure your child will go to Morpeth is if you gave birth in the playground and never moved outside it.

Schools Ministers have for years been arguing that parents want yet more  choice in education.  The theory seems to be that if schools are pitted against each other in some kind of Darwinian fight for survival, with parents’ votes as the mark of survival, then they will pull their fingers out and standards will rise.  This is evidently not true and runs contrary to another strand of government policy which is about getting schools to collaborate to share resources and expertise.

The continued stress on choice and competition also flies in the face of all of the research, which repeatedly says that parents just want government to make every school good, so that every parent feels happy to send their child to whichever is nearest.  Make every school a Morpeth and all parents will have their choice.  Make it illegal to discriminate against children on the grounds of their parents’ religion (or lack of it) and at least everyone is in with a chance of going to a school they live close to.  As Deborah Orr said in a recent article about schools lotteries:  The worst schools are not compelled to improve because of parental choice. They just end up populated by the children of the parents whose choices are fewest.  The choice is illusory – and I’ll go on believing that it’s a poor way to go about allocating places even if we do get into our first choice.

Fear of networking

In all of the advice for small businesses (of which there is scads around at the moment – look here, and here and here…) there is generally a rec0mmendation somewhere that the key means of generating new business leads is networking.  In my head networking just means meeting people and making connections; hopefully not leaving them thinking that you’re an idiot, and if possible having a mutually beneficial conversation which leaves both of you thinking you might like to work together in future.  It happens spontaneously in meetings, on train journeys, in the pub, online.  And there’s an element of matchmaking in it – I really love introducing people to each other if I think they could help each other out.

How did this entirely natural and civilised idea turn into Business Networking Events?  It’s just speed dating for office workers – ie even less fun than normal speed dating looks and done in business suits.  I have been to one of these events.  It was one of the most buttock-clenchingly embarrassing evenings I’ve ever spent and I couldn’t wait to get away.  I’m not sure they even work – has anyone ever walked away from a networking event with a firm lead on some work (or is it just my social ineptitude which makes me unable to do it? ) But I guess needs must, and as the outlook for small businesses gets bleaker I shall shine my shoes, brush my hair, arm myself with a sheaf of business cards and hit the networking trail.  So, any advice on how to make it a) more productive and b) less painful?

Why I will never be rich

… but will never have to apologise to  a Select Commitee:

He who is ridden by a conscience /Worries about a lot of nonscience;  

He without benefit of scruples/ His fun and income soon quadruples                                                                          

(Ogden Nash, 1931 – when they also had a spot of bother with the banks.)

If you build it, will they come?

Interesting to see on Emma Mulqueeny’s blog a post about Directgov’s attempts to set up a news site about school closures during the great freeze.  I salute the fact they even tried to do it (so fast, and without a Submission to Ministers first, too!)  The technical problems they had are laid out in the comments to Emma’s original post, but at least it’s there and it works after a fashion, and it will get better.

Problem is,  even though I’ve worked with Directgov in the past – in fact am linked to a project with them right now – it never crossed my mind to go there for news on Monday.  (I went straight to Tower Hamlets’ website and found not very much of use – although it did tell me the library was closed.)  Is it just a matter of time before Directgov seeps into people’s consciousness as the place to go for information – or are we always likely to think locally first about issues which affect us on a local basis?

When I was at DfES some years ago, there were ideas floating around to get schools to set up mass text message services for parents to let them know about school closures.  Anyone know if this is happening?  That kind of very local solution to problems like this instinctively feels better to me than trying to do it on a national network.