Tag: Public Affairs

Corporate communications & PA: focus more on the target, less on the message

Some corporate communicators and public affairs practitioners still focus too much on the message, and not enough on the target: audiences are defined as broadly as ”media” or “policy-makers” and even the meaningless “general public”.

As top-tier marketers and political campaigners have known forever, target audiences need to be narrowed down enormously: a communicator should ideally break down their target list all the way to single individuals within each audience segment, be it real individuals when audience numbers are small or budgets are huge, or more likely, fictional but highly representative personas.

This will in turn enable the communicator to: a) more easily determine what that person wants or needs thorough research and testing (possibly involving some scrutiny of social data); b) based on that, understand whether there is any overlap between their wants and needs and what the communicator can offer; and c) if so, communicate accordingly.

Again, too often, corporate communicators bypass these steps, and develop 2 or 3 broad-based messages that in theory should reach and influence all “media” or “policy-makers” or whatnot. What is far more likely to work is closer inspection of audiences, then targeting multiple segments applying tweaked storylines based on what’s most likely to affect each one. In essence, what political campaigners call micro-targeting.

Why is this not the norm? Why do we invest in “messaging sessions” without first knowing much about whom we are trying to influence? A mix of reasons no doubt, but first and foremost, it’s a legacy of old-school PR largely based on hunches and relationships, and communicators not being accountable enough for their output.

Corporate comms & public affairs: often too rational to win

In a recent post – A business delusion: “non-profits win because they can peddle misinformation” – I implied that corporate communicators tend to underestimate the sophistication of the non-profit’s communications toolkit. Building on that, I’d argue that NGOs often win because corporates approach communications far too rationally.

We’re not rational beings. Think family, friends or political affiliation: do we evaluate each rationally i.e. weigh up pros and cons and then decide whether we like them or not? Of course not. Yet most corporate communicators must think we do. Show people facts, data or science – they claim – or tell them stories repeatedly, and they’ll be won over.

This ignores two factors:

  • Confirmation bias: we invariably seek to confirm our existing beliefs; no matter how credible, opposing proof points are unlikely to change our fundamental views (and may even strengthen them.)
  • NGOs don’t simply present their side of the story; they frame issues as ethical (them) vs. unethical (their opponents). And once you’ve been portrayed as unethical, you can’t fight the label by rationalising.

So what options remain for corporate communicators (including PA professionals)?

  1. Give up on trying to convince everyone. If confirmation bias is at play, beliefs run deep. Ignore and move on to groups whose views are not so set in stone.
  2. Fight an ethical battle; build legitimacy passionately not rationally, and don’t be afraid of getting into a scrap.
  3. Build legitimacy beyond issues; being top-tier (and credible) employers and citizens can have a greater impact than a credible take on day-to-day issues, for instance.
  4. Don’t just rebut your opponent’s position: create an alternative narrative rather than seeking to reframe the prevailing one.
  5. If you do rebut, don’t belittle the recipient: you know where they stand and see their point, but beg to differ.

A business delusion: “non-profits win because they can peddle misinformation”

I’ve heard this statement in various guises over the years. Supposedly, non-profits win over public opinion by duping gullible citizens through emotive, exaggerated if not outright false tales, which compels decision-makers to approve regulation that unfairly and disproportionately damages business.

When corporates think so-called emotive campaigning makes up the entirety of the activist’s toolkit and leave it at that, they’re guilty of malpractice. And I doubt most citizens are quite as dim as they think.

We’ll overlook two pertinent factors:

  1. Corporates do quite often win. Indeed, market power scale (i.e. job creation and investment) has been proven to be a key determinant of decision-making at EU level.
  2. Non-profits don’t always peddle misinformation: they’re often on the right side of the public debate based on hard fact (think CFCs) although I appreciate this is not always the case (think GMOs, where pseudo-science and demonisation largely trump reality).

Instead, let’s look at a few areas where non-profits, especially those that are larger and more professionalised (including foundations) often do better than most (not all) of their corporate counterparts.

  1. Picking the right battles

Public affairs professionals are always oh so busy working on their 20 dossiers. No one can fight, let alone win 20 battles. Non-profits are vocal about some things but not others because they pick their battles well: they select those they think they can win. I appreciate it may be easier said than done, but corporates should be looking at their issues and determining which are most commercially beneficial AND winnable, and focus on those. Also, some companies get hit more than others that make the same products for a similar reason: again, non-profits pick battles they’re more likely to win. They analyse the competition and attack the companies that are worse equipped to retaliate. Methodologies for commercial competitor analysis are well advanced yet in public affairs they’re patently not. Why?

  1. Start early

Public affairs is often reactive, yet in policy-land, the longer one waits, the harder it becomes to win. Corporates need to start reputation building activities early, way before it even looks likely that regulators might strike. As highlighted above, picking the right battles involves identifying vulnerable industries or companies that have failed to build reputational equity; starting early helps to mitigate this (unless the product or service is overtly nasty).

  1. Fund battles properly

One of the great myths of policy-land, which is gladly espoused by NGOs, is that corporates engaging in public affairs are lavishly funded while all non-profits except possibly the foundations trundle along on meagre donations. This is not true. Public affairs is often seen as a mystifying cost centre and tends to actually be underfunded. At the same time, we’ve witnessed significant professionalisation of the NGO sector and new funding mechanisms, coupled with the advent of foundations and the growth of philanthropy. Overall, this has resulted in non-profits often being better funded than corporates.

  1. Study opinion formation

Corporates often do not know what makes their targets tick: how do they form opinions? And by extension, what can we do to get them onside? I hardly know the workings of all non-profits, but I’ve spoken to a fair few that have applied Values Modes to help develop outreach that targets a broader set constituents, not just “people like me” which tended to be the norm. Similarly, plenty of good academic research looks at the nature and determinants of interest group influence at EU level (some of the best is by Heike Klüver). Is any of this type of stuff ubiquitous in corporate circles? Not as far as I know.

  1. Be campaigners

Most NGO folk I know would gladly be defined as campaigners. A campaign denotes an outcome: I campaign in order to bring about said change. They are often subject matter experts, but also know the campaigner’s toolkit inside out, and are diligent students of both. Corporate public affairs practitioners are often subject matter experts but are uncomfortable with campaigning, or communications in general, which tends to make them knowledge rather than outcome focused, to their detriment.

Internal communications and public affairs

My digital public affairs wheel includes internal communications as a core component of the public affairs toolkit, which struck some people as odd. I’d argue that good internal communications is imperative for any large scale business conducting public affairs (but admittedly less so for non-profits or SMEs), given the following:

  • PA is often not understood by the wider business and/or seen mainly as a cost
  • The value that PA practitioners bring may be under-appreciated
  • Therefore, the PA function is often underfunded (and overworked) and thus ineffectual
  • At times, PA is not integrated in the wider communications set-up, which may result in perilous misalignment (policy maker hearing one thing from PA but reading another somewhere else originating from Corporate Communications?)
  • Similarly, PA practitioners might not be using thinking and material developed by other communications functions because they sit in different silos
  • Furthermore, PA can be ineffective because it does not contain enough real-world business proof points i.e. it gets caught up in policy-speak not real world outcomes

I have no doubt that leadership prioritisation, good hires, structure and/or silo reduction need to play a role, but I suspect improved internal communications would already go a fair way towards countering each of the points in my list.

Updated digital public affairs wheel (model)

A few years back I developed the digital public affairs wheel, linking the three components of day-to-day PA activity (i. delivering a message to policy-makers and other audiences; ii. building relationships with them; iii. gathering intelligence) with relevant online tactics. Basic but useful as it helped start conversations with the right premise: what someone is seeking to do rather than the tactic or channel first.

I’ve updated the wheel to include two further disciplines that the PA professional increasingly needs to handle: campaigning (building and mobilising support) and the oft-overlooked internal (informing and engaging internal stakeholders). It’s a bit messy but I hope it makes sense.

digital public affairs wheel

Digital in EU Public Affairs: what really matters

Talk about the application of digital and social media in Brussels-based EU public affairs often centres on the potential for grassroots mobilisation, citing one or more of the following:

  • At national level, citizens are politically active online across the EU; given that they’re using the same social networks, the advent of the European Citizens’ Initiative, and activist sites like Avaaz are uniform and multilingual, pan-European campaigns should be on the up.
  • In part through digital means, citizens have dramatically reversed the tide on issues that seemed set in stone e.g. ACTA and fish discards.
  • Even corporate-led public affairs is veering towards greater engagement with downstream players e.g. consumers, retailers and unions, who are more able and willing to mobilise constituents.
  • Online grassroots mobilisation is inherent in US politics and where they start we tend to follow.

There’s some truth in all of the statements above, but they largely ignore the following:

  • On many (most?) Brussels issues, there is no major public interest angle; the sexy stuff (health, education etc.) is largely dealt with at national level.
  • EU policy-making remains more technical and less political than it is at national level. Unless an issue has become highly politicised, technical know-how and the ability to navigate expert groups and comitology is key to success.
  • Likewise, EU policy-making is more consensus-based than at national level; the ability to come with solutions that can form the basis of consensus is valued more highly than public support (again – unless this is considerable).
  • On the corporate side – let’s be frank – even if there’s a public interest angle, players are often on the wrong side of the public debate and thus have no interest in raising volume levels.

Does this make digital and social irrelevant in public affairs? No, but in most instances, focus should be on other elements of the digital/social suite, for instance:

  • Basic content and search: successful public affairs requires timely provision of relevant communications material; this needs to be available online (and must be easy to locate) but too often it is not.
  • Intelligence: various online intelligence tools and techniques should be applied more broadly e.g. network analysis technology can help map and prioritise relevant networks of influence.
  • Social business: a frequent complaint about business lobbyists is that they know the dossiers inside out but not enough about the business they represent; similarly, PA professionals complain that their business counterparts don’t value their work. Improved internal collaboration networks, one of the hallmarks of social business, could help both ways.
  • And…. the digital & social ethos: given the complexity of the subject matter and the background of most public affairs professionals (i.e. policy/politics not strategic communications), PA is too often knowledge – not strategy and outcome – focussed, making too much PA output dull and ineffective. In digital and social, given online information overload, highly discerning audiences and greater internal scrutiny, output must be strategy based, creatively executed, social by design and measurable – or it just won’t work.

Public Affairs London vs. Brussels: 3 observations

I’ve been mostly London-based for just over 6 months now. Three divergences in the practice of Public Affairs have stood out for me so far (although there are many more):

1. Media matters

Few truly pan-European publications exist (the FT and the Economist to some extent), while Brussels-EU media are information aggregators or news sources more than reflections of – or shapers of – public opinion. So when trying to influence an EU-level decision-maker via media, the PA professional either has to target pan-European publications (difficult – story needs to be bloody good) or go via national press (virtually impossible at scale – trying to do media in up to +20 markets requires more resource than PA teams tend to have). There’s a place for media in Brussels, but in a single national market with a concentrated, established suite of leading media outlets, media relations is easier (although by no means easy) and more impactful.

2. Sheer number of stakeholders

The bane of Brussels: finding someone who cares. Stakeholders i.e. people or organisations with a stake in your issue, largely only exist at national level. Obviously. This leaves Brussels PA folk with a variety of challenges. How to get national level stakeholders to take a real interest in Brussels? How to not offend by using too many stakeholders from a single member state, or only large member states, or only rich member states? In the UK, most stakeholders you’re interested in tend to care about the issue, and to boot, they’re usually not too far away.

3. Polling as a PA tool

Most issues in Brussels don’t have much of a public angle: they’re often too technical or niche for a wider audience to take any real interest. This almost always makes polling an irrelevance as a PA tool: why poll people, ostensibly in the hope of showing that you have public support, when the public knows nothing about your issue? Alternatively, there may be a public interest angle, but how are you going to poll across multiple member states without breaking the bank? In a national market, there’s almost always a public interest angle, plus polling is more economical to carry out, making it a far likelier PA tool (assuming you have a fair share of public support, clearly).

I suppose the overarching theme is that shaping the environment in which policy making happens is more prevalent in London – and other national markets no doubt – than in Brussels. Effective government relations alone tends to not be enough to win, making the practice of Public Affairs a broader – and I’d argue, interesting – exercise.

Digital Public Affairs services: 3 + 3 (seen vs. unseen)

I developed the digital public affairs wheel a couple of years ago, which does a decent job of summarising how digital can support the three main components of execution in Public Affairs i.e. intelligence gathering, message delivery and relationship/coalition building. What it misses is the background stuff i.e. the unseen work which makes the execution actually work. To this end, I think the following 3 + 3 split works quite nicely i.e. you still have the execution (the “seen”) but in parallel we have the “unseen.”

digital public affairs

Public Affairs and strategy

Public Affairs is the communications discipline that most easily gets away with being unstrategic: frequently (not always, clearly) it can be executed without being linked to clear business objectives and a corresponding, measurable plan of execution.

Why?

Detail

The amount of detail often inherent in issues managed by PA pros is far greater than it is in any other communications discipline. Simply being on top of it and understanding which issues and stakeholders matter and doing something about them, however spurious, can be seen as doing enough. Even when there is no way of truly demonstrating outcomes that benefit the organization’s bottom line.

Accountability

PA is often not expected to be as measurable as other disciplines, certainly in terms of true outcomes. This is largely because the ultimate outcome – impact on policy – is governed by so many external factors beyond a PA professional’s control. They are therefore often not held accountable for failure, certainly not compared to say a marketer, who is held entirely accountable if a hike in activity has not resulted in an increase in sales.

Culture

Many PA professionals have little to no experience of strategic communications, and operate in a space in which deep knowledge of policy and relationships are often seen as more important. Granted, both remain essential, but increasingly, influence has to be built up beyond the corridors of power and broadsheet media, and to do so, PA needs to adopt the staples of strategic communications (research, strategic planning, measurement and so forth). However, given that they view themselves as political beasts, not communicators, a number of PA pros are reluctant to do so.

Resourcing

The PA function often remains under-resourced, largely because it is frequently seen as a cost by the people who control the purse strings. Small PA teams thus too often spend their time doing the basics, or fire-fighting, rather than planning for the future.

Making digital work in Public Affairs: hold off on campaigning, focus on government relations for now

What should the Public Affairs professional seek to do? Two things mainly:

  • Help build solid relationships with policy-makers through the practice we call government relations – and ultimately try to gain their support.
  • Try to shift the pin on issues more broadly i.e. get public opinion on side so that government relations becomes less necessary (in theory, at least).

Usually, digital is seen as part of the toolkit for the latter i.e. “shifting the pin”.  And for good reason: it’s got unlikely candidates elected to political office and it’s made poorly funded activist campaigns take off and beat the big boys. It’s quick, access is mostly free and it’s ubiquitous. It’s a great storytelling medium and it’s the best and most cost-effective mobilisation channel ever devised. It’s TV, radio, telephone, water-cooler and soapbox in one.

What’s not to love? In Public Affairs, especially in Brussels, two things:

  • Plenty of Brussels dossiers are technical and don’t interest that many people, so there’s actually no pin to shift.
  • More importantly, even when there is pin shifting to do, structural issues within organisations get in the way. The Public Affairs function tends to cover government relations and little else and has the people and budget to do just that. Unfortunately, shifting the pin takes a variety of skill-sets (campaigning, creative type stuff etc.) which organisations may have collectively somewhere amongst their marketing and communications people, but not in PA. Plus it costs lots of money: usually far more than PA folk are given.

Is this a long-winded way of saying that digital in PA is obsolete? Not quite. I would argue that without the right people and budgets, there’s no point in trying to shift the pin. But sometimes the right people and budgets are available, and down the line, when we’ll see PA and other marketing and communications functions at the same table, there will be an upsurge in shifting the pin type activities.

While we patiently wait, I’d focus on where digital can support government relations. It doesn’t have to be big and flashy, but it can help drive an agenda. How? I’d centre on three things in particular:

  • Highly targeted content which mirrors what the government relations team is saying and doing. We’re not talking fluffy content stating that organisation X is saving penguins 5,000 miles off, but rather, exactly the same storyline recited to decision-makers but told through an alternative channel. Then ensure it reaches the intended audience through highly targeted paid media i.e. search engine and social advertising.
  • Social media (Twitter mainly, but possibly also LinkedIn and at some point Facebook, depending on the issue) but only when used as an alternative channel to engage with main targets. If they i.e. policy-makers and key influencers aren’t active, don’t bother: social networking for GR purposes is useless if no one you care about is at it, clearly. And get people who build offline relationships to replicate online i.e. don’t hand it off to the intern.
  • Use a listening platform to do three things: learn more about your targets’ constituents, track stakeholder activity so you know you’re picking up the vital exchanges for social media engagement, and track uptake of your GR activities (see my previous post for further details on this.)