Community Radio Can Be Powerful PR

Australia is rich in radio.  But community radio stations rarely feature in PR and media relations plans. And that's a pity because community radio covers a lot of territory and reaches a lot of people in this country.  

It is estimated more than 4.5 million adult Australians listen to community radio stations every week.  That makes them an effective way of channelling campaign messages to grassroots and often committed audiences.

Community radio caters for many interests including community, multicultural, Indigenous and religious broadcasters. And like its commercial cousin community programming includes a stew of  music, news, current affairs, lifestyle and local content.

Although bigger stations may have a full-time station or program manager, volunteer broadcasters who give a few hours of their time each week are the lifeblood of stations.  As well as their broadcasting value these volunteers are often activists in their own right who can provide word of mouth and other engagement opportunities beyond the reach of the station. 

Here are the websites of peak and other bodies where you can learn more about Australia’s community radio sector:

• Community Broadcasters Association of Australia
• National Ethnic Multicultural Broadcasters Council
• National Indigenous Radio Service
• Christian Broadcasters

Community stations even have their own news service. A small team of dedicated journalists run National Radio News from Bathurst in NSW supported by communications students at Charles Sturt University.  Their three minute news bulletins are syndicated to local stations across the country.

Many years ago I was a part-time community broadcaster.  That plus recent experience of working with a host of community stations has convinced me that volunteer radio can be an important medium in a PR project.

What has been your experience of community radio?

Open Government: The Canadian Way

Recently I met Canadian Chris Moore, the  Chief Information Officer for the City of Edmonton.

Chris is spearheading  efforts to deliver “Open Government” to the City’s citizens.  That means making the processes and data held by Edmonton's agencies more available to people …and in easily accessible forms.

The City of Edmonton is the fourth municipality in Canada with open government initiatives rooted in the IT department.  Chris’ measures include crowd sourcing new ideas and launching an Iphone app to allow citizens to easily report graffiti and potholes around the city to a municipal call centre. 

Chris has over 25 years of IT experience and has only been in his current job around 18 months.  Based on his experiences - which I’m sure have involved many bureaucratic struggles - he identifies three conditions as necessary in any efforts to make government more open.

• There must be support from the top which means political  and CEO backing.
• Administrative arrangements must support the move to change.
• There must be genuine community engagement with peers, staff and with residents.

Chris blogs Edmonton’s Open Government program here.

Follow the Australian Government’s progress on Open Government here.

Say It Loud

I have just started using Audio Boo, a new social media application that allows you to share audio files via the Internet.

Audioboo is an application for recording and sharing your voice with the world. The free version allows you to create audio up to 5 minutes in length and post that to an account on the web. You can add titles, tags, geolocation info and a photo to the recording before you upload it and all that will be saved with the file.

I recently "did a boo" especially for people who attended one of our workshops. A sort of enhanced word of mouth.   Listen here

Audioboo could be a good way to go if the people you need to reach, prefer to listen rather than read information.

The Business Reason To Tell Stories

Story telling is the universal language of the human camp.  We have been telling each other stories for 40 000 years.  We use them to motivate, amuse, warn and share information.

Stories are powerful.  Yet are you using them to communicate the good things your organisation does? If not why not?  A story is more powerful than a mission statement, annual report or policy document. 

I recently came across great advice from Alison Esse of the storytellers.com about how  companies can use stories and I thought it is worth sharing with you.  Thanks Alison.

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 The best way to pitch storytelling to your organisation is to position the argument as a 'winning  hearts and minds' one - creating an emotional connection to the  organisation, its objectives, goals, strategy and vision rather than  simply a rational one.

 Assuming that no business leader would argue that they didn't want to  create this level of connection, it would be fair then to suggest that  a storytelling approach is really one of the most effective ways of  achieving this.  Since mankind began we have used stories as a  powerful way to transfer knowledge and information, engage and inspire  people and to spark the emotions, stimulate actions or change  attitudes and behaviours. 

It's a necessary and vital part of human  bonding.  

We all tell and hear stories every day of our lives, in and outside the workplace, and harnessed to specific business messages you  can effect the most remarkable changes very swiftly.  The corporate  'story' or journey can be structured and told as a narrative which  makes it easy to understand and believe in (and corporate narratives  should be constructed in the same way as any story narrative), and  validated and nurtured with great stories about employees and  customers to keep it alive and to sustain interest.  Unless leaders  believe that 80-deck Powerpoint presentations can achieve the same  effect, it's a no-brainer!

 It may be a good idea to pitch the idea starting with a great story  about an employee who, faced with a particular dilemma (eg customer- related), took a particular course of action to win the day and make  something happen that has been truly inspiring or beneficial in some way to the business.

Improve Your PR Productivity

There are number of free software tools on the market to help improve your PR productivity.

The ones I'm currently using are:

• Evernote to clip and store material from the web including images, websites and documents.
• Drop Box to share files and folders between desktops, laptops and mobile phones.
• You Send It to email very large files such as videos and hi-res images.
• Audio Boo to record an audio file to the web and then distribute it.
• And of course, Facebook and Twitter to share ideas with other communications professionals.

So what are you using to save time and effort in your communications?

10 Steps To Engaging Communities

In recent weeks I have been working on a major conservation project which is in response to climate change. It is as much about people and communities as it is about science and data.

No matter how compelling or frightening the data may be, governments still need to convince people they need to act in the face of challenging circumstances. This means consulting them, getting their input and then fashioning a response individuals, communities, business, government and others can act on.

Often community consultation involves a series of inter-locking steps:

• Identifying stakeholders and individuals who wield influence
  
• Identifying local attitudes, aspirations and concerns
  
• Helping those affected understand what it is proposed, how it will improve things and when things begin to happen
  
• Providing opportunities for community feedback and involvement throughout the project
• Keeping people, especially key people, continually informed
  
• Incorporating feedback into planning and subsequent actions and, as importantly, telling people you have done so
  
• Communicating milestones and outcomes
• Simplifying communications yet providing access to detailed data if people want it
  
• Frankly acknowledging setbacks and disappointments
  
• If people have to change behaviours, providing information when they need it and how they need it and offering ongoing encouragement
  

Above all build flexibility and persistence into your own mental mindset.

Things rarely go to plan 100% of the time in community consultation, coalition building and communications. After all we're dealing with people - just like us - and that's just the way it is.

Wanted - Visionaries Who Can Communicate: Apply Within

The world community faces tough challenges.

Issues like the global financial crisis, climate change and international terrorism are enormously complex. The threats in each are real and pressing. There are no easy answers and what is needed is a sustained, perhaps even a multi-generational approach to tackling these challenges which cut right across borders.

These problems impact us all , so it is good to remember the simplest way through complexity is clear vision and simple communications.

This past week two visionary communicators have been notable.

On Friday President Obama received the Noble Peace Prize. The award was probably more in recognition for his ability to inspire people and give them hope than for any one achievement this early in his Presidency. Obama is a communicator in his very own class and the power and persuasion of his words resonates beyond Americans to people around the world.

In this past week I came across leading Canadian environmentalist Harvey Locke who talks about the need to think and act on the grandest of scales to protect and strengthen the earth's fragile environment in the face of climate change.

Locke is currently in Australia talking about about his experiences in helping to establish the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation corridor in North America. At 3200km long Yellowstone to Yukon is the largest conservation undertaking of its kind in the world. It literally links landscapes in the western United States and Canada to preserve animals and vegetation. It is shifting conventional thinking beyond saving "small isolated islands" of threatened environments.

Locke speaks simply, persuasively and peppers his views with anecdotes and stories. In his efforts to encourage Canadians and Americans he underpins the conversation with basic but compelling messages:

• Firstly the problems of climate change are so significant, no one person or organisation has the solution. Organisations should stop pretending they have a monopoly on the way ahead. They must paint the grand vision of what could be and allow the rest of us to define our own contribution on how this can be achieved.
  

• Locke believes in personalising the story. Or in his case "animalising the story." He talks freely why large a North American conservation corridor is so important to the long term survival of buffalo, grizzly bears and other animals iconic to North America. He has chosen his case studies well to tug at the heartstrings of his listeners.
  

• He stresses the need for simple conversations. You can't reasonably expect people to support what they don't understand so he cautions governments and scientists to stop over-complicating the information they provide to the rest of us.
  

Obama and Locke are people with vision and who communicate it simply and consistently. In their own ways they are powerful examples for the rest of us.

Don't Applaud the Death of the Newspaper Just Yet

A few days ago I downloaded some songs from ITunes. It was a quick and cheap transaction and within minutes I was playing selected songs from the 60s. My transaction was easy: in fact probably similar to thousands of other ITunes downloads made each day.

I precisely identified my preferences for music and the Internet delivered exactly what I wanted. And that got me thinking - there may be a downside to all this.

While the Internet is great at delivering information to suit our needs it is not so great at delivering other information which we either should know or possibly might want to know. And that's what makes the Internet so different from newspapers.

By and large our daily or weekly newspapers do a creditable job of sourcing, sifting and presenting a broad selection of news from our communities, states or from around the world. It could be information on politics, business, sports, health or a whole host of other topics. Newspapers lay out a vast array of information and each edition offers us the opportunity to learn something either we did not know or really need to know. And all the time we retain the right to skim straight past anything we don't not fancy.

The Internet on the other hand delivers only what you we ask for. That is its great strength and at the same time a fundamental weakness. By its very specificity it just might fail to introduce us to other material we could benefit from.

Some call this the echo chamber effect. Unless we take very deliberate steps to expose ourselves to contending voices, we stand in danger of seeking out only the information from the Net that supports our opinions and own world view.

This phenomen is nothing new. Research shows many of us choose to get information only from those media outlets that agree with and give voice to our opinions. Perhaps this is just part of the human condition: to hear what we want to hear. But the troubling thing about the Internet is it can silo our information with such cold efficiency.

Some social media commentators delight in predicting the demise of the newspaper. The evidence certainly seems powerful particularly in the USA and more recently here in Australia with the shrinking of Fairfax newsrooms and the iconic Trading Post disappearing from our news stands to morph into an online version.

I am more cautious about whether the predicted death of the newspaper is such a good thing. True they have their shortcomings but without print newspapers do we risk losing the daily opportunity to tune into the broad coverage of community information they provide? News that we can read over coffee, swap, share and circle with a pencil. Or even rip out and stick on the refrigerator door if it is particularly relevant to our lives. And without the traditional newspaper where will those without digital access go?

I'm a great believer in the digital age bringing in a golden age in communications. However let's be careful. We may gain something wonderfully valuable from these new digital platforms but in the process we may lose something wonderfully valuable as well.

Technology Reducing Face to Face Communications?

A recent US survey of 1000 people found that technology is reducing face to face communications. But it seems personal communications remains the best way to engage people when the going gets tough.

Read Shel Holz's blogpost at http://shelholtz.com/

The Assumption Effect - Never Assume Anything

This morning my wife and I had an interesting conversation.

We were half way through it when we both realised that we were each talking about a completely different issue. No wonder the conversation was not going very far.

In recent months I have been involved with two organisations where the same thing has happened. Senior managers assumed the people they wanted to reach knew what they were talking about. In both cases the intended audiences knew little if anything about the subject.

Both organisations exhibited self referential communications: a symptom which runs along the lines of I know what I mean therefore everyone else must know what I mean.

As communicators it is very easy assume because we have invested time and effort in producing key messages, designing brochures, distributing media releases etc, that people - apart from us - know what we are on about.

There must be some high sounding term in the science of communications to describe this effect. I'm not sure what it is so I simply describe it as the assumption effect and it has probably been the root cause of countless failed PR and marketing campaigns.

Never assume the people you want to reach know what you are talking about until they demonstrate that knowledge. That sounds simple but I wonder how many times your personal or organisational communications have been de-railed by making false assumptions at the outset.

That's why it always pay to market research your audiences, and if the data or observation are not there, never assume they either know or care about what you want to communicate.

Local Government and Social Media

Today I presented at the Local Government Web Network Conference in Sydney on using new digital media platforms in government communications.

Here are some links you might find interesting:

• A copy of today's presentation
• Jeff Bulla's post on 28 Reasons the CEO is Afraid of Social Media
  
• Another post from Jeff: 9 Ways to Convince the CEO to Use Social Media and Enter the 21st Century

If you are having troubling convincing your elected council officials to try social media, ask them to listen to this podcast of Donna Papacosta interviewing Rob Burton, the 63 year old Mayor of the Canadian city of Oakville.

In this interview Mayor Rob discusses using Twitter, blogs and Facebook to communicate his municipal duties. This is well worth a listen.

Cheers and good luck to all my colleagues in Local Government.

Communications Lessons from Obama's Cairo Speech

This past week President Obama delivered a speech on building bridges between the US and the Muslim world. Immediately after he delivered the speech in Cairo it was posted to the White House and media websites around the world and so far has received warm endorsement in the US and abroad.

Obama is a masterful communicator, perhaps the most effective Presidential orator since Ronald Reagan. Aside from its strategically critical content, the speech was a significant piece of communications and something from which we can all learn as we speak out on behalf of our own organisations:

• Obama spoke with a keen awareness of his audience - not only the 3000 strong audience at the University of Cairo but to Muslims listening throughout the world. He started by acknowledging the contributions Islam has made to world history and by noting his own personal credentials, namely his childhood experiences in the Muslim world. He established a connection between himself and those listening to him, acutely mindful of the cultural sensitivities that have plagued US - Arab relations in recent years.

• He outlined how the US and the Arab community might connect better in five specific areas providing examples of how closer cooperation in each might be achieved. The speech had both vision and detail.
  

• The speech was simple and clear. It was big on optimism yet at the same time he acknowledged that moving ahead was not going to be easy. So often great communications start by focusing on what brings people together and then identifying the way ahead for resolving the challenges that keep them apart.
  

Hopefully Obama's aspirations for a safer Middle East will be realised. At least they have started with more empathetic and effective communications than we have seen in a very long time.

Where Australians Go Online

Last week I attended a presentation by Hitwise Asia Pacific on where Australians go online for information, particularly which government sites they visit.

March 2009 data shows the most popular online destinations for Australians are search engines and social networks. Australia has around 6500 government websites and these account for 2.4% of all Australian online visits - higher than the US (1.7%) and the UK (0.9%).

Federal Government websites account for 60% of all visits, State Government websites accounted for 29.7% visits while 6.2% of visits went to Local Government sites.

In March 2009 the most popular Federal Government websites were:

• Bureau of Meteorology
• Centrelink
• Australian Taxation Office
• Australian Job Search
• Australian Taxation Office - Tax Agent Portal

The most popular State Government websites were:

• Victoria Country Fire Authority
• CityRail
• Roads and Traffic Authority NSW
• Better Health Channel
  
• Transport Infoline

With the top Local Government sites being:

• ourbrisbane.com
• Brisbane City Council
• Gold Coast City Council
• City of Sydney.
• City of Melbourne
  

As well as their own online efforts, social networks could provide a key opportunity for Governments to share information with Australians. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia all ranked in the top 15 websites that Australians visited this past March .

Referrals from social networks sites to government information are up 16.1% in the last 12 months.

Get the full report from Hitwise

The Power of Community Relations

Smart organisations instinctively know their survival is linked to their community. And that long term success depends on their relations with other organisations and individuals in the areas and environments in which they operate.

Those same organisations invest time, money and effort in community relations programs and continually look for ways to link to their communities. Effective community relations can increase their visibility and influence and help their bottom line by fending off unwarranted restrictions or criticisms.

Effective community relations gives them a "license to operate".

The University of Canberra apparently understands the power and importance of community. In the past 12 months it has embarked on a program aimed at drawing it closer to those living in Australia's national capital and the surrounding region.

What's attractive about the University's approach is it is simple and seems to be effective. For example this year the University:

• Entered a team in the Mothers Day Breast Cancer Walk joining around 4000 locals to raise awareness of this critical women's health issue. The team's brilliant orange T shirts announced their presence and the University won the award for the education institution making the biggest contribution on Mothers Day to the cause in Canberra.
  

• Is sponsoring (for the second year running) a competition to encourage the development of young Canberra film makers in their final year of school. Run in conjunction with the Tuggeranong Arts Centre the sponsorship connects the University to local schools and, importantly to influential personalities in Canberra's arts community.

• Has established a Canberra Award to acknowledge students who undertake an active program of personal development over the course of their university studies. Through the award students develop their skills by a combination of academic work, paid work experience or voluntary participation in community activities. At graduation they get a certificate of achievement which in today's tough employment market could be just the thing to make them stand out from other job seekers.
  

The community relations program seems to be cutting through. Along with vigorous marketing efforts, this year both the University's domestic and international students enrolments are well up.

(Disclosure: My partner works at the University of Canberra)

Publish Post

Branding, Culture and Communications

In our workshops for not for profit groups, we cover the relationship of organisational culture, communicating with staff and branding. And we show how all three intersect to present your image to the world.

We came across this very good blogpost on branding and internal culture which is worth a read.