My son Freddy paying his father’s advice due attention, recently…
In the three years I’ve been doing PR and communications consulting, I’ve seen a few patterns emerge. It turns out there is often one easy answer to your big PR question. This week, for example, I had clients ask me these tactical questions:
-Should we include a strapline under our name in our logo?
-How many quotes should we include in the press release?
-How do we frame this issue with our funders as opposed to for staff?
-Does this video need a different voiceover?
-Does it matter that our website has stock images of people on it?
I found myself answering most of these questions with another simple question. I do so not because I’m a difficult person, but because I’ve learned that it’s often the quickest route to being most valuable. I asked, in a manner of speaking, “how would doing it one way or the other move you towards your big goal for the year?”
And that’s it. That’s what I’m here for. You can call what I do “PR” or “strategic communications” or anything you like, frankly. But what I’m really here to do is to get you there, quicker. If you’ve got a big goal, I’m here to help you move closer towards it. Often, I find organizations start worrying a lot about their tactics in one of two scenarios. The first is worse. It’s when they don’t have a unified goal or a hope of attaining it. That’s when you start seeing deckchairs shuffle around on the proverbial Titanic. The second is more encouraging. It’s when the big goals are clear but they’re overthinking the delivery. They often need me on hand to say, “it’s okay, you’ve got this, and honest, it doesn’t matter either way. Now, let’s get it out the door.”
If you’re focused on tactics, it might be a good idea, if you can, to ask yourself a deeper question about your big goal. That is: “What are the one or two things we’re doing that undercut our ability to achieve it?” They might be comms-y. They might be in another area. But at the end of the day, I’m here to help people think that stuff through.
Once your big goal and audiences are clear, the most common communications mistake people make is over-communicating. Particularly, they communicate too much about things that aren’t in line with the big goal. What I try to do in that situation is get people to realize it confuses their audience if they say too much. People stop knowing for sure what they stand for. And don’t tell me what you do is complex. If Barack Obama could summarize his entire campaign in two words, you can, too.
Hope! Change!
The next big thing people do is get stuck. The big goal matters so much to them that they find themselves going round in circles when it comes to talking. They can’t say anything because they worry that they’ll phrase it wrong or alienate a key audience. That’s when I tell them if they’re clear on their goal and audiences, then they’re a lot further ahead than most of their peers. So: It’s time to go for it. The more you delay yourself in red-lining countless documents, the less your impact. It’s time to tell people what you’re here for.
Of course, it’s sometimes a case of cobblers and their own bad shoes. I turned 43 on Sunday. I’ve found myself struggling a little bit, wondering what my big goal is for the next year. Luckily, I subscribe to John Lennon’s philosophy. He sang that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Meantime I’m happy to continue delivering on the tactical level for all my clients. And occasionally, to helping them ask themselves the bigger questions about what they’re doing here in the first place.
If I’m honest, I think I find the answers to the biggest questions when I’m in the park playing with my son or sat around the kitchen table with my wife. But I do love to read and write and tell stories. Whether I’m at the kitchen table, in the park, or on a Zoom call with you. Those conversations can be meaningful and, in many ways, the stories we tell are what we’re here for.
To recap. If you have a comms question, ask yourself if answering it in a given way leads you towards your big goal for the year. If your goal and audience are clear, then get on with talking to them about what matters. If they’re not, then it’s important to get clear on them as soon as possible. I can help with either challenge. Meanwhile, life goes on. And I wish us all the best with it.
