Here’s a thing. You find a stash of drugs and what do you do?
If you are Thamas Valley Police you ask tongue in your cheek for the owner to present themselves.
A jacket was recovered in Witney yesterday with a large quantity of drug money in the pocket. If you’d like it back please see PC 6382 Miles at Witney Police station. pic.twitter.com/1gcS8DUZLm
What does that tweet say? They’ve been cracking down on drugs and they employ human beings as officers. The tone and wit of the tweet makes it more likely to be shared.
We’ve all been there… what do you by the PR and comms person for Christmas? Or birthday? Or as a leaving present?
Here are a few ideas that could help solve your present buying dilemma. Secret Santa? Something substantial? There are a pile of ideas that could help you. A big shout to the members of the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group for their input. Full credits at the bottom of the post.
Less than £5
STATIONERY: This meeting should have been an email pen. Buy it here.
BOOK: Tubesperation. Using the London Underground to come up with creative idea.
Around £5
TECH GEAR: A handy tool to help you film or take pictures with your smartphone.
SOFT FURNISHINGS: Typewriter cushion. For helping you bang your head against in safety.
BOOK: Fucking Apostrophes book. For the grammar geek in your life.
Google cardboard. Have a look at what the future looks like.
HEALTH: Stress Paul. Your handy person to squash if you need to vent spleen.
BOOK: Anarchists in the Boadroom by Liam Barrington-Bush. For when you want to think creatively on how to connect and how to understand networks.
Around £10
STATIONERY: Moleskine ruled notebook. For those creative ideas.
BOOK: Potty, Fartwell & Knob. True names that will take your mind off that comms plan or logo competition for children request.
STATIONERY: Creative post-it notes.
MUG: Grammar grumbles mugs. For the grammar nazi in your life. Buy it here.
CREATIVE: Artefact cards. Cards to help you comms plan and think creatively. Buy them here.
BOOK: Inside the Nudge Unit. An account of life in the unit that has changed how organisations look to engage with people.
TEA: Calm the fukc down tea. Herbal tea. Buy them here.
MUG: : First I drink the coffee then I do things. Buy it here.
BOOK: Think Small. A book to help you achieve goals.
BOOK: PR is Dead by Robert Phillips
OFFICE: Icon cable ties. Tidy up all those leads and cables.
Between £10 and £20
BOOK: SEO for Dummies. Understand an often overlooked skill.
More than £20
CARD GAME: Cards Against Humanity.
CALENDAR: Comms cartoon calendar by Helen Reynolds. Buy it here.
T-SHIRT: Being a Communications Manager is Easy. It’s like riding a bike. Only the bike is on fire and you’re in hell. Buy it here.
TECH GADGET: A smartphone projector. For when you want to watch the youtube clip with a bigger audience.
DRINK: Bombay Saphire Gin gift pack. Because people from the South Coast seem to quite like gin.
CAFFEINE: Stove-top espresso maker. Start your day with a jolt.
Big shout for ideas and inspiration to Eddie Coates-Madden, Sally Northeast, Vanessa Andrews, Penny Allison, Phil Hodgson, Hayley Douglas, Paul Compton, Jane Slavin, Sara Hamilton, Rachel King, Lisa Potter, Shevaughan Tolbutt, James Allen, Clare Parker, Nicole Crosby-McKenna, Louise Powney, Sian Williams, Emma Wild, Ruth Fry, Paul Coxon, Heather Heaton-Gallagher, Georgia Turner, Ian Mountford, David Bell, Vanessa Andrews, Jude Tidder and members of the Public Sector Headspace Facebook group.
A dying patient asks to see the sea a final time and an ambulance driver takes a small detour.
Anyone who has lost a loved one can feel this.
Anyone who is human can see this as pure gold. Not as a piece of comms but as a gesture to make a dying wish complete.
What makes this that bit more special is that it moved from being an anecdote at the water cooler to a perfectly weighted piece of communications that works beautifully. It works because it is not contrived and not staged.
It reminds me, funnily enough, of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. They were determined to shed their post-Hillsborough disaster bunker mentality by a new approach. It was simply ‘do the right thing’.
As the post says, sometimes you don’t need drugs to do a good job just empathy.
Look, I know I’ve been shouting about video for some time now.
But when I see a video as quietly determined as this one from Sefton Council my heart sings.
It’s a good approach. Women are recorded saying a short message and then are edited so the argument comes from all and from one at the same time.
It is short, it is recognisably a Sefton Council communication and the mono and music make it.
What’s great about it from an organisation’s perspective is that they have the accents of Sefton. Their voice is identifiable to people. They will be recognisable to people who work in the organisation too. They’ll pass them in the corridor.
Disclaimer: I helped deliver an in-house workshop at Sefton Council on how to shoot video. But this was all their idea. They took the basic skills and have done great things with them.
Is bullying a brand thing? On the face of it, no. But if 30 per cent of children feel bullied that’s a fair chunk of Burger King’s audience.
Credit to them then that they made a YouTube clip that tackles bullying and asks passers-by just to watch out for kids who are having a difficult time.
It’s remarkably effective. There’s a twist too. You can see it here:
Large organisations can be human when they open themselves up to talk about human emotion.
A day a year local government shouts about what it does.
I raise my hat to everyone who took part in the day and created content.
Seven years ago, this was purely a Twitter thing when it started as #walsall24. Over the years the Local Government Association has got involved to support it.
But now that Twitter is the 4th most popular social platform should it just be Twitter? I’m not so sure. If it is true to its aim of reaching people to tell the story of what local government does it needs to find the best platform. Probably, this is an array of platforms.
An additional worry in a discussion on the Public Sector Facebook group is that people struggle to create the time to make #ourday really work. But anecdotally, this does work as internal comms. It also works to encourage service areas to share their stories.
Here are five pieces of content that caught my eye
Radio DJ Nick Grimshaw posting about council gritters on instagram
Nick Grimshaw has 1.3 million followers. He is from Oldham. The winner of their name-a-gritter competition was ‘Nick Grit-shaw’. So, as an Oldham boy made good he shared it with his followers attracting 30,000 likes.
Why is this good? This isn’t the council talking about what they do, it’s a Radio One DJ. That’s far cooler.
A post shared by nicholasgrimshaw (@nicholasgrimshaw) on
An interactive be-a-council-officer game
There used to be a cartoon strip called You Are the Ref where you were given a scenario and had to choose the correct outcome. Doncaster Council used Twitter to create a similar scenario only being faced with the challenge a council officer would face. It gave a taste of the difficulty council staff face.
Let’s get started.
— #OurDay in Doncaster | Story 1 (@DoncasterTales1) November 20, 2017
Why is this good? It’s not saying ‘here’s what we do.’ It asks: ‘what would you do?’
A poem set to video
There are 1,200 services that local government does. It’s hard to cover them all. But a video of just over a minute covers much of the ground. Well done Bath & North East Somerset Council.
Why is this good? It uses video so autoplays in your timeline. It covers a range of things in a short space of time.
Hello doggy
The most popular Facebook update wasn’t a council service as such but a lost dog. Of course it was. It was never going to be an engineer filling in a pothole, was it? You can see it here.
Hello, regular people
One of the benefits of #ourday is putting faces to names and to be able to tell people what they do, as this Derbyshire Dales Council tweet shows.
Busy day ahead for these 3 from our Clean & Green Team. Mick is our central litter bin emptier, while Andrew & Steve are preparing to help with the clearance of autumn leaves #ourdaypic.twitter.com/SZ1iZwehB8
Why is this good? Because it tells you who those familiar faces are and what they do.
A Periscope broadcast to explain a guided walk
South Cambridgeshire has many attractive places and guided walks encourage older people to step out. Here the council used Twitter’s live streaming app Periscope for a council worker to talk about what the scheme is.
A clip-on mic helps to improve the sound.
Why is this good? Because it is getting out of an office and experimenting with technology.
I’ve a soft spot for #ourday the local government day of posting day-to-day tasks to show a bigger picture.
It started as #walsall24 when Kate Goodall suggested that a day of everyday tasks would be a good idea. It was shameless rip-off of #gmp24 a police 24-hour tweet of day-to-day activity. And #our day is a shameless rip-off of #walsall24. This is a good thing.
I’m a bit on the fence about just using Twitter to reach people as there are more more popular platforms available. But I did like this Sandwell Council not-in-an-office video of staff en route to carry out their job.
It’s like Car Share for the public sector. There’s even a bloke waving in the back seat.
Paramedics see the best and worst that life has to offer. In an emergency they save lives.
So, when a viral video of a man swearing at a parked ambulance in Runcorn went viral the Liverpool Echo took the video and ran it as part of a news story.
They newspaper approached North Western Ambulance Service for a response.
The press office could have taken the tack that they don’t comment on individual cases. But that wouldn’t have been particularly human. Instead they offered this comment reported by the Echo here:
By being human in their media statement they were human in their response.
Thirty years before Grenfell Tower there was another fire in London that cast a long shadow over the capital.
More than 30 people were killed at Kings Cross after debris that had gathered under a wooden escalator caught light. Amazingly, in today’s terms, back then you could still smoke underground.
The fire changed fire safety and a long list of changes followed. It’s worth remembering that for some these changes are ‘red tape’. But red tape is often written in the blood of people whose death taught a lesson.
London Fire Brigade told the story in real-time on Twitter drawing in a range of sources.
Mr Squire was travelling up escalator 4 & noticed white smoke underneath stair treads & saw sparks. He reported it to the booking clerk #KX30pic.twitter.com/oNzyGwSvzx
Firefighters were tackling this blaze in woollen tunics which were pretty much unchanged since 1866 & absorbed water. Plastic leggings that melted & red gardening gloves. The uniform was impractical for firefighting #KX30pic.twitter.com/8jCADbgj1A
What was also interesting was that the hashtag – #KX30 allowed for people to contribute their own memories.
Having spent two wonderful years working at the station, this is a tragedy that has become very close to my heart – I’ve heard accounts from that horrific night and I’ve seen remnants of the fire still hidden away around the station today. #KX30pic.twitter.com/Q5kgEAEv2C
Amazingly, the thread brought together people whose lives had been changed:
I’ve had some Fantastic messages of support and one really stuck out. @nickgunnphotos has contacted me about how HIS dad and cousin pulled out MY dad from the #KingsCrossFire Nick’s Dad is on the left & his cousin is standing caring over my dad who’s on the stretcher @LondonFirepic.twitter.com/ixkRKK60Ai
There have been fewer things greater than Doncaster Council’s World Cup competition to name its two new gritters.
Warm, funny and above all human the campaign has grown a life of its own taking in an appearance on Channel 4’s ‘The Last Leg’ and a tweet of support from Bob Mortimer.
😱*Puts on tin hat* 😱
We would like your name suggestions for two of our new gritting vehicles, please.
Keep em clean and be original – we’d prefer not to spend the next few days trawling through responses of Gritty McGritface and Gary Gritter. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/rCH9HneHJe
The aim of the Twitter campaign was to encourage people to come up with names for the two gritters. There was no call to action beyond that and that’s fine.
What did people learn?
That there are human being s working in local government. Some even treat the roads when the weather is icy.
