Digital by default – mind the generation gap.

I recommend everyone,  from comms strategists and policy wonks to the merely socially curious,  take a look here  for a fascinating overview of British social attitudes in 2012, compiled by Ipsos Mori.

The research was presented at the Government Communications Network  last week and generated a flurry of startling factoids on Twitter – like this one:

more children between the ages of 2 and 5 can use a smartphone than can tie their own shoelaces.

There’s a mass of useful information for planners in the report.  I’ve  gathered together some of the insights revealed during the debate which highlight some important trends and generational differences:

• On average each UK household owns 3 different types of Internet-enabled devices
• For the 1st time, over half (52%) of all calls are made via mobile phones
• Big differences in methods of communications: 16-24s heavily text reliant. Over 65s opposite, voice-based
• 1/3 of 16-24 year olds live in a mobile-only home. More than double UK average of 15%
• 8/10 people in UK have Internet access. Figure drops for over 55s
• Implication is of increased polarisation between young and old. Rise of the smart phone. Texting as a mass medium.  TV remains strong. Young people are switching off the radio. Post is still v important to older people
• BT and Virgin’s superfast broadband services were available to around 60% of homes by March 2012

It’s clear  that a broad mass of people of all ages are perfectly comfortable in an online world and have multiple means of accessing it.  The generational divide isn’t as clear cut as you might think – here are some more statistics, from the Forster Company’s overview of age in the UK:

• 47% of 55 – 75 year olds connect to their friends with either Skype or instant messenger services
• 45% of 55 – 75 year olds spend up to 30 hours on the internet a week
• 33% of over 55s use social networks
• The fastest growing group of Facebook users is aged 50+

We’re not all digital natives yet

But it’s  also  clear that while many of the over 55s are fine online,  a significant minority aren’t - yet.  That’s an important issue for policy-makers.  Time will eventually iron out the difference until everyone left standing is a digital native , but we’re not there yet.  This makes the government’s strategy of making public service delivery “digital by default” by 2015 look slightly optimistic.

If people have to access the services they need online, what happens to those (currently 20%+ of the over 55s, according to the Ipsos Mori research)  who don’t have internet access?

If people over the age of 65 are more comfortable with having a conversation than dealing in “text-based communication”, how easy will they find negotiating an online application form for vital services like pensions or social care?

The recent story about the shortcomings of the helpline for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections didn’t inspire confidence:

[A whistleblower]  who is working at an Electoral Commission call centre dealing with queries about the election, told the Guardian that he spoke to hundreds of older people every day who could not access the information online. They were referred to a “very temperamental automated phoneline” at the Home Office, and then were only given a list of names and no real information”

And how long will it take before superfast broadband is available everywhere so that online applications can be done speedily even in remote rural areas?

The 1948 show – a bloomin’ bit of all right

I love everything about this 1948 COI film about the NHS.  The message – of course – but the look and the music too.  As a piece of animation it’s  energetic and engaging - quite right that it’s introduced by the COI equivalent of the MGM lion, and carries its own music, design and director credits. 

It’s packed with social detail about class and family.  Watch the high street shops that Charley cycles past, for example. Charley’s doll-faced missus sits happily darning his sock while he eats his dinner and only gets animated when she has to rescue the baby from the coal-scuttle and give him a (tin) bath.  The voiceover is Mr Cholmondeley-Warner at his most patronising, but the film is clear and informative and, at 8′ 37, much longer than a modern attention span would be deemed able to cope with.  (In those pre-TV days it must have been intended for cinema screening, so I guess had a captive audience.)

Compare and contrast with this, government communications fans…

 

Same approach – animation with voiceover, illustrating illness by animating what’s happening inside a body -  but no-one with an accent like that would have got anywhere near a film studio in 1948, unless they were going to sweep it.  Accents aside, I really prefer the old one  – which may be just the charm and strangeness lent by its age.  Charley’s insides samba to a sassy beat and magical medicines hover around his bed.  Change 4 Life’s faceless plasticine blobs just get gunged up with internal cotton wool and expire early on their faceless high street.  It’s just as patronising in its own way, too.

I’d be intrigued to see what an equivalent film introducing Andrew Lansley’s new model of the NHS would look like.  What would clinician led commissioning, Foundation Trusts and a new role for Monitor look like?   Could it be done in less than 8 minutes?  Would Charley and his missus think it was still a bit of all right?

Putting a value on government communications?

Is the government about to revive its spending on communications campaigns?  And might it have left it too late?

I missed the publication of the  Changing Behaviour, Improving Outcomes report into “changing health-related lifestyle behaviour” (trying to change the way that some citizens are smoking, drinking and eating their way to chronic  ill-health).

I caught up with it via the National Social Marketing Centre‘s summary which highlights some interesting consequences of the ban on non-essential marketing imposed by the government:

• The number of people joining Change4Life fell by 80%. Calls to the Change4Life information line fell by 90% and web visits by two-thirds
• Calls to the FRANK help line fell by 22% and web visits by 17%
• Visits to the Smokefree website fell by 50% and the volume of people making a quit attempt also fell, in line with the reduction in purchased media spend

More strikingly, evidence from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health concluded that:

‘…the cessation of marketing activity has resulted in declining quit attempts and subsequent loss of life from smoking-related illness.’

As such, the report recommends that some mass communication campaigns – mainly in the form of sponsorship and paid media partnerships – be resumed.

It’s hard to know whether to cheer or cry.  Without wishing to say I told you so, it wasn’t hard to see that withdrawing funds from campaigns designed to change  “health-related lifestyle behaviour” offered short-term saving which could increase long-term costs for the NHS (and the police and prison service).

You could say that all the figures show is that if you stop promoting a website people stop visiting it and, obviously, Change4Life won’t solve the nation’s obesity crisis by itself.  But I’m going to stick my neck out and say that if fewer people are getting practical information about healthy eating, smoking or drugs, then solving those problems is less not more likely.  And the stakes are pretty high.

• The Dept of Health website  warns that weight problems already cost the wider economy in the region of £16 billion, and that this will rise to £50 billion per year by 2050 if left unchecked.   
• The NHS Confederation has estimated that alcohol related conditions cost the NHS £2.7billion in 2006/7
• There are estimates that smoking costs the NHS up to £5billion a year

By the way, when it was launched, Change4Life was budgeted at a slender £75m over three years.  Setting a sprat to catch a mackrel, as my grandmother would say.

Victim of a political culture that says that all communications is spin, the comms industry should be arguing that it offers a useful weapon in the long-term battle to control  costs in public services.  Though, as Alex Aiken put it in PR Week recently:

It is also worth considering whether central government communicators made a sufficiently robust case to retain the talent, campaigns and operations that had been painstakingly built up in the years of the last government. Despite the cut backs now is the time to invest in research to understand rapidly changing public perceptions and use this as the foundation on which to argue the case for a particular approach which allows the PR team to sit at the top table in the organisation.

Is government communications more than press relations?

I was badly sidetracked from what I’m meant to be doing today by a podcast of an event from the Institute for Government What Next For Number 10 Communications? Inevitably the  focus of the event  -   “the role of the Number 10 Director of Communications” – was about press relations.  A distinguished panel of former prime ministerial press advisers and senior journalists was assembled to talk about the role facing Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s new Director of Communications.  It was a fascinating insight into the trials and tribulations of a press handler’s life.  But it did leave the impression that the only kind of comms that matters in government is press relations.

For anyone who’s worked in any other comms discipline in government this will sound familiar if dispiriting.  For understandable reasons most Ministers are focused most of the time on how they are going down in the press.  Other comms approaches don’t seem to have the same resonance with them – even though they might offer more effective ways of communicating directly with the public.

Meanwhile, the review of government comms chugs along, and is due to report soon; and the current Head of COI,  has just announced that he’s leaving for pastures new, giving some the impression that COI’s days as a significant player in government comms may be numbered. 

I raised some of the questions I’d like to see answered in the comms review  here.  In particular there are big issues to be addressed around the potential of  new media approaches in government comms.  The only question  I heard raised at the IoG’s event about the role of the internet  (by the only woman’s voice I heard at the entire event) wasn’t answered  by the assembled gentlemen of the press (which chairman Nick Robinson described, without apparent irony, as “a cosy Radio 4 reunion”).   Perhaps my Twitter hero, Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom  ”HMG’s data sharing Czar”, is closer to the truth of the government’s approach than I’d  imagined (sample tweet:  We could use the Internet to allow people to connect directly to Whitehall, like a sort of Departmental Ceefax, via wires as it were.)  Can I put in a request to the IoG that now they’ve looked at issues of the press they could turn their attention to the other forms of government communication and debate them?  I’d go.

Government comms – cock-up or conspiracy?

I’m amused that people are claiming to see dirty tricks afoot in the government’s climb down on the forestry sell-off.  There was a round of applause when it was suggested on last night’s Question Time that the whole thing was a set-up to present the government in a caring and listening light and to deflect attention from more nefarious goings on in health and education. 

Having worked in Whitehall, I’m always amazed that people think government is efficient enough to put a conspiracy together.  Given the choice between something being down to cock-up or conspiracy I would bet the mortgage on it being a cock-up every time.  Government is too big, leaky, dumb and chaotic to manage the nimble footwork, discipline and cunning required to manage a conspiracy,   it certainly couldn’t raise the wherewithal to do it over this.  The simplest explanation is the best – they messed it up, didn’t listen to anyone before they announced the policy, hadn’t thought through the politics of it and were astonished at the response.  Another one to chalk up to my growing list of examples of how bad government comms is at the moment. 

Perhaps David Cameron’s past life as a PR came to his aid when he killed the policy.  Standard advice  in crisis comms  is to act swiftly and decisively, accept blame where it’s due, put counter-measures in place fast and apologise sincerely.  All of which they more or less achieved.  I do wonder about the longer term damage to the Tories’ corporate reputation, though.  Ed Miliband has already made the point that cuts are reviving memories of Thatcher and “re-contaminating” the Tory brand.   At least the Thatcher governments maintained a reputation for being steadfast in the face of opposition. How many more U-turns driven by poor policy planning  can this lot afford before their public image is of malign but incompetent toffs blundering through things they don’t understand?

Come on down for Opportunity Costs!

I’d missed the news that Michael Gove  banned the use of the phrase Every Child Matters at the Dept for Education until this week.   This is what you get if you try to find the old ECM site online. 

For the record, ECM was set up after the Laming enquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie.  It tried to integrate children’s services, closing the gaps between services previously offered in isolation by schools,  social services and the NHS.  It included the expansion of Sure Start and major changes to the way that local authority services were provided.  It was, depending on your political tastes, either a hugely bureaucratic, over-engineered response to a problem which needed a simpler approach; or an ambitious attempt to address systemic problems in services which  left  young people at risk.  I applauded the intentions of ECM even as it drove me temporarily insane. 

I worked on the comms  strategy at the beginning of the programme, addressing audiences in every branch of the public sector,  trying to change the way thousands of people worked.  Our approach was to try to work in partnership with the people who delivered services.  It made sense to us to have the people who were going to make the policy work in practice help shape it – the “if you want to go fast, travel alone; if you want to go far, travel in a group” philosophy. 

The pace of progress at the start drove me nuts.  My old boss likened the endless trail of seminars and discussion documents and presentations to bushtucker trials, in which we had to eat our diet of toasted kangaroo balls and cockroach biscuits in order to win the opportunity to come back and do it all again next week.  Eventually, despondent at the rate of progress, I moved on to other things.  It’s taken me  years to realise that my expectation of a faster pace to such massive change was unrealistic. 

All those hours of work,  the cost of making change happen so that services would be better in the long run, are now being written off – and I doubt figure  in the government’s balance sheet of the savings they are claiming from slimmed-down public services.

A GP taking part in PM‘s debate about health service reforms made the same point to Andrew Lansley this week, asking whether the costs of redundancies, retraining  and waste due to the scrapping of systems figured in his costs for NHS reform :  ”I’ve been around for a long time and I’ve seen many reorganisations, and one of the problems is that there doesn’t seem to be any publication of the true costs of these reorganisations, which often take a couple of years to take effect…”    Lansley argued, as ministers always do, that this time the reform was for keeps, so the costs would be cancelled out in the long run.  I wonder.

I also wonder about the government’s approach to working with partners.  They give the impression of wanting to go very fast indeed and opting to do it solo.  The last post highlighted the apparent state of relations between DCLG and local government.  DoH seems to be working in the face of opposition from its key stakeholders too (though I’m not inside the Department so don’t know what conversations are taking place.)  As the Observer’s secret civil servant pointed out in today’s paper, this may have far-reaching consequences: 

“Doctors have raised the tempo of the debate and, unlike teachers or policemen, they can comfortably play politics as public deference to medical professionals is strong. Government advisers are not alarmed. The coalition can win this fight. It will pass its health bill in the House of Commons and should get it through the Lords. The new health system will get built but the real risk is what happens then. If doctors are alienated and angry and patients worried and confused, the system won’t work. … Ultimately, this mess may even lose the coalition the next election” 

So, farewell then COI?

A roundtable of comms experts is working with government to decide the future of COI.  I wrote about the beginnings of the process here a while ago.  If today’s  story in PR Week is to be believed, by the time the white smoke rises from their deliberations, COI will have been ’re-modelled’ out of all recognition.   

I worked at COI briefly a couple of years ago - on secondment  to the Strategic Consultancy  team.  It was an eye-opening 12 weeks, which left me feeling honour-bound to defend my former colleagues from criticism  – even though quite often I agreed with what the critics were saying.

The commonest complaints from civil servant comms leads were that the services COI offered to departments were expensive and too often not of high enough quality; and that they added little value when they managed projects (but still levied sizeable management fees).  In COI’s defence  I argued that, as in any agency, there were good and bad practitioners at COI, that the experience of  government that resided in COI was a great asset to draw on, and that some of the work they did was excellent. However, COI isn’t like any other agency and shouldn’t behave like one.

There’s an inevitable tension when one organisation is asked both to manage government’s relationships with its suppliers and  actively compete with them for business.   I don’t think COI managed that tension well, although in fairness they shouldn’t have been asked to.   It was interesting that, when last year’s 40% staff cut at COI was announced, there wasn’t a  queue of PR professionals lining up to defend it.  

How government comms is going to be re-structured is still up in the air – so what role might COI play  in a new comms landscape?  After a bit of thought I’ve come up with some possible roles.  COI could:

• continue in its role as government’s media buyer
• continue to run the frameworks - though they will have to be smaller and  less bureaucratic in future;  some question the need for them at all 
• act as a central training body for government communicators who still tend to be  generalists rather than specialists; it could also run the professional networks which exist between departments  (though this begs the question of the overlap with GCN, and whether both are needed)
• facilitate the big cross-departmental comms campaigns which need high level co-ordination and administration
• continue to work as a specialist recruitment agency for government – although GovGap‘s impact on the market and its in-built advantage over other suppliers enrages many in public sector recruitment. 

None of them feel like compelling arguments for COI to continue.  I hope there’s something I’ve missed, but I fear there may be more bad news at Hercules Road once the consultation is over.

Re-shaping government comms (a work in progress)

PR Week announced this week that government spending on comms has halved since May, and that Matt Tee,  the  Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary for Comms,  leaves his post in March and won’t be replaced. 

The outlook for government comms is pretty clear.  In the short-term at least there isn’t going to be much.  Some campaigns will continue because they’re  too important (or too difficult) to cancel.  Most  ideas won’t get off the ground.  As the scale of the changes to public services becomes apparent, a need may be identified to do a bit more public communication to explain what’s happening, but we won’t be able to devote the kind of resources to the job that might have been made available  a few years ago. 

There are, of course, some “process” questions to be answered as cuts are made.   For example: the Cabinet Office master-minded  last year’s cross-government communication in preparation for a possible swine-flu pandemic.  With  smaller budgets and fewer hands on deck – and no representation at the most senior levels of government – who will do that next time?   But that’s starting to feel like the wrong question to be asking. 

I hope that Matt Tee is using the months he has left in post to shape a review of government comms and the role of COI  that doesn’t  try to deliver the same kind of communications on a smaller scale (and isn’t just about saving the taxpayer money).  It needs to ask the classic question for any strategy - what are we trying to achieve?  What  rightly belongs to government to communicate and what does not ?  If decentralisation is the new reality, what does that mean for communication from the centre?  What responsibility  for communicating with citizens and workforces should rest with local authorities (and how will they pay for it)?   How does government use  the cleverer, cheaper, more flexible, more customer-centric approaches to communication possible online?   And how do you change departmental structures and a Whitehall culture which seems to have made attempts to do this in the past such a nightmare?

Fretting that we’re losing the COI’s bulk purchasing power and expertise in managing procurement, as some people are, supposes that once budgets return to pre-crash levels there will be an appetite to get back to the kinds of campaigns that were a feature of the past five years.  I just don’t think that’s going to happen.  If it did it would mean that a fantastic opportunity to re-configure comms completely had been missed.

How do you prove you’re resilient? Work in the public sector

A depressing entry in the Guardian’s cutsblog suggests that the image of public sector workers as plodding, risk-averse jobsworths will count against them when it comes to taking some of the  2 million jobs that the private sector is poised to deliver any day now. 

Enough recruitment consultants have been quoted in PR Week saying that public sector-ites will be at a disadvantage in the jobs market to have spooked me into attending a CIPR/VMA event looking at how hard it might be to move from public to private sector.   Inevitably the hardest thing to prove when you’ve worked in the public sector is that you have the commercial acumen to make it in private business.  Otherwise, it seems  the skills that employers are looking for are, encouragingly, the ones that you develop as a means of survival in the public sector -  resilience,  managing change, leading teams, influencing stakeholders,  a willingness to push back against difficult managers (Lord, have I got some stories to tell…)

Transferable communications skills

Having worked in comms in both sectors, I’d say that the skills you need to succeed are pretty much the same for either.  My starter list would include  a continuous focus on the audience, a sound understanding of the market you’re working in,  imagination, flexibility, tenacity, a sharp eye for managing budgets and people, an understanding of strategy (and how it differs from tactics),  a willingness to get stuck into delivery (and the practical know-how), a healthy respect for deadlines,  the political nous to navigate  layers of management, good writing skills and an eye for detail.  I see no reason why having the skills to work in one should somehow bar you from working in the other.

The importance of social networks

I was struck by how few people at the event said they felt confident  using social media as part of their job-hunting armoury.  Sadly, opting out isn’t an option.  Research suggests that 100% of recruitment consultants use LinkedIn as a tool to identify (and weed out) candidates for posts, and that the size of your network is important.  Something like 85% of them use Twitter for the same reason.  Not having an online presence suggests that you haven’t updated your skills in a decade and aren’t really playing the game – not having a LinkedIn account now is like not having an email address was ten years ago.

Barbara Gibson - our social media guru – recorded this  on her phone at the event I went to, demonstrating a neat way of gathering content for a blog or website at the same time as cementing a link with a potential contact – wouldn’t you be flattered if she asked to interview you?  And wouldn’t you put the link on your site too and link back to her?  Genius!

Communication isn’t the same as spin

Pop quiz: what do these   stories have in common?

• There are rumours that removing regional development agencies might land Eric Pickles’ department  with a £1bn+ bill 
• Michael Gove takes several goes to announce cuts for BSF and then hails 16 rather than 700 free schools  (most of which won’t open on time)
• Potential tax breaks for married couples are announced in order to muffle complaints about child benefit cuts  
• A senior Minister is on TV defending cutting milk for primary schools as Downing Street announces that the cut won’t happen
• Jeremy Paxman gets to reprise one of his greatest hits by asking Theresa May repeatedly when she found out about the child benefit shemozzle
• Baroness Warsi announces that electoral fraud cost the Tories three seats at the last election but won’t say who, what, when or where 
• Town hall meetings about the Big Society have to be cancelled after the first one degenerates into a slanging match

The answer is, of course, they are united by rushed policy-making, an airy attitude to making announcements without expecting to be questioned about the details, and  spectacularly bad communications. 

Ironically,the thing I like about this government  ( the only one) is its sense of urgency and its refusal to accept that there are any sacred cows that can’t be slaughtered.  I wish the last lot had been so bold.  But change on this scale needs to be based on sound evidence and detailed policy work, else it has a tendency to blow up in your face; and if you can’t explain what you’re trying to do, you can’t build the support you need to get it done. 

The comms thing really pains me: poor briefing, confused messages, over-promising what cannot be delivered, insensitivity to the needs of important stakeholders,  confusion about key areas of policy.  They  need  good communications support and the need will get more acute as policy starts to be implemented.  Some optimists think that they are going to start realising this quite soon.  Regular readers will know, however,  that I am not  by nature a glass half full kind of a girl.  Government communication is firmly linked to spin and smears (Cameron said it again in his  leader’s speech yesterday).  The notions of PR, lobbying and campaigning are such an anathema to Ministers that they are effectively forbidding people to do it (even though an estimated 15% of new Tory MPs have a background in lobbying).  CIPR are trying to raise the issue of the value of public sector comms, but I doubt that will be enough.  They need comms help – how do we convince them?

Update:  I’ve just re-read this.  It worries me that it looks as though I think comms can or should be used as a cover for bad policy. It can’t and shouldn’t. My point is that if the government has a coherent strategy  that is driving what’s being done,  they have no chance of letting us know what it might be without a marked improvement in their comms.  The fact that it looks increasingly  as though no such coherence exists is worrying on many levels…