The Do Good Better List - 5 Things I've loved this week.
There's been a lot to love about week commencing 16th July at Grey Fox.
Here's just 5 things...
1. New client relationship
It's been a week of making arrangements to work with a brand new client, in the health sector. I'm delighted to be working with them to spread the word about the life-changing impact of innovation and research.
I'll share more detail next week - but suffice to say, I'm incredibly excited to work with this brilliant new client.
2. Client work targeting young people.
I've been working this week on a project with a client focused on the welfare of students and young people.
It's very much a content creation piece, and it's been fantastic to work on.
I've worked with young people in various organisations and on various projects throughout my career; and one thing has always struck me.
Working with the Under 25s (I personally would class "young people" as older than that!) is fantastic as it means you have to constantly stay on top of trends in technology to ensure you're reaching and involving your audience through appropriate comms channels.
However - "young people" are still "people". And the long established rules of successful communications still apply. Whatever the channel, you first need to do the ground work to have:
- SMART objectives
- A full understanding of your audience's lives, motivations, barriers, and preferences.
- Consistent messaging
- Relevant, engaging content (based on the previous 3 points)
At this point, the choice of channel becomes academic, and should be the simplest part of process, given that this important work has been done prior - and due to the fact that as communicators, we're fascinated by new comms channels anyway.
So, young, old, or somewhere in between, whatever the audience: let's start with them, their lives, and work from there.
3. Blog post of the week
The title this week goes to this fantastic piece by Dan Slee; co-founder of comms2.0, comms consultant and all-round swell guy.
I love the use of "punk attitude" to reference the skills that we all as comms people are going to need now and for the foreseeable future.
For me this means: don't wait for permission. If you need to know something, find out yourself. If you need a new skill; don't wait for your HR Team to catch up, learn it yourself.
If you want to meet and learn from other people doing a similar job: start your own Unconference.
If you want to deliver comms to organisations your way: start your own company.
That's the philosophy behind Grey Fox.
And for your Friday listening, here's the Greatest DIY punk band Of All Time, Fugazi, to explain:
4. Podcast of the Week
This week's Podcast of the Week is not technically a comms-related one. Though it does, to me, prompt a lot of questions about the role of public sector comms in times of crisis.
And when I say "times of crisis", I am probably underplaying it slightly.
Let's say you do comms for the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, or maybe a Local Authority. How do you prepare the British public or your local residents for Nuclear War?
Well this was a very real issue for organisations during the 40 years of the Cold War; and one of my favourite podcasts The Atomic Hobo (hosted by journalist Julie McDowall) goes into great detail into the seemingly absurd advice that HM Government were issuing to citizens, in the latest episode, on "Advising the Householder".
Comparing government comms from the mid 1960s, to the early 1980s, Julie explains how the advice moved from looking after your pets (the 1960s), to how to bury dead family members (most notoriously explored in the absolutely bone-chilling Protect and Survive "cartoons" of the late 1970s).
There's a lot of horror nostalgia in there for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War; but it's fascinating to listen to from a public sector comms perspective:
How would your government comms team respond to that brief these days? Really gives food (probably tinned Spam) for thought.
5. Badly-written-passive-aggressive-kitchen-notices Twitter thread...
Earlier this week, I was writing a new blog post, and I shared some thoughts on it, on Twitter.
As with many things on Twitter, this sparked a hilarious thread about those hand-written or angrily capitalised notices you see in shared office kitchen spaces.
Have a read, and a chuckle.
