Tag: Public Affairs

Public Affairs: best use of websites and positions papers

Two staples of the PA comms suite in Brussels are policy focused websites and position papers. They’re usually chockerblock with useful stuff, but in most cases, fall prey of being too detailed. A majority of your audience will not be experts, although some will, so a range of knowledge levels must always be respected. As my colleague Aaron frequently says: most MEPs are lawyers – not scientists, engineers or economists.

Hardly rocket science, but these two triangles illustrate what I mean in a tad more detail.

On websites, a site visitor should first be presented with easy access to basic information, and if he or she wants more detailed information, or even highly advanced information aimed at experts, they’ll find it by clicking further. Some sites do this, but most don’t: they’ll either not cover all levels of detail, or they’ll be overly detailed from the off.

Position papers are always detailed by nature, albeit to varying degrees. That’s fine, but the issue is that they’re frequently left unread because of it. What’s missing is that the position paper is never broken down into smaller bits. There are real opportunities here, given that a position paper represents an organisation’s detailed and virtually complete vision of an issue, so the building blocks are all there. Meaning what? Take the information and do one or more of the following:

  • Create an alternative version in 10 bullet points or structured like an FAQ
  • Create an executive summary in visual form (infographic)
  • Feature the author(s) in a video, podcast (or series of) describing its contents
  • Create a series of online news items, blog posts or whatever, each highlighting one section of the position paper
  • Publish a series of tweets highlighting the key points and a link through to the detailed paper
  • … And market each item heavily

Public Affairs and corp comms: making them work in tandem in a policy town

Organisations, including agencies, often have separate public affairs and corporate communications functions in Brussels (not Fleishman-Hillard). It’s a tad peculiar, given that PA is a communications discipline, and that the comms piece is increasingly important: good PA must incorporate more elements of disciplines such as reputation management and branding than before, while the proliferation of channels means there are far more ways to reach policy-makers, and often in more markets. Combined, there’s no doubt that success isn’t easily attained with traditional PA tactics alone.

So why are the functions often still kept separate?

  • Culture. By and large, PA professionals tend to value knowledge (policy-based), while comms people think communications strategy and output (audiences, content, engagement, measurement etc.)
  • Comms people weren’t required back in the day: there were fewer target audiences and channels, even PA people could do it properly! These same PA people still rule the roost and are loath to change their ways.
  • Structurally, the fact that the disciplines were separate means separate silos developed. Hence the Brussels phenomenon where companies have their European HQs out by the airport and a PA office near the Parliament.

So what should organisations looking to assimilate their PA and corporate communications functions in a PA town do? As is often the case in this blog, there’s no definitive answer, but a series of thought starters:

  • The bleedin’ obvious: combine the corp comms and PA teams.
  • Bring in new blood to stir things up, especially senior corp comms talent.
  • Focus on avowed generalists who bridge the PA and corp comms gulf most comfortably.
  • Position the corp comms folk as thought leaders and have them lead a series of first-rate internal training sessions (PA folk are smug and will inherently think they’re more cerebral – this may help!)
  • When possible, make a corp comms specialist head of PA too…
  • Make it about more than corp comms and PA: build bridges with marcomms, even if they’re in a different country.
  • Do the boring stuff to support this: create processes e.g. monthly calls, annual meetings to exchange best practice (based on very clear templates and agendas to ensure relevance).

How does a PA pro become content-driven and creative?

I frequently speak to fellow Public Affairs professionals who tacitly agree that we’re all a little dull (not personally, but the PA function within our organisations). This is problematic because the evolving nature of the PA function demands that we become more interesting. Gone are they days when we speak to a miniscule audience of fellow experts. Increasingly, we need to be winning over hearts and minds that may not know that much about the subject matter, in a market where they are exposed to far more information than ever before. This in turn obliges us to be more thought-provoking, amusing and, god forbid, emotional.

No, PA is not too cerebral to be any of the above: enough of the endless data, position papers no one reads and press releases no paper picks up; instead, bring on smart summaries of issues, layman’s terms and information presented in forms other than small print.

Easier said than done though: how does the PA function, which traditionally has focussed on subject-matter expertise alone rather than how to communicate it effectively, suddenly become thought-provoking, amusing and emotional by embracing creative content production?

There’s no right or wrong answer, but here are a few thought starters.

How isolated is the PA function within the organisation in question? If it’s very isolated, it’s unlikely to have been in contact with more creative elements it could probably pick up a few tricks from (usually the ones involved more closely in targeting customers). And by the way, the old “we’re traditional, there’s no one creative in the whole company” claim doesn’t fly: creative doesn’t mean comic books and trapeze artists, it can just mean smart, strategic thinking done with a twist. Talk to the brand, marketing, corporate communications teams, even if they’re somewhere else, and even if you’re a bank or produce unpronounceable chemicals.

You can try to change things from within but the people onboard have “traditional” PA profiles? That’s fine, but next time you hire someone, maybe look beyond the person with a political science degree, experience in government or similar sectoral experience in a different setting. Hire someone who has a proven track record in communications outside a policy town. Clearly they should understand PA, but it shouldn’t be their bread and butter. This sort of profile will also usually be better at grasping PA within a business and reputation context, which is getting ever more essential as we veer towards a model where Public Affairs becomes less about government relations alone.

“Hire someone creative” may be a bit of a push, not least because the barriers to creativity often stem from internal hurdles placed by traditionalists within the PA function in an organisation. How can they be won over? Start with two simple things which we for some reason often overlook in Public Affairs although they are staples in other areas of communication: benchmarking and polling. Yes, benchmark other organisations, other industries, even other functions within your own organisation. I suspect many of them will have produced smart and effective material that isn’t in Times New Roman font size 8. By polling I don’t just mean professional polling (although clearly if you can, do so). Ever asked friendly members of your target audience (officials, assistants, press) what they really want from you? In many cases, it won’t be another position paper.

If you work with agencies, as yourself a couple of questions. First, is your agency the right one? You need policy expertise but you may also need really good communications nous. Does your agency provide both? If not, maybe look beyond it. Second, do you use an agency that is part of a larger network? If so, make sure your agency thinks of other parts of its network when servicing you. They may have a design magician in Paris and a former journalist come story-teller par excellence in Berlin who could be really useful to you, but neither is being called on because “they don’t do PA”.

Anything I’ve forgotten?

Content checklists for PA pros (one good, one bad)

Online content matters. Why? Your target audience may come across it e.g. think the oft-quoted 93% of MEPs use Google daily to learn about policy-related issues.

But content needs to tick the following boxes:

  • It needs to be relevant
  • It needs to be interesting
  • It needs to be clear and ideally concise
  • It needs to be published in channels audiences are likely to use
  • It needs to be marketed so that audiences actually find it

Unfortunately, too much PA-related output in Brussels does not tick these boxes, largely because far too little thought is out into producing it: no it’s not a case of stick something up and the hoards will come.

Outlined below are a couple of checklists, the first showing a smart process, the second showing the prevalent non-process (use it at your peril.)

Digital and Public Affairs “wheel”

 

The activities of the Public Affairs professional in Brussels (and most other places, for that matter) can be summed up in three core activities:

  1. Gathering intelligence.
  2. Getting a message to policy-makers and influencers.
  3. Engaging with stakeholders and building relationships and coalitions.

Each of these activities can be supported online, and the purpose of the wheel is to exhibit this. It contains the three core activities at the centre, and moving out, online communications activities, and in the outer circle, the tools and tactics that support these.

Caveats:

  1. These could be placed in an order (1-6) starting with monitoring, through to content production, marketing and ending with community, which would in principle represent the correct way to approach most online endeavours, but it may not always be the case, plus I didn’t want to over-engineer.
  2. Yes, there’s plenty of overlap, hence the arrows. There should probably be more arrows, but again, didn’t want to over-engineer.
  3. Yes, there are far more tools and approaches, but this is specific to PA in Brussels, hardly the most advanced digitally, so this is fine for starters I think.

The wheel is by no means final, so would appreciate scathing criticism or (preferably) constructive suggestions for improvement.

Public Affairs and LinkedIn: big potential

Whatever the issue, Public Affairs professionals in Brussels will usually seek to do two things: obviously, communicate with policy-makers, whether directly or through what we in PR-speak call “influencers”; and build coalitions of support, ideally in both Member States and Brussels (note: how to manage the Member States and Brussels nexus – in particular how to identify and harness activity at national level to drive political developments in Brussels – is arguably the greatest bane of the Brussels-based PA professional).

With the advent of digital, PA professionals got rather excited about prospects for the latter: the online space would allow them to build pan-European coalitions with ease and speed, and on the cheap. These coalitions of people interested in very specific issues (web-speak: micro-communities) – so far often scattered and unaware of each other – would finally have a single place in which to unify and mobilise their activity, which when fed into the policy loop would help drive political developments far more effectively.

It didn’t happen, however:

  • People across the EU may have been active on issues online, but on different platforms (and communicating in different languages) i.e. like-minded people may have been producing lots of good material and doing stuff which policy-makers and influencers would have taken note of, but their activity remained as splintered as before.
  • When anyone did try to set up an online community to join the dots, it was hard to get people to join: raising awareness of a one-stop online community was difficult, and even if likeminded people were informed, getting them to join (and stay active) in a dedicated community was (and remains) nigh on impossible.

Enter LinkedIn Groups, and we finally have a community platform that ticks the following boxes:

  • It’s pan-European and has critical mass (or getting there.)
  • It’s credible.
  • People are already on it so no one has to join something new and unfamiliar.
  • People check their LinkedIn regularly, so will likely check the community and be active on it more than they would on a dedicated platform.
  • It has all the required features (aggregation, discussion, sharing) to enable what’s required of an online coalition i.e. being a single unifying hub for good information scattered in lots of different places (blogs, sites, Twitter feeds, whatever), and allowing like-minded people to meet, engage, share, mobilise and – in particular – consolidate their activity.

Needless to say, a group has to be managed very efficiently if it’s to act as a single hub and drive cohesive action on an issue, but the potential’s there.

The telephone was once pretty useless too, so what?

I recently heard for the umpteenth time that someone who had signed up to Twitter and didn’t gain a following of a million within a few weeks had given up, claiming it doesn’t work as a channel to raise awareness and engage on policy-related issues because it’s not credible and 140 characters is only enough for a bit of mindless babble.

I doubt it. There are two reasons it wouldn’t have worked (beyond the fact that it always takes a bit more time than you think): either tweets were dull or irrelevant, or, on the given issue, there aren’t enough people interested in it active on Twitter YET i.e. there’s no critical mass. A telephone too was pretty useless when hardly anyone one had one.

So two points:

  • A channel is just a channel: it’s not the nature of it that determines whether it works or not but what you transmit on it. Does an annoying telemarketer trying to sell you something utterly useless make you think the phone is a worthless communications channel?
  •  A channel is just a channel: it’ll work if there’s enough critical mass i.e. lots of people on it, meaning people in your sector/area of interest/issue, actively using it. Fact of the matter is, in most areas, they aren’t all on Twitter yet.

And a third:

  • Enough with the “only 140 characters”: it’s enough for a quick exchange and to drive traffic somewhere else where you have as much space as you like to delve deeper (a blog, for instance.)

Measuring success in Public Affairs

Know what happens to a marketer whose big programme does not result in a rise in sales? They’re in trouble. They may very well lose their job. What happens if a PA professional’s big programme still results in overwhelming loss in that ultimate of KPIs i.e. the outcome of the regulatory issue it’s trying to affect? Nothing much, in many cases (but not all cases, by any means).

Why the disparity? Because a marketing programme needs to fit into a neat sales funnel that lists all activities ultimately leading to the sale, and each activity is eminently measurable. If something is clogging the funnel, which then results in fewer sales than expected, it’s easy to detect exactly where the fault lies. There’s no PA equivalent of the sales funnel, however.

Result? In some cases, PA professionals can get away with not succeeding because:

  1. Often, the activities they conduct aren’t linked to ultimate success due to the lack of a funnel, so their achievement is often measured in fairly subjective terms, usually based on output. Lobbyist X is great, in just 3 months he/she got us meetings with 12 MEPs and high-level officials, produced 4 position papers which our board thought were great, and hosted an event which 3 journalists came to!”
  2. If a marketer doesn’t sell, there’s nowhere to hide, yet the PA pro has more pretexts: the public fell for the NGO narrative and politicians felt compelled to support their position; the media misrepresented us; we only had 3 months and so only met with 12 MEPs and high-level officials and wrote 4 position papers (as if to say if the bastards had given us 6 months, we’d have had 24 meetings and published 8 position papers: that would have done the trick!)

What’s the solution? Not a PA funnel that’s quite as neat as a sales funnel, because frankly, we PA pros have a valid point regarding the number of variables that affect regulatory outcomes. You can be brilliant and on the right side of an issue and still lose due to any number of factors. A brilliant marketer will usually get it right (assuming the product isn’t a dud).

However, output should never be a measure of success. The fact that it is, helps explain why some PA activity is poor. I see it all the time in digital, for instance. God-awful websites, excruciating videos, social media outreach that reaches no-one other than 12 spammers. And yet the programme is deemed a success because it ticked the website, video and social media boxes.

So step one to bridging the gap to more accountable communications disciplines like marketing is to produce indicative KPIs which connect output to success more cogently:

  • As a result of our meeting, MEP X tabled an amendment that supported our position (which, in truth, most tend to measure already, albeit not as part of a clearly defined measurement dashboard incorporating a number of KPIs).
  • As a result of our social media outreach, we built a coalition in country X and shifted a constituency into our camp, resulting in MEPs supporting our position.
  • As a result of our position paper, we were able to get meetings with 8 perm reps, which subsequently shifted Council’s position in our favour as measured by ABC.

It’s by no means an easy (or entirely scientific) exercise to extend this across far more PA activities (the sample KPIs above, for instance, require plenty of work). Yet I’m sure more specific metrics can be developed, which would ultimately make PA pros and their output more accountable, resulting in less bad PA and presumably more success in terms of affecting regulatory outcomes.

Brussels and digital: a different crowd now

I presented to a clever and vocal crowd at the Euractiv “Federations Workshop” this week on how to integrate digital in traditional PA practices (presentation at the bottom of this post, although much of it is just images and may thus not make much sense – feel free to get in touch if you have questions.)

Some thoughts:

  1. In the past, when I did this sort of thing, there were always people in the crowd with no digital experience. Now, it’s rare that no one at least produces content for a website. This crowd was especially savvy.
  2. Similarly, there always used to be doubters in the crowd. No longer: everyone sees the value, but would just like pointers on how to do it better.
  3. Amongst people who think they’re beginners, there are often some fairly sophisticated users of social media. At EurActiv, some attendees were making impressive use of Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and social media measurement platforms.
  4. I often tend to run through common “stumbling blocks”. At EurActiv, I mentioned lack of internal support and resistance from IT and/or legal as issues, but not a single attendee had any sort of internal stumbling block. Great news, as this (and lack of resources) used to be cited as the primary reason for not embracing digital.
Digital and Public Affairs in Brussels

Pet hate: “there’s no digital element in this”

There always is. ALWAYS. And thanks to input from my clever colleagues, Aoife and James, from now on, in order to make this very, very clear, I’ll explain digital to PA crowds solely in terms of how it can be used in support of traditional PA activities and will always avoid supposed jargon like content and engagement.

Meaning what? Summarising PA very neatly in 4 categories – i) getting your message to policy-makers and influencers; ii) building relationships with policy-makers and influencers; iii) building and mobilising alliances and networks of support; iv) intelligence monitoring – I’ll then move on to explain how each of these four categories can be enhanced using a variety of digital tactics.

Fingers crossed it’ll get more of the nay-sayers onboard.