Stakeholder communications can be fun and engaging (here’s how)

I thought the media launch for the new LiveLighter TVCs would be the most interesting event I’d attend as part of my internship, but I had no idea how great the stakeholder launch would be!

The purpose of the stakeholder launch was to introduce LiveLighter’s stakeholders to the new TVCs, as well as the new resources (cookbooks, leaflets, online resources, merchandise). The stakeholders were mostly from other health promotion agencies that use LiveLighter’s messages and resources in their work, and governing bodies like Healthway and PHAIWA (Public Health Advocacy Institute of WA).

Before the actual stakeholder launch, I got to sit in on another interview for the H+M (Health + Medicine) liftout in the West Australian. This time the interview was with the two experts who we had as spokespeople for the new campaign – nutrition expert Professor Amanda Lee and gastroenterologist Associate Professor Leon Adams. Because the interviews were for H+M, the interviewees could go more in-depth with medical and nutrition science terminology and explanations than they could with their interviews at the media launch. This seemed to make both interviewees a lot more at ease, as they didn’t have to worry about dumbing-down the science (which is much harder to do than you’d think).

My job for the stakeholder launch was to live tweet the event. It was the first time I’d done a live-tweet and it was quite exhilarating (in a PR dork kind of way). We’d stuck posters all around the lecture theatre with LiveLighter’s twitter handle and the hashtag for the launch (#junkfree), and encouraged any Twitter users present to live tweet the event as well. We had a number of the attendees participating in the live tweet, including guest speaker Amanda Lee. I had to think on my toes and let go of my perfectionist tendencies when doing the live tweet. My engaged twitter audience was seeing things at the same time as me, so I had to make sure I tweeted things in real time.

After my experience, my advice for anyone doing a professional live tweet for the first time is:

-        -   Try and memorise exactly what the speaker is saying as they say it – verbatim quotes are perfect for live tweeting

-        -   If possible, ask the speakers for a copy of their PowerPoint before the presentation – it looks much better to tweet a screenshot of a slide than a photo of it being projected on a screen

-       - Ask key players (eg. Campaign director, guest speakers) to get involved on their personal accounts – some audiences members may be more comfortable to tweet their questions rather than ask them in front of a room full of people

I have to share a photo of the creative healthy catering for the event – fruit pizzas in pizza boxes, veggies sticks and dip in chip buckets and mushroom “cheeseburgers.” The catering at a health promotion event is always under a lot of scrutiny and LiveLighter cleverly tied it into their junk food theme.

I think one of the main reasons of I enjoyed the stakeholder launch so much was the sense of being a part of a committed team. The whole LiveLighter team (not just the Comms staff) pitched in to help with the event and it ran like clockwork because there were so many hands on deck.

On a slight tangent, I’ve noticed that because Communications (and health promotion as well) are female dominated industries, a large percentage of the staff are part-time. This had presented me with some challenges regarding whether it’s crossing professional boundaries to text/email co-workers with a work-related question if it’s their day off, and has made me appreciate how difficult it is to schedule a team meeting when everyone works different days.

What do you think about the work-force having greater part-time flexibility? Is it better for families/post-graduate study opportunities, or impacting workplace productivity?

Until next time,

Bec

Things Don't Always Go To Plan...

As most of you will know, things sometimes have to be changed so that they can become better.

I got to experience this when it was decided that the education campaign I'm currently helping to develop had to undergo major changes.

Luckily, it wasn't because I had been doing everything wrong (phew). The education campaign I'm working on is to try and increase the registration numbers of off-road vehicles, and it was originally decided that we would be targeting the people who ride and own them. After discussions with the communications team and careful consideration, we decided that this wasn't going to be very effective, and that it's outside the scope of responsibilities for the government department I'm interning with. Instead, the campaign's main focus will be encouraging local governments to enforce the regulations that are under their control and encourage members of their communities to engage in safe riding practices.

This meant that the campaign that I had spent about six weeks working on had to be almost completely changed. Changing the key stakeholders meant that the objectives, key messages, communication tactics and the implementation timeline all had to be changed - which is essentially the entire thing.

Surprisingly, I didn't find myself disheartened or annoyed about this. Instead I took it as an opportunity to learn that things won't always work straight away, and to not get to attached to an idea, because it may not work out. Looking back, I'm happy it happened, because I was able to get more experience out of it.

 Zoe

Uni Life Meets Real Life

I’ve officially made it past the half waypoint of my internship, and have come to notice a very important activity in public relations that I hadn’t realised before. Over the duration of the past two weeks I’ve found myself helping to create, update and validate databases for not only the PR consultancy I’m working at, but also for major clients.

Some are the databases are internal, consisting of media contacts, that become extremely helpful when creating lists of people or companies to contact when sending out press releases. Other databases I’ve contributed to, are maintained by us for particular clients that allow them to easily organise and access their clients at a click of a button, putting in place a tool for the effective communication distribution internally and externally. 

Having databases makes everyday PR life so much easier, however a great deal of work gets put into them, not to mention just how time consuming and sometimes monotonous they can be. Today I stared the process of creating a database from scratch for the Managing Director to have his entire list of stakeholders right at the tip of his finger.

The first step is to put all the contacts into Excel, including their name, position, company of employment, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing address and any direct meetings, notes and interactions he’s had with the particular contact. Oh and I should mention there are over 400 stakeholders in letter A alone! (Yes there are 23 more letters to go and no, I’m not doing it alone, thankfully)

What’s most interesting is that the finished database will have a section where

stakeholders are classified by Mitchell et al’s stakeholder salience theory with the well-known attributes, power, urgency, and legitimacy.  This helps to define their role to the organisation and categorise their position among others, helping our consultancy make better informed decisions when dealing with specific stakeholders. I believe every third year Curtin University students should be quite familiar with this theory at this point in time, I guess all those long Corporate PR seminars have finally paid off for me.

I've definitely come to experience first hand that stakeholders are the key to good public relations and emphasis should be put on the way they are categorized and managed in organisations, as this will directly alter relationships. No matter how small a stakeholder is they there are still valuable to the organisation, so its important to not overlook them.  

Only now that I’m actually using the stakeholder salience theory and witnessing how it contributes first hand to PR, can I understand how theory’s learnt in University contribute to the real world. Many times as students we learn theories and think we'll never have to use them once we graduate, but this is clearly not the case, it seems many organisations are following the very things we're learning every week in class.