The author of an opinion piece in the Health Service Journal last week ponders how public organisations should handle the media onslaught when things go wrong. “My first question”, she writes, “is ‘What would Max Clifford do?’”.
Of course. And when I’m faced with a tricky HR issue, my first thought is always “Well, I’ve never met the man, but he seems to do a lot of hiring and firing; what would Alan Sugar do?”
Actually, I’m being a bit unfair to the column’s author, Jenny Rodgers, an organisational development consultant and coach. She does go on to make the point that NHS organisations need professional PR support when things go wrong. And that professional means just that, not someone whose corporate governance portfolio has sprawled to include comms along with facilities and HR.
She’s absolutely right about that. But still misses the point, along with too many NHS boards, that you need senior-level professional comms support before things go wrong. It is crucial to build and manage the reputation, to look out for risks, and to build the trust of the chief executive so that effective action can be taken to head problems off, not to just manage the mess, when the proverbial hits the fan.
Over the years working in NHS communications I’ve seen some of the best and the worst of crisis management. The worst tend to be where there is no professional communications or it is at such a junior level it is excluded from the important decisions and discussions, unable to have its professional advice heard at the right levels. And the very best, even where the chief executive is a natural communicator, tend to have solid, professional communications support with direct access to the board.
Measuring quality not quantity
An interesting article in PR Week has a senior council communicator ‘fuming at government plans’ to count the number of press releases sent out as a way to assess local council communications.
Now, before I jump on the bandwagon to declare that we’re all going to hell in a handcart, I ought to point out that I’ve scoured the web and can’t find out what or where this government plan is. But this story does highlight the recurring problem for PR people of demonstrating our effectiveness and the return on investment that good communications can deliver.
It all comes down to the difference between outputs and outcomes. For example, we can measure how many press notices we issue, how many consultation events we hold, how many publications we distribute, and so on. These outputs might show how very busy we’ve been, but they don’t show how effective we are.
To find that out, we need to know how many people have understood and acted upon our messages; how our target audience’s opinions or behaviours have altered as a result. This can be much more difficult to find out, and can be down to all sorts of other factors. It requires us to have a coherent strategy underpinning our communications, with measurable objectives and good insight into our audiences. But it is essential to demonstrate our effectiveness.
The new system for assessing primary care trusts (PCTs), while far from perfect, offers a good model that could be applied to councils. Called, rather grandly, World Class Commissioning, the system was introduced last year and the communications and engagement elements were developed with a lot of input from NHS comms leads.
A range of communications and engagement measures are looked at in combination to assess how well the PCT is fulfilling its role as the local leader of the NHS. These include an evaluation of the volume and tone of media coverage and the results of surveys among the public and stakeholders to measure the PCT’s reputation and their levels of satisfaction and confidence.
Knowing that these are the measures on which they will be judged, PCT communicators know that simply ‘sending out stuff’ isn’t going to get them anywhere. It brings a sharp focus on effective, meaningful communications and engagement with local people. It is far better than counting press releases.