Category: Public Sector Communications

Your government needs you

Ran across this on another blog – it’s a link to a request for ideas from the Foreign Office.  Stephen Hale, the  FCO Head of Digital Diplomacy,  is looking for ideas for how social media can be used to address global economic problems.  He’s gathering ideas in advance of the economic summit happening on London in April.  In his own words:

Can the web can help answer the major questions of economic action? How would you like to contribute to the conversation? Would you prefer to engage with government on official websites, or elsewhere? What web tools would you use to stimulate debate? Where on the web are the lively debates already taking place? Who should we collaborate with? What lessons can we learn from similar exercises? – 

More information on Stephen’s blog (see how blogging puts us on first name terms already!) which incidentally has lots of other really interesting stuff about how the web can work in government 

You cannot hope to bribe or twist…

I’m currently part way through Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News,  which highlights what he describes as a crisis in journalism, and the role that  PR and political manoeuvering plays in it.  So I was  interested to read the report in today’s PR Week about a Reuters Institute study on the same subject, What’s Happening to Our News, which decides that, all things considered,  PR isn’t a cancer eating at the heart of journalism (so that’s alright then…).

I recognise a lot of what Davies says about a crisis in journalism, driven by cost-cutting and staff shortages, and the demands of  a 24-hour news machine.    I think his section laying into  PR is  actually pretty weak.   He’s much stronger on the evils of political manipulation of news and in particular the role of the CIA and the Bush administration’s machinations in the  ‘war on terror’.

What Davies doesn’t touch on (unless it’s in the bit I haven’t read yet) is the  effect the media has on politics.    Outside Whitehall it might appear that the politicos are pulling all the strings.  Inside it often feels quite different (this was touched on in Digby Jones’ evidence to the select committee.  A second  name check in a week for Lord Jones!)   Far too often serious political issues are reduced to their simplest possible essence – who’s “in” and who’s “out” ? Was that a gaffe? Who’s been disloyal to the leader?  Who’s making a leadership bid?  I can’t think of anything less likely to encourage intelligent  debate than the Today programme’s habit (thankfully ended) of wheeling in Nick Robinson to deconstruct political interviews immediately they’ve happened, to decode what the politician actually meant when he said X (Nick usually thought he meant Y, but sometimes he grudgingly agreed that he meant X but that X wasn’t what the Party needed to hear)  The issue of the damage caused by a cynical, confrontational media constantly trying to find out “why is that lying bastard lying to me?” was explored in John Lloyd’s book What the Media is Doing to Our Politics , which makes a good companion piece to Davies.

The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of a ditty I used to mutter to myself after a particularly difficult call:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,                                                                         thank God, the British journalist.                                                                                   But seeing what the man unbribed will do,                                                       There’s really no occasion to.

Living Life in Black and White

Increasingly it feels as though I’m living a secret life online, dipping in and out of all of the truly inspirational (well, OK, quite interesting) things that are happening in a world of PR somewhere else.  Google reader turned up this blog post today highlighting a range of great ideas for things I’d love to do myself and none sounding so close to the cutting edge of technology as to be impossible.    Then I turn my attention to the office I’m actually working in at the moment.  From here the online world feels like a technicolour Oz with me still stuck in sepia-toned Kansas.  Forget Facebook groups,  Twitter and webinars.  At the moment not only is there no digital strategy, I can’t even get security clearance to get through the internet firewall to update our website.   The notion that “Web 2.0 technologies have made participation more fun, accessible, instantaneous, trackable” is great, except it doesn’t feel that it has much to do with me at the moment; a month into this contract and wondering where’s the best place to start just to get the basics right.

Five reasons why money spent on PR is always worth it

Coming home on the tube yesterday I saw a headline in one of the freebie newspapers which said “Haringey Council blew £2m on PR”  The argument, depressingly familar to those of us who work in public sector communications, is that every penny spent on press officers means less for social workers, leading in this case directly to the death of Baby P.   Comforting myself with the thought that my source was hardly a paper of record, I googled the story this morning to see if any of the “proper” papers were running with it. I found this in the Telegraph, which repeats the argument pretty much exactly, making a direct link between the money spent on PR and the casework overload of the social worker in the Baby P case.

I am a PR consultant who works for public sector organisations (and therefore, obviously, am quite happy to grab cash and if possible food from the hands of widows and orphans), so I have a bit of a biased view of this one.  But I’m still pretty depressed at the frequency with which the PR = wasted money argument comes around.  I’ve spent most of my career in  publicly-funded bodies, and have always had at the front of my mind the fact that I am spending the public’s money on the projects I do,  so need to get value for money. (By the way, I appreciate the irony that I am now defending Haringey’s PR team, having criticised their performance over the Baby P case a couple of posts back – perhaps it means Haringey just aren’t spending enough…)

So, off the top of my head, here are five quick reasons why it’s worth public bodies spending public money on communicating with the public – and how depressing to have to trot them out yet again.

1.  There’s little point in spending very large amounts of money in providing services for the public and then failing to let them know how/where to access those services

2.  It’s good for local democracy to let people know how their elected representatives are spending their money.  Even if individuals don’t personally need to access all local services it’s good that they know that the Council does more than just emptying the bins.  If people understand how their Council Tax is being spent,  they can object if they want to, which is one way of keeping the link between local government and local people alive.  Comms budgets often pay for public consultations on contentious local issues.

3.  Media training doesn’t mean turning out hordes of automata who just parrot a party line.  It means helping people who are not professional communicators deal with the pressures of media scrutiny so that they can put their case as effectively as possible.

4. Press offices offer an invaluable resource of information and contacts for journalists – bet the Telegraph journo who sourced the quotes for this story gets lots of help from PRs!

5.  As a proportion of Haringey’s overall operational budget, £2.2m is peanuts.  I think I read that the total budget was somewhere north of £250m (I could always call their press office to check…)  So the PR budget represents just a shade under 1%.

If anyone wants to add more I’d be happy to hear them, and store them up for the next time this story comes around.

And finally, why is the PR industry so bad at doing PR for itself?