Why ‘Use a professional’ is a campaign that matters in PR as well as with the Law Society

DTW staff holding a range of posters from the Law Society campaign

DTW is in the media today, with the focus on our new client The Law Society – we’re delivering a major PR and marketing campaign for it across England and Wales.

The national ‘Use a Professional’ campaign, which is launching across England and Wales this month, is to promote private practice or high street solicitors and encourage people to use their services.

Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 13.34.43So, if you’re reading this and you need some good service from a solicitor – jump on to the Law Society’s free online Find A Solicitor website, which matches people needing legal advice to qualified professional solicitors in their town or area.

It’s a great project, and the office has been buzzing with ideas and inspiration with #teamDTW spending the summer finalising and testing the creative concepts, travelling around the country shooting videos, working on real-time bidding advertising campaigns and planning creative PR and social media campaigns.

The focus is all about the importance of using a professional solicitor to deliver important services that you need – sounds simple doesn’t it? Yet many of us don’t do it – we’d rather get something done cheap or fast.

Whether we are getting a ‘good’ service is often overlooked.

The legal profession is not alone – as any PR and comms people reading this will already have realised.

Everyone can do PR, right?

Wrong, but professionalism is something that the PR industry is still grappling with. Talk to people at CIPR Council meetings or the more engaged members of the PR community and they get it – we need to be professional in everything we do to deliver a future for the industry – training, evaluation, ethics and professional development.

What we’ve collectively been less good at is demonstrating the huge value that the public relations function can bring to organisations. In an era when reputation has never been so important, we must take this issue and tackle it head on.

That can mean challenging colleagues, superiors and clients when it comes to devising and delivering campaigns that make a difference. We must be relentlessly focused on outcomes, think from a customer perspective and not compromise on quality.

The Government Communication Service, under the watchful eye of Alex Aiken, is doing a great job in showing the way. Those of us operating in the private sector should take note.

Professionalism and expertise isn’t a ‘nice to have’, whether you are getting legal advice, growing your business or delivering challenging behaviour change campaigns, it’s an essential.