Author: DTW Agency

Energy. Yep – we all need it.

Green energy. Even better.

Energy infrastructure in the filed behind your back garden? Oh, hang on, most people not so keen.

OK then, you must be up for paying higher bills to cover the increasing costs it would mean to replace pylons with underground pipes etc.? Er, what – my gas bill is too high already – I need the cost to come down not go up.

That’s it in a nutshell really. We all want cheaper energy, we’d quite like to save the planet, but we don’t want to spoil our view. Can’t you do it somewhere else please.

The national conversation around the energy industry – and by that I mean everything from nuclear to energy from waste to wind power, needs to acknowledge and address these issues. Not easy.

At a community level, the challenge is the same, only more acute, because the ‘not in my back yard’ issue is raised every time by people who feel very passionately about their area.

So how does community relations and communications activity ‘on the ground’ start to win the public acceptability argument at a local level. Easier said than done, but here’s three building blocks to get us started.

1. Bloody hard work – if you think this can be done with a couple of press releases and a twitter account then forget it. Company representatives have got to put in the hard yards on the ground in community venues and with local influencers and residents to help them understand the issues, engage them so they can help provide the solutions and involve them on an ongoing basis.
2. Try listening as well as talking – a consultation should mean just that – a listening exercise that can actually influence and impact upon plans and delivery. Otherwise, all you are doing is telling people stuff, which is better than sitting in the corner and pretending it’s not happening, but isn’t listening and isn’t consultation.
3. Pictures, video, animation and plain English please. If your mum or Dad or 12-year-old can’t understand what you are talking about you have lost the battle already. Jargon is great when you are talking internally but utterly meaningless to most people, so take the time to make what you say and how you say it meaningful to people.

There’s plenty more but a list of 27 points would start to lose impact pretty soon. That’s important too mind – you need layers of information to keep things accessible.

The energy issue isn’t going away any time soon. Neither are the communications challenges. Hopefully the government will do its bit and engage with the big picture so developers and operators have a more informed audience and a helpful context to engage with individuals and communities at a local level.

Health sector communications has never been under more pressure. We say it every year – and it’s true every year.

Budget squeezes, the context of junior doctors on strike and at odds with the Health Secretary and the need to put that well worn phrase of ‘doing more with less’ into practice mean that health sector communicators have a challenging time.

But still, most of the British public hugely value the NHS and the support it delivers to all of our families.

And, anyway, you might argue (I hope not, given you are reading this, but you might), why does the NHS need all these PR people and spin doctors – it should be employing more doctors and nurses and making people better not wasting time telling people how good it is.

Fair enough in some ways. I don’t think any of our team has ever participated in or performed a life-saving six-hour surgery. That is truly incredible and awe-inspiring stuff. But, what we do, and what thousands of NHS comms staff around the country do is playing its part in saving lives.

Engaging the public on healthcare issues or to help signpost them to the best healthcare provider to meet their needs doesn’t just happen by magic.

Health comms is important. It can be hard work and challenging but it can really be life and death stuff. That is why we’re slightly chuffed to have been listed on the NHS North of England’s Commercial Procurement Collaborative’s multi-disciplinary framework to provide comms and other services to the NHS.

There’s some good company to keep as well – the North of England CSU and Deloittes are two of the other providers listed on the framework.

So, next time you see a clever and creative health care campaign or initaitive that grabs your attention, just tip your metaphorical hat to the comms team or agency that helped create it – they do their bit when it comes to saving lives too.

You know that your next Ofsted inspection is due in a couple of months.

The staff are stressed, it’s a critical time for influencing potential children and parents from next year’s possible intake, and you know that the trend from Ofsted inspections is for schools and colleges to drop one if not two grades.

Sound familiar? It is – you’re not alone.

Over the past couple of years we’ve worked with a number of schools and colleges who have found themselves in this position and have had to put in a lot of work to maintain pupil enrolment numbers and maintain their reputation in very challenging circumstances.

The best thing to do of course, is to persuade those wonderful Ofsted inspectors that you still deserve that Outstanding or Good rating. But that doesn’t always happen, and in those circumstances schools and colleges need to be pro-active in engaging with pupils, parents and other key stakeholders to keep them informed and provide reassurance.

As a starter for ten, here’s a few lessons worth remembering that we’ve fine-tuned along the way.

• Try and adopt a ‘no surprises’ strategy with senior stakeholders – in the vast majority of cases local councillors, MPs and other prominent community figures will want to work with local educational institutions if they can see that the leadership team is working to address the issues it needs to tackle. What they really appreciate though, is a personal briefing from the head or the principal. That communication channel should always be open anyway, but if it isn’t, pick up the phone and share what you can at the right time before it comes public. That way you are more than likely to win respect and support at the time you need it.
• Acknowledge the challenges, but shout about your successes – it rarely does any good launching an all guns blazing assault on Ofsted (they’re going to be back again soon), so a bit of humility and a focus instead on what you are doing to improve things is very important. That doesn’t mean you just roll over and give up however. Your high achieving students, successful community partners and proud parents will be valuable allies and can be very powerful advocates for your cause.
• Be open and accessible – whether that is informal drop-in sessions for students at lunchtimes, parents in the evening or by sharing personal contact details and inviting feedback and questions is absolutely critical. Going into a bunker and adopting a siege mentality won’t work at a time like this, however much you feel like doing it. Brief your team and put yourself and your best and most engaging staff members ‘out there’ to answer questions. It will be worth it.
• Get digitally savvy – if the school is great but your website and social media feed is still stuck in the early 1990s, that isn’t a great first impression for people who have no other experiences of the school or college, and that is critical at a time like this.
• Make a plan – logistics, timing and sequencing are important for getting the message out there for maximum impact. Make sure you don’t fall foul of Ofsted’s rules and at the same time think about how the announcement might impact on your next Open Evening or Parents event and prepare accordingly.

So, if your next inspection is in two months and you haven’t started planning the communications around the results, now is the time to get busy (even busier, sorry).

PS – the picture at the top of the post isn’t one from our design studio by the way – congrats to the pupils at Hill Top Infant School in Essex who celebrated their outstanding Ofsted grade by creating this lovely picture.

*** Don’t forget to turn up your sound when watching! ***

We have really enjoyed working with you in 2015 and look forward to catching up with you again in 2016.

Thankyou for helping us do what we love. Have a fantastic Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.

It was great to see the comms team behind the work to tell people about the creation of England’s first purpose-built specialist emergency care hospital get some recognition at the north east CIPR Pride awards last week.

The Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust were well deserved winners of both the Best Healthcare and the Best Use of Digital campaigns for their work.

This isn’t some back door way of plugging our work by the way – we weren’t involved (would love to be next time though guys and girls) but it is good to see an important and successful campaign recognised by the industry.

The team running the microsite at the heart of the campaign – https://www.northumbria.nhs.uk/emergency/ – did a great job in keeping it up to date and relevant to the audience.

This was a classic example of a campaign where someone had clearly sat and thought about the objectives they wanted to achieve and built the campaign around that (I know that sounds like PR lesson 101 but it is amazing how often people ignore this concept).

Directing patient behaviour and building understanding of some fairly major changes was at the heart of the campaign, and by ‘Telling the Northumbria story’ in a creative way they achieved it.

A bit of digital advertising (yes, it’s still PR folks, just not as we know it, but that is a different blog post) some innovative use of social media tricks like Thunderclap to create momentum and some good old-fashioned media relations and planning to deliver a meaningful campaign right across Northumberland really paid dividends.

Well done all, keep up the good work!