Author Archives: Dan Slee

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There’s growing uncertainty in post-lockdown Britain and comms and PR people are feeling vulnerable.

The shadow of the first wave of COVID-19 deaths recedes replaced by the fear of job losses.

If you’re feeling exposed and fear redundancy I know how that feels.

Back in the early 1990s two weeks into my working life that was me and it taught me three important things.

Back then, I was working on a newspaper as a dark room technician trying to pay off University debt while working out what I wanted to do with my life. Two weeks in, we were all called into a meeting to be told that the paper was being put up for sale and there may not be enough money to pay the wages.

That was compulsory redundancy.

Six years ago when I left to become freelance it was voluntary but the lessons I learned still applied.

The redundancy process is always painful but when properly applied is equitable. When badly applied it causes resentment and blows the organisation’s credibility.

Here’s what I learned.

There will be rumours. Stop listening to them.

“I’ve heard that X met Y and they say that Z is going to happen.”

From experience, you’ll hear all sorts. Almost all of it will be supposition, rumour and speculation. All of it becomes tiring.

I eventually made the conscious decision to stop listening for the good of my mental health.

Wait for official communication

“This is the picture and it’ll happen by X.”

I found it far easier to ignore the rumour and wait for official communication and a chance to ask questions.

While you’re waiting…

Join a union

“They may tell you X but that’s wrong. Y is what they need to do and Z is the law to cite.”

It is so useful to have someone in your corner and who can spell out to you what the process is in law.

I’ve been a member of the National Union of Journalists for the past 25 years. They represent PR and communications. You can get more information here.

My Mum used to say that one door closes and another opens up. If you’re in the middle of the storm you won’t see this. I get that. This only comes with hindsight. It’s not a nice feeling to have your job under threat and I don’t dismiss that lightly but I hope one day you see a silver lining to it all.

Good luck.

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Fewer people are sharing COVID-19 safety messages and that’s a problem for public sector people.

According to Ofcom research, 25 per cent of people were sharing key messages at the start of the pandemic but 12 weeks in that figure has halved.

Anecdotally, there’s a range of reasons for this. Message fatigue. Lockdown fatigue. Falling trust in politicians. Debate over the messaging. Confusion. But why is less important than the ‘what next?’

That’s a real problem if you are a public sector communicator charged with reaching people.

If this whole episode has proved anything its that the communicator who churns the same stuff out without thinking has had their day.

So what to do?

Back when I was on newspapers in the late 90s the answer to falling circulation was to do more of the same. Only much more. That was the wrong answer then and its the wrong answer now.

Here’s five things you can do to better get the message through to people.

Educate the client. The landscape is changing rapidly. What worked five weeks ago let alone five years ago are two different things. Pay extra double close attention to research like Ofcom’s and educate the senior leadership team as to why you are doing what you do. It doesn’t have to be extensive. Just something that spells out why you are working how you’re working. This is so very important.

Create your own content. Data has suggested that people are getting fed-up with politicians and the Government. So, try making your own assets with local messages that mirror the national picture.

Take your own content to where the audience is. I know, I know. I’ve been banging on about this for a long time. Create content for Dudley and knock on the doors of Dudley Facebook groups. People are more likely to trust messages from people who look and sound like them.

Nurses and Doctors to the front. Trust in the NHS remains sky high. Nine out of 10 people trust medics. So have local medics fronting your content.

Advertise. If people won’t naturally share your content put some money behind it. That way it’ll reach people.

Work with your local news brand. Newsrooms are getting thinner at the time when people trust local news more. So, talk to them about what would work with them. A video? A Facebook Live with a public health officer? Have that conversation. It’s about reaching people.

Remember that your staff are your biggest assets. Remember that? So, use them. Have a network of people who are prepared to share your public health message. Connect them via email or Workplace or Yammer or whatever the best way to connect them is.

Pay really close attention to your own insights and data. What’s working locally? As people’s experiences change and alter your own insights will be a useful barometer over what is working. It’s less ‘is it visible?’ and far more ‘has anyone seen it and acted upon it?’ Box ticking presenteeism in your comms is of no use to anyone. Least of all now.

When Liverpool won the Premier League after a 30 year wait the red part were happy, the blue part were sad and public sector people held their breath.

In pre-COVID-19 days the win would have been greeted by a huge outpouring of emotion on the streets. Three quarters of a million supporters greeted the Reds’ European Cup win last year.

But with restrictions there was an anxiety that people would forget the public health advice.

Media reports and social media saw smaller gatherings at Anfield and elsewhere when Chelsea beat Manchester City 2-1 on the Thursday evening and gave the Reds and unassailable points total but it was to Pier Head that thousands turned to celebrate on Friday.

The afternoon saw the Pier Head turned into the site of an overly indulged festival with beer cans and other debris strewn.

Jennifer Bruce, Liverpool City Council’s video journalist, joined the weekly Zoom session of Public Sector Comms Headspace where she shared key learning.

I’ve blogged some of the key points with her permission.

While Liverpool FC’s title win was good for the city the Pier Head celebrations and their aftermath threatened to be deeply damaging. Celebrations for some supporters were also a public health nightmare in a pandemic. The council in its response was faced with a difficult challenge.

Jen shot footage of the celebrations from the city council’s offices in the Cunard Building. But when the celebrations started to get out of hand she retreated.

She then shot footage in the morning of the state of Pier Head to help explain the challenge the city council now faced. The fans’ litter made the city look a mess.

Our amazing cleansing team worked tirelessly throughout the night, into the early hours to clean up the Pier Head:

🔘6k clean up operation
🔘Staff on site from 12.30am and 17 staff deployed at peak
🔘25/30 volunteers assisted
🔘10 tons of waste collected
🔘3 wagon trips to tip pic.twitter.com/V3RapCcxt0

— Liverpool City Council (@lpoolcouncil) June 27, 2020

Look for the heroes. Jen shot footage of city council staff who were clearing up but also individual fans too who had come down to clear away the mess. They were the individual heroes and by telling their story she could tell the wider story. That’s such a brilliant piece of advice and chimes with the idea of looking for a human face.

By mid-morning the next day, Liverpool FC, the council and Merseyside Police released a joint statement condemning the behaviour at the Pier Head. The council speaking alone wouldn’t have cut through. All three together were needed and the statement text here was picked up by the regional and national media. The move served to help head off any future celebrations. The swiftness of the statement was as a result of good working relationships built-up over months.

There is a value to creating and posting content swiftly. Footage of the celebrations and the morning after were posted quickly. A long sign-off process would have hindered this.

Video works. The footage was widely viewed on the council’s own social media assets. More than 2.5 million people saw the footage on Twitter and there were 23,000 engagements.

#VIDEO | Following last night's @LFC supporters celebration on the #PierHead, Abu Mansaray, who lives in the city centre, talks about how pleased he is with the speed at which the city council have cleaned up. pic.twitter.com/yZKuehx1mQ

— Liverpool City Council (@lpoolcouncil) June 27, 2020

Team work works. It was heartening to hear how the Liverpool City Council team all rallied around to help.

Subtitles work. Even in a short turn-around the council put subtitles on their video to extend reach and make them more accessible.

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When the history of the pandemic gets written there’s sure to be a paragraph on the hundreds of thousands of people who headed to Bournemouth to enjoy a sunny day by the sea.

Quite how the town coped is anyone’s guess but it was a real delight to hear Rachael Mills‘ account. The PR and communications manager at Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council gave some key learning from during a Zoom chat for members of the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group.

It’s absolutely clear that Rachel and the rest of the council team and other public sector communicators in the town performed heroics with long hours over a number of days.

With her permission, here are some of the key points of learning.

As the numbers unfolded, one of the first steps was to turn social channels into broadcast channels. Normally, the council is responsive to question and comment but as the situation unfolded the queries were outstripping the ability to answer them.

As the media queries escalated a system of triage was introduced. As the world’s media rang, there wasn’t enough capacity to answer all of the questions and interview requests straight away. A triage system allowed the council to prioritise those media companies who were most important.

As the media queries flooded in, the one talking head needed extra help. The council Leader won credit for their handling of the situation and calmness in answering questions. They were backed-up on the ground with council staff who maintained social distancing but helped marshall the media requests.

A second briefed interviewee would have been handy. The main spokesperson played a blinder but the the organisation needs to have some capacity for someone else to take the slack.

Comms channels on the ground came into their own. Town centre LED messageboards became an important part of the equation as the council tried to communicate with people.

As a community that relies on tourism there were two audiences, visitors and residents. Channels to talk to residents were used to speak with residents. With residents there was an awful lot of myth-busting to be done. Channels for visitors delivered messages to visitors.

Good relationships built in peacetime can bear fruit in a time of crisis. The council had good links with the Local Resilience Forum and others that had been built up over months. When a real emergency happened those relationships were already in place.

For staffing, people were reserved to be the early shift and the late shift. There was no sense in letting everyone run at the issue at the same time. Some resource had to be kept back.

A thread of tweets from a personal account really cut through. Rachael used her own Twitter account to write the explanation of what the council had done and why. By using her account she put a human face on the issue.

Picture credit: Documerica / Flickr

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The battle against misinformation will be won and lost on Facebook.

It is the largest social media platform in the world with more than 49 million users in the UK. It is where people go for news, gossip, family pictures and to kill time.

This week the Daily Express ran a piece proclaiming the English towns on the verge of local lockdown. It led to a forest fire of rumour circulating with Facebook groups as the driver.

It’s easy for public sector communications people to feel swamped in the face of a sea of rumour and often hostile comment. It’s braver to stand up and challenge.

Take the case of Wigan in the North West of England.

Facebook case study: Wigan

Research I’ve carried out would suggest that every person who lives in Wigan would be a member of three Facebook groups.

I’ve chosen three Facebook groups to map the activity.

Three groups were chosen. I’m From Wigan with 41,000 members, WiganNow with 16,200 members and the Im From Wigan group (note no apostrophe) with 1,700 members.

Compared to the groups is Wigan Council’s page with 39,000 likes. in a borough of 318,000 which works out at a more than healthy 12 per cent. The health warning is of course that not all the council’s page audience will see an update.

Fig 1. Wigan Facebook audience: Three Facebook groups and the council page.

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Visual content gets shared as misinformation

All had content shared from the Daily Express link.

Visual misinformation will travel as an image, a meme or a link. Sometimes it is deliberately created or shared knowing it is false. This is disinformation. At other times it is just plain incorrect which is misinformation. The Daily Express story.

A version of the Daily Express story was posted into the three Wigan groups:

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Creating shareable Facebook content as rebuttal

Hats off Wigan Council. They created sharable content on Facebook with quotes from Kate Adern Wigan Council’s director of public health denying that Wigan was under imminent threat of lockdown.

The content had a human face.

The content had a clear message.

There was a clear call to action – a request for people to share it.

Within hours the content had found its way into the three Wigan Facebook groups and much further afield too. In little over 24-hours the rebuttal content had been shared a stocky 6,300 times.

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The Wigan content was factual and relied on trust in experts.

The borough’s Public Health expert played the role of Chris Whitty and politicians were nowhere to be seen. This is exactly the right balance to take when talking to an audience. Politicians as a group are not as strongly trusted as medical experts sdo it was right to quote the expert.

Wigan Council’s content was shared in Wigan groups

Each of the three Wigan groups saw people sharing council content. Of the five pieces of council rebuttal in the three groups, three were screenshots of the message and two were links.

While a council can create accessible content on its page that can be read by screen readers the reality is what works across wider Facebook isn’t that. It’s images and memes.

That’s the content that the public sector should be creating.

I’ve no doubt that historians will look back at this pandemic with wonder.

How did people cope? What did they do?

Often they’ll look at the big picture of the numbers and some key moments like the Prime Minister’s lockdown speech or they’ll look at fighting for toilet roll.

What they may miss is this. The period was 67 million stories of stress, bravery, boredom, frustration, grief, joy and tiredness. Every emotion, in fact.

Amongst those emotional stories are the children of key workers whose parents are doing key roles.

Step forward South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust. They’re not the first people to do this but they deserve credit for doing it. A letter home from the chief executive to the children of staff thanking them for supporting their parent.

It’s also written in very plain English ‘My name is Glen,’ it begins.

The danger of calling three months into the pandemic ‘the new normal’ is you stop caring so much about your internal comms.

This would be dangerous.

Sometimes internal comms isnt to communicate a strategy or directive but just to say ‘well done’ and ‘thank you.’ That’s a lovely human thing to do.

Bravo South Warwickshire NHS Trust.

And bravo Mum.

• 

It can only be good news that the CIPR has published research on black Asian and minority ethnic experience.

Commissioned almost 12-months ago and delayed by COVID-19 the Race in PR research lands at a time when equalities prompted by the death of George Floyd is in a long overdue.

The findings are stark.

Diversity has stalled and is reversing. In 2019, just eight per cent of PR people are from a diverse background a figure that had shrunk by three per cent in four years.

Not enough is being done. None of the 19 interviewed felt the industry is taking sufficient action to increase diversity.

Poor backgrounds. The research also showed that many people from minorities come from poorer backgrounds which is in itself a barrier to perceived ability to make connections and progress.

Independent. A poor experience has pointed people from minorities to become independent practitioners rather than proress up the corporate ladder.

Lack of fairness. Just six per cent said that ethnicities were treated fairly in the industry.

Unconscious bias. People often resort to stereotypes when they judge people which penalises people from minority backrounds.

Subtle digs. The report talks of ‘microaggressions’ which individually can be explained away but over time build-up. The unchallenged subtle racism of a client, for example.

“My dad had always said to me ‘Son, you’ll have to work twice as hard to get what the white man has got’. He wasn’t wrong! It certainly has felt like that in PR.”

Anonymous contributor, ‘race in pr’

Now, I approached this thinking I was the wrong person to be blogging about this. I’m a bloke and I’m white. After reading it, I still think I’m the wrong person but for different reasons. I’m not in a position of authority. But I do get that for things to change the whole industry needs to be prepared to change and that includes you and me.

Britain isn’t equal

During the #blacklivesmatters protests I was struck by a tweet from a campaigner thankin companies for their supportive tweet and then asking politely for a photograph of their senior leadership team to see how diverse that was.

But there is a big battle.

Britain is a place that hasn’t recovered from the Norman conquests and yes, I know they only occupied England and Wales. Norman names are 800 per cent more common at Oxford than the general population. Seventy per cent of the land is owned by 0.3 percent of the population. This is not an equal place.

It’s also a country that despite being rich in history buries it. Today, the leap is from the Tudors to the rise of fascism. I’m an English and History graduate. My knowledge of colonial Britain and slavery comes from reading around the subject not what I was taught in the classroom or in seminars.

In June 2020, at the height of protests race has never been higher as a priority but what happens when the news agenda changes and attention moves away? And what about gender equality? And equality for those from poorer backgrounds? They’re all part of the broader mix.

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Can this be a start?

The research behind ‘Race in PR’ is based on 17 interviews with PR agency, in-house and independent practitioners. There appears to be no public sector involvement. I’d be keen too to know how geographically spread the interviewees are. That’s not to devalue the research. It’s hugely timely and a good starting point. But if we’re comms people we should be trying to get the best data possible and if 80 per cent of people in the UK live outside London I’d like to know what the picture there is too. If anything, I’d bet the problem is even worse in rural areas than in urban more diverse places.

But that quest for more data shouldn’t be an excuse for people in PR taking action and there are many steps are set out in the report and on the CIPR site. As the report says, what to do is pretty clear and set out. People just need to start to do it.