Public Relations in Parliament

So far I am ¾ of my way through my placement here at FHHS. Today I learnt an invaluable lesson from my supervisor. She briefed me on how to deal with contentious issues when raised in parliament. Contentious issues and the handling of them has not been touched hugely on in my studies at Curtin, so I found the information invaluable. I am hoping to work in a similar industry when I graduate, so for all I know in a year’s time I could be dealing with a similar issue.

A contentious issue is often based around a controversial topic. It is often a topic that people may fight over. Due to the industry of my placement this could be based around confidentiality, patient information, difference between public and private health systems or medical practice.

Due to confidentiality reasons and not being able to release specific details, the lessons I have learnt will be broadly summarised as followed:

• Generally the Opposition Leader will raise the issue in parliament. This leaves the General Leader caught off guard, especially if have not being informed by the Department of Health of the issue. The leaders assistant will then contact the Hospital directly requesting information. At this point as a PR Officer you need to do all that is in your power to fix the issue and fix it fast. In most instances this is drafting a response to the allegations.
• TIME IS PRECIOUS. In some cases you have a matter of minutes to draft a response. If a local newspaper has been tipped and is going to print immediately on the story, you need to respond accordingly.  In most instances the journalist has written the story before contacting you (if on a tight deadline). A PR person’s worst nightmare is the local papers blowing the issue out of proportion and including a statement saying you had no response. This causes community panic. Whether the allegation is true or not, it makes the community think it is. Community members begin to doubt what other controversies have they not been informed on. This brings doubt to the health service and what is provides.
• Responses are vital into creating a point of view the journalist writes by. It enables you as a PR professional to angle the story as much in your favour as possible. You can state in your response the facts, then followed by a statement saying “In no circumstances were the initial claims true.” (If viable of course). This dulls down the hype of the article, as the journalist cannot report on confirmed incorrect information.
• Briefing notes are a key tool used by the Parliament Leader. Obviously the situation is not ideal when to leader is caught off guard in session. You must provide as much detail as possible. This is so the leader can report directly on the facts, leaving no details to the imagination of others. Parliament is not the media, and all facts can be supplied to them in as much detail necessary.

• LESS IS MORE. When responding directly to an allegation the media has obtained, it is best to keep your response to minimum detail. Back the claim up with “legal jargon” if possible. Give them official reasoning to why you cannot provide them all the information they are requesting. This way the reporter understands you are not doing this to be difficult, but due to being legally bound. It is not worth breaking a confidentiality agreement purely to give the reporter the information they want.

When being briefed on this topic, I was overwhelmed with information. I never knew that such a small issue could be blown so far out of proportion, to the point where it is raised in Parliament. Whether it is true or false, that has no relation to me as a Public Relations Professional. You need to do the same amount of work, backing up the response to address the claim. I look forward to my last few weeks here at FHHS, to then walk away with a brain full of new knowledge. 

If Jesus were around today he’d employ a PR consultant.

So, this is it, the final blog post in the final unit of the final year of my Public Relations degree, hallelujah and praise be to [insert nondenominational tutelary]! 

I’ve reserved the final post in my blogging quadraplex to the media, and the way I and others in our office and in politics in general interact with the media on a day-to-day and issue-by-issue basis.

For me the interaction between politics and the media is the fundamentally archetypal picture of public relations. Media releases, photo-ops, door-stops, press-conferences, attack, defence, parry, repost etc. Political media relations have all of the hallmarks of primetime PR, but alas the West Wing makes it look so simple.

I should preface this by saying that I work for a backbencher and therefor my interactions with the media tend to be on a more issue-by-issue basis as opposed to the daily interactions of a ministerial office. Sorry readers, so juicy Hollow Men gossip from me.

In our office there are two types of media relations/interactions we undertake. The first is issue specific media relations which tends to deal primarily with national media outlets such as the ABC, the Networks , News Ltd’s Dailies and Fairfax’s Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Canberra Times broadsheets.

A pertinent example of this kind of media relations is the recent story about the ‘Supertrawler’ and the pressure by Members on all sides of parliament to ban it from fishing in Australia waters, of which my boss was a significant player. 

Now having announced that she would introduce a Private Members Bill into the Parliament to see the trawler banned from fishing in Australian waters, my job immediately turned into one of fielding calls from every media outlet in the country, an interesting if not fanatical task often with several telephone conversations on the go at once. I cannot say there was any part of my PR degree that prepared me for this, but I think decent organisational skills are probably the key.

On the other hand, we have the two local newspapers we deal with on a daily basis. While no Age or Sydney Morning Herald, both newspapers are probably more important than any daily broadsheet to our primary objectives and goals. Now this is something I touched on my blog about events. It’s all well and good to get in every paper in the country, but does it advance your goals and objectives? If the answer is no then you're wasting your time.

Billionaire Warren Buffett believes that the future of the newspaper industry lies in ultra-local newspapers like those produces by the Community Newspaper Group here in Western Australia, Indeed he recently put his money where his mouth his and purchased 63 local newspapers in the US for a staggering $142 million - and I think he’s got a point.

Local newspapers are relatively inexpensive to produce and they contain ultra-local content, which is what people want and something that politicians should take notice of. Local newspapers should not be frowned upon or looked on as inferior to the big dailies, because I can guarantee on a per distribution area basis they are far more widely read.

Good local news stories, good relationships with local reporters and good messaging to your constituents through the use of local media is what I think grassroots politics is all about, and with that I wish everyone the best in their future careers and highly recommend anyone with a passion for politics should get involved, it’s fun and very rewarding.

Adieu, Ron.

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Engagement is only a couple of rings away.

Community engagement, especially for a political office, is a peculiar beast. A long time staffer once tried to sum up the situation, he said: “People come to political offices for one reason; they want something,” and while that is true in so many ways, I don't believe it give credence to the scope of what people actually want.

In my experience there are two kinds of people who go to politicians for help. The first are lobbyists of one kind or another, and the second are people who are at their wits-ends with no where else to turn. The latter, the people who are at their wits-ends, are the reason I went into politics.

During my internship there have been several cases where people have come into the office desperate for help having no where else to turn. Some people cannot be helped but others you can help untangle the bureaucracy that is Government and have them walk out the door with a smile on their face and their problem solved, and that is incredibly rewarding. Form helping someone with an immigration problem to assisting with a Centrelink quandary sometimes people just need a leg-up.

Do I think any aspect of my Public Relations degree is able to assist with this kind of community engagement? No. Not really. You can’t teach empathy.

But Community Engagement isn’t just about inbound calls, outbound is, as we’ve been told often enough, just as important, and keeping good relationships with sporting groups, community advocacy groups, residents, schools etc. is another key aspect of what I do and an aspect in which the skills taught in Curtin's PR degree have helped.

This week we did a mail out outlining the Government’s new dental health scheme for kids and lower income Australians. This went out to several thousand houses and is a great example of the kind of outbound communications tactics we use. But of course, as any PR101 lecturer will tell you, outbound doesn’t work effectively by itself, which brings me to the final two important aspect of Community Engagement in my job.

The first is face-to-face ‘open air offices’ whereby people are given the opportunity to meet with the Member at a predetermined time and location and ask questions or seek advise. These are always hit and miss and often depend on the level of apathy in the community, but they are none the less an important part of the democratic process, politicians do represent 'the people'.

Finally, I want to touch briefly on social media and specifically Facebook. One of the first things I did when I started this job was create a social media presence for my boss because it creates those very important symmetrical lines of communication, which has worked quite well but is still in its infancy.

So, that’s me for today. All the best with your own experiences - Ron.

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Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance - Vi-gra doesn’t work for everything.

Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

This great military adage has proven itself time and time again in one of the more enjoyable aspects of my job, event planning. So far during my ‘internship’ I have planned and hosted three events ranging from small briefings to large 100-person cocktail functions and the key, I believe, is having a solid planning document that ensures you always know what needs to be done, what has been done, and when everything needs to be done by. 

Stephen Fry once said “An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.” Well ideas like speeches, letters, books and even jokes, can be broken down into a methodical structures and once you’ve got the structure down everything else is just stuffing, events are no different.

Event planning was touched on briefly in the first year unit PR Techniques, but there are some cool tools out there to make the process easier. For example, the websites Trybooking and Eventbrite allow users to maintain a centralized booking system where people can either freely register for an event or pay for a ticket, the websites then generate an automated self-managing guest list. Additionally, Eventbrite gives users the option of using the Eventbrite 'App' so you can tick people off as they arrive. This is really useful for post event follow-ups because you know exactly who and who didn’t attend (don’t rely on RSVP lists).

One of the most important aspects of event planning, in my view, is something that is often overlooked and that is: Why are you actually holding the event? 

Lots of people seem to think that holding as event is a strategy in itself, but events should simply be a tactic in achieving your strategy and not a strategy of its own. Thoughts to ponder include: What you want people to take away from the event; what you want people to commit to at the event (money, time etc.); and how is an event the best use of your resources given your strategy? 

In so many cases, if you just want to tell someone something, you’re better off organising one-on-one meetings with people, it’s cheaper, a little more time consuming, but considerably more personal and interactive and more likely to generate a personal relationships, which is more powerful than any event.

Finally, I want to touch briefly on the importance of post event follow-up. In my previous blog post I highlighted how all good speeches have a skeletal structure that can be used repeatedly: Tell people what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them, the same should be applied to events. Your invitation will tell people what you’re going to tell them, your event is where you tell them, and you should follow-up post event to thank people and importantly tell them what you’ve told them.

So that’s events - until next week.

Ron

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The key to being John Malkovich.

“Politicians employ speech writers as ventriloquists,” says Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist George Will. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. 

By far one of the most difficult aspects working in a political office is writing letters, speeches and remarks in the voice of your employer. It’s a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to get right.

I have worked in my current roll for a little over 18-months, yet the ability to be able to determine what my boss would say in any given circumstance, from a speech to a room of mining executives, to a Q&A with a bushel of primary school students, has taken a not insignificant amount of time, research and consideration; improvement has only come, like with most things in life, with constant repetition and plenty of mistakes. 

But there are tricks to help along the way, and while it’s not something that I was taught in Curtin’s PR degree, knowing some of those tricks can be useful. The task of learning to write for someone else is made easier if you have a large group of sample documents at your disposal; which raises the importance of filing all outgoing correspondence and speeches.

When broken down, most people have a practiced and structured writing style they tend to follow consciously or otherwise. For example, a letter might open with a brief paragraph about its content and generally would contain the words: ‘regarding’, ‘in relation to’, ‘enquiry’, or something not too dissimilar. 

Following-on some writers get straight to the thrust of the matter while others like to give a rich contextual background for an issue; both options are correct, but whichever option you choose should reflect the personal nuances of the originator (the speaker or sender). In many ways it’s about removing your ego from the equation and putting yourself in the mindset of the other person.

In the case of speeches, most speakers like to use words and phrases they are comfortable with and would use in everyday conversation, and while ‘programatic specificity’ works for some, it doesn't work for others and there is nothing worse than watching a speaker stumble over his/her words (click here for some wonderful examples provided by the comedic talents of George W. Bush); and of course you always need to consider your audience. In any case the key is to review previous examples and pick up on the style, structure and language of the speaker, and recreate those. 

This is not creative writing, superfluous language should be avoided. There are however a few important things you should do in any good speech: First, tell people what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them, this is the key is getting your message across and making sure people remember what you want them to take away from your speech. Always know what you want them to take away.

If you’re being employed to write for someone, that person most likely someone who receives a lot of correspondence or who often does public speaking and like in journalism you can apply a structure to your writing, leaving you more time to focus on the  individual words and phrases the originator likes to use, of which there are thousands and the best you can hope for is a constant decrease in the number of changes to your draft each time. 

So, that’s my two-cents based on my experiences so far in relation to writing for others. If you've got tips, advice, suggestions, thoughts, queries, qualms, quandaries or questions, don't hesitate to comment below.

Best - Ron

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