Tag: PR Week

So, farewell then COI?

A roundtable of comms experts is working with government to decide the future of COI.  I wrote about the beginnings of the process here a while ago.  If today’s  story in PR Week is to be believed, by the time the white smoke rises from their deliberations, COI will have been ‘re-modelled’ out of all recognition.

I worked at COI briefly a couple of years ago – on secondment  to the Strategic Consultancy  team.  It was an eye-opening 12 weeks, which left me feeling honour-bound to defend my former colleagues from criticism  – even though quite often I agreed with what the critics were saying.

The commonest complaints from civil servant comms leads were that the services COI offered to departments were expensive and too often not of high enough quality; and that they added little value when they managed projects (but still levied sizeable management fees).  In COI’s defence  I argued that, as in any agency, there were good and bad practitioners at COI, that the experience of  government that resided in COI was a great asset to draw on, and that some of the work they did was excellent. However, COI isn’t like any other agency and shouldn’t behave like one.

There’s an inevitable tension when one organisation is asked both to manage government’s relationships with its suppliers and  actively compete with them for business.   I don’t think COI managed that tension well, although in fairness they shouldn’t have been asked to.   It was interesting that, when last year’s 40% staff cut at COI was announced, there wasn’t a  queue of PR professionals lining up to defend it.

How government comms is going to be re-structured is still up in the air – so what role might COI play  in a new comms landscape?  After a bit of thought I’ve come up with some possible roles.  COI could:

  • continue in its role as government’s media buyer
  • continue to run the frameworks – though they will have to be smaller and  less bureaucratic in future;  some question the need for them at all
  • act as a central training body for government communicators who still tend to be  generalists rather than specialists; it could also run the professional networks which exist between departments  (though this begs the question of the overlap with GCN, and whether both are needed)
  • facilitate the big cross-departmental comms campaigns which need high level co-ordination and administration
  • continue to work as a specialist recruitment agency for government – although GovGap‘s impact on the market and its in-built advantage over other suppliers enrages many in public sector recruitment.

None of them feel like compelling arguments for COI to continue.  I hope there’s something I’ve missed, but I fear there may be more bad news at Hercules Road once the consultation is over.

Re-shaping government comms (a work in progress)

PR Week announced this week that government spending on comms has halved since May, and that Matt Tee,  the  Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary for Comms,  leaves his post in March and won’t be replaced.

The outlook for government comms is pretty clear.  In the short-term at least there isn’t going to be much.  Some campaigns will continue because they’re  too important (or too difficult) to cancel.  Most  ideas won’t get off the ground.  As the scale of the changes to public services becomes apparent, a need may be identified to do a bit more public communication to explain what’s happening, but we won’t be able to devote the kind of resources to the job that might have been made available  a few years ago.

There are, of course, some “process” questions to be answered as cuts are made.   For example: the Cabinet Office master-minded  last year’s cross-government communication in preparation for a possible swine-flu pandemic.  With  smaller budgets and fewer hands on deck – and no representation at the most senior levels of government – who will do that next time?   But that’s starting to feel like the wrong question to be asking.

I hope that Matt Tee is using the months he has left in post to shape a review of government comms and the role of COI  that doesn’t  try to deliver the same kind of communications on a smaller scale (and isn’t just about saving the taxpayer money).  It needs to ask the classic question for any strategy – what are we trying to achieve?  What  rightly belongs to government to communicate and what does not ?  If decentralisation is the new reality, what does that mean for communication from the centre?  What responsibility  for communicating with citizens and workforces should rest with local authorities (and how will they pay for it)?   How does government use  the cleverer, cheaper, more flexible, more customer-centric approaches to communication possible online?   And how do you change departmental structures and a Whitehall culture which seems to have made attempts to do this in the past such a nightmare?

Fretting that we’re losing the COI’s bulk purchasing power and expertise in managing procurement, as some people are, supposes that once budgets return to pre-crash levels there will be an appetite to get back to the kinds of campaigns that were a feature of the past five years.  I just don’t think that’s going to happen.  If it did it would mean that a fantastic opportunity to re-configure comms completely had been missed.

How do you prove you’re resilient? Work in the public sector

A depressing entry in the Guardian’s cutsblog suggests that the image of public sector workers as plodding, risk-averse jobsworths will count against them when it comes to taking some of the  2 million jobs that the private sector is poised to deliver any day now.

Enough recruitment consultants have been quoted in PR Week saying that public sector-ites will be at a disadvantage in the jobs market to have spooked me into attending a CIPR/VMA event looking at how hard it might be to move from public to private sector.   Inevitably the hardest thing to prove when you’ve worked in the public sector is that you have the commercial acumen to make it in private business.  Otherwise, it seems  the skills that employers are looking for are, encouragingly, the ones that you develop as a means of survival in the public sector –  resilience,  managing change, leading teams, influencing stakeholders,  a willingness to push back against difficult managers (Lord, have I got some stories to tell…)

Transferable communications skills

Having worked in comms in both sectors, I’d say that the skills you need to succeed are pretty much the same for either.  My starter list would include  a continuous focus on the audience, a sound understanding of the market you’re working in,  imagination, flexibility, tenacity, a sharp eye for managing budgets and people, an understanding of strategy (and how it differs from tactics),  a willingness to get stuck into delivery (and the practical know-how), a healthy respect for deadlines,  the political nous to navigate  layers of management, good writing skills and an eye for detail.  I see no reason why having the skills to work in one should somehow bar you from working in the other.

The importance of social networks

I was struck by how few people at the event said they felt confident  using social media as part of their job-hunting armoury.  Sadly, opting out isn’t an option.  Research suggests that 100% of recruitment consultants use LinkedIn as a tool to identify (and weed out) candidates for posts, and that the size of your network is important.  Something like 85% of them use Twitter for the same reason.  Not having an online presence suggests that you haven’t updated your skills in a decade and aren’t really playing the game – not having a LinkedIn account now is like not having an email address was ten years ago.

Barbara Gibson – our social media guru – recorded this  on her phone at the event I went to, demonstrating a neat way of gathering content for a blog or website at the same time as cementing a link with a potential contact – wouldn’t you be flattered if she asked to interview you?  And wouldn’t you put the link on your site too and link back to her?  Genius!

Clinging to the wreckage?

Lying awake at 4am fretting about how long it’s taking to confirm a new piece of work, I was trying to remember my own rule 5 – the one that starts “it always takes longer to get work sorted out than you think it possibly can.”  Looking up the actual quote this morning I was astonished at how breezily confident of getting new work  I sounded  a mere 7 months  ago.

The need to re-focus the business was clear as soon as the scale of spending cuts in the public sector (where I’ve done most of my work for the past two years) emerged.  It’s a time-consuming undertaking though, and not everyone took the hint.

Being prepared for cuts?

Pre- election I was  talking to a 20-something AD at an agency with lots of public sector contracts and asked if she  worried about what might happen when spending was cut.  She looked at me with all the confidence of someone who’s never experienced a recession and said,  as though speaking to the very hard of understanding: “If there’s a new government there will be changes in policy.   Change always needs to be communicated.  We’ll carry on working with the Department,  just on different things.”  The agency is now making a significant number of staff redundant.  I genuinely hope she’s not one of them, she was very good at her job – but lots of people were caught in that trap and were just not prepared for what was coming.

Money saving tips

I’ve been doing some work recently on how the voluntary sector can cope with the impact of spending cuts – maybe that’s what’s making me pessimistic!  A lot of the advice translates to any SME, so here are some resources that might be helpful

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.

Belts will be worn tighter this year

(But only by some)

At the risk of committing career suicide by teasing COI, I thought the NIB in this week’s PR Week summed up everything you need to know about  how things work in Hercules Road:

COI is being restructured around six client themes.  A briefing from the COI suggests that the reason is planned cuts in public spending.  The move will see the COI make 12 new appointments – six group directors and six group strategy directors.

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?

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.

I’ll show you mine, if…

Google reader turned this up in my inbox this morning – a  post from American media strategist BL Ochman about the difficulty of finding out what other people charge for a job.  As she says:

“You are more likely to know what your best friend eats for breakfast or how many times a week he or she has sex, than how much money they make.

Despite all the Web 2.0 talk of transparency, openness, and honesty, you’d be hard pressed to find out what most new media consultants charge.”

Her point is that there is no  reason why consultants should be secretive about the rates they charge – so why does no-one ever say?  It would certainly be helpful to know.  One of the things I found hardest when I set myself up was knowing how much to charge for different pieces of work.  It’s really hard to know if you are pricing yourself out of a market, or seriously under-charging.  Unless you’re lucky enough to know  friendly freelancers who work in your field and are happy to discuss their rates, you have nothing to compare yourself to.   If you get it wrong,  and I really under-charged a couple of clients at the beginning,  it’s hard to get the rate back up to where you want to be for repeat business.  In my experience the conversation about fees always feels as though everyone concerned  is somehow embarrassed to be speaking about something so tawdry.  Is that a particularly British thing – or is it just me?

As a  reasonably well-established freelance myself now, I understand the fear of being undercut by some young whipper-snapper who knows my rate and sees the chance to snaffle my business.  But in my experience price is not generally the deciding factor in whether or not I get a job. That has much more to do with experience, track record and contacts.

I worked for the Government Equalities Office earlier this year, as the  Equality Bill was being prepared.  One of the things they want to do is make it harder for companies to hide what staff are paid . They also want to encourage companies to publish their  gender pay gap.  This would make it easier for new entrants to an industry to tell whether what they were being offered was fair (it suddenly seems a long time ago that there were jobs around to apply for!)   Openness seems to me to be a good thing, but if you’re a freelance there’s not much information to go on.  The best thing I’ve found is the PR Week salary survey, but that’s tied very closely to agency roles which don’t necesarily equate to other types of work.  So, should we all come clean?  And if I show you mine, will you show me yours?