Are social networks the best tools for charity PR?

Here’s some fantastic advice for charities (though any small business could use it) about delivering successful PR on a budget.  As you  might expect it focuses solidly on digital channels – Twitter, Facebook, blogging and audioboo. 

The low entry costs compared to the potential impact of social media make them obvious channels for organisations without marketing budgets or press officers to command.   An effective social strategy costs in terms of time - those blog posts don’t write themselves, and the price of success on Twitter is eternal vigilance.  But as the example of the Never Seconds blog shows, a simple piece of online communication can  have extraordinary repercussions.

However, nothing is ever simple.  Recent experience suggest it’s worth treading carefully before the evangelising can commence. 

Lesson 1: don’t assume that people know what this stuff is or how it works

I did some training recently with a charity whose Chief Exec wanted her staff to understand the role that they could all play in raising profile through the smart use of tools like Twitter.  Explaining the potential of Twitter took second place to explaining what it is and how it works.  A minority of people in the room had accounts and used them enthusiastically.  Most displayed a degree of scepticism.  

Lesson 2: don’t assume that people have enough time, technical confidence – or kit.

Most people didn’t feel comfortable about communicating online or able to do it, partly because they lacked equipment – many didn’t have smartphones, for example (today’s figures from Ofcom suggest that only 39% of people do). There was concern about losing time from already busy days to servicing more communication, and about how a small organisation could meet the increased workload that a successful strategy might generate.

Lesson 3: just because you can see opportunities don’t assume others share the view.

My group assumed that Twitter would be time-consuming (“don’t you just get streams of stuff to read and respond to?”); full of trivia (“isn’t it all about what people had for breakfast?”); and slightly creepy (“following people and having them follow you?  It sounds like stalking!”). 

Lesson 4: charities may have particular concerns about social channels that PRs should respect

Many felt uneasy about talking about what they do online because they work with vulnerable people in difficult circumstances.  There was a lively discussion about the danger of forfeiting clients’ trust, the limits of what was and was not acceptable and how to raise attention – and funds – without exploiting people.

Eventually we agreed that it was better to make a cautious start with social media than avoid it for fear things might go wrong; that there are plenty of voluntary sector organisations using social media effectively and their experience offers lessons to be learned; that while client confidentiality trumps all other considerations, there is much else that can be discussed online. 

But there’s still convincing to be done before some organisations feel confident enough to look for advice on what to put in their multi-media toolkit.

Can you be too small to invest in the future?

I ran a training day this week for a small charity which is, warily, thinking about dipping its toes into PR and marketing for the first time.

It quickly became clear that even the simple ideas we were coming up with were beyond their limited resources and the event became an impromptu staff meeting as they looked at ways of restructuring teams to free some time to allow people to do more communications.

Now, this is all very gratifying for me – they  liked what I was suggesting and could see the value it offered.  But it raised some uncomfortable issues, too.

Where do resources go – future investment or current staff?

Like many charities they run largely on volunteer and part-time labour.  To get additional things done they’re going to have to take work away from some staff and give it to other, already over-loaded colleagues.  Or they’re going to have to stop doing some things completely.  Or they’re going to have to find a partner organisation with  resources they can share.  Or they’re going to bring in a new member of staff from outside to do the work.  To get someone who’s worth having they’re going to have to pay – not big bucks, but something.  How does the CEO explain to volunteers, some of whom have stuck loyally to their task for years, that there’s no money to pay them, but there is enough to hire someone else?

The answer is that without investment in communications the organisation’s membership won’t grow, its income will stay fixed and  there’ll never be  enough money.  But that’s easy for me to say. I’m not the one doing a full day’s work just for the love of it.

Where to go for more advice on funding?

I had a quick squint at the websites for ACEVO and NCVO – two of the biggest support/membership organisations for the third sector –  looking for advice on sharing services, diversifying income streams, or just managing staff through financial hard times.  I may just have missed it in my haste, but there’s less around than I’d expected (though the advice I listed here almost two years ago is still valid).  NCVO’s Sustainable Funding Project looked helpful for small voluntary organisations looking to widen their funding base – linked here in case it’s of use to anyone.  Other suggestions gratefully received!

2011: 5 lessons from a hard year in business

It’s hardly the Office of National Statistics’ survey of the national accounts, but I’ve been spending the last semi-working day of the year looking at some figures for my business which showed: 

1.  I’ve worked more days – at a slightly lower day rate – for more clients this year than last.  Which surprises me.  If you’d asked  before I looked at the numbers, I’d have said this year was the worst ever.  In fact, with a full quarter still to come, I can see I’ll end the year  up in both days billed and income generated. Possibly it has just felt harder, coming after the long slog of 2010/11, which left reserves of both cash and bulldog spirit at an all-time low.

2.  But, I’ve got an awful long way to go before I return to the glory days of  my personal annus mirabilis - 2008/09 - when the global economy tanked but mine soared.

3. My business suffered from being too closely entangled with the public sector.  I was cushioned through ’08/’09 by a government commited to  spending to ward off a slump (thanks Gordon).  Things slowed down immediately after the general election.  It’s been a high price to pay for not taking my own good advice to spread the work around (though in fairness I saw the crash coming, I just wasn’t able to avoid it).  It takes a while to change direction – even for a tiny business like mine - it’s not just a matter of developing new contacts, it’s also a question of changing people’s perceptions of what you can do.  No wonder there’s been  a boom in advice for ex-public sector bods trying to join the private sector. 

4. The good news, though is that in the world of micro-businesses the difference between a good year and a terrible one can be just one contract.  This year has been improved by two new clients offering several months’-worth of work each.  The thing to cling to during the troughs in business is that one phone call can turn things round. 

5.  I’m not the only one to have found trading tough.  Some clients I got lots of work from in the early days have disappeared completely.  Only one client I worked for last year has used me in the last 9 months, all the other business has come from new leads.  If nothing else this highlights the importance of marketing your business and expanding your network of contacts.

However, comparing “now” with “then”  already feels like an academic exercise. As an SME-owning friend said at the weekend:  the world has  changed.  There’s no point worrying that you no longer know you’re going to be booked out for the next six months.  It’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and we’ve just got to make the best of it.  The trick, for freelancers like me at least, is to diversify – to develop new skills and ever-wider networks, to get better at seeing where new opportunities are coming from and to be flexible enough to grab them.  I can see some light at the end of the tunnel – do these points ring true for anyone else?

101 words of advice: how to handle debt

From  recent personal experience – as the disgruntled supplier – I suggest:

If they owe you

• Be reasonable.  Times are tough, people generally do the decent thing.  Anyway hitting hurricane force immediately leaves nowhere to go.
• Be persistent.
• Know your rights.

If you owe them:

• Don’t hide.  Ignoring email, phone messages or carrier pigeons sent to chase the debt won’t work.  Like Arnie, they’ll be back.  Keeping people in the dark  infuriates them.  There’s good advice here.
• Be honest, explain, offer to pay a bit at a time to show good will.
• Get  help.
• Remember, no-one believes “the cheque’s in the post”.

 

What recruitment consultants don’t tell you about job hunting

A good recruitment consultant is one who is honest about what he or she can do for you.  The best ones tell you the truth: you are far more likely to get a job through your own network than you are through the efforts of even the best recruitment consultant.

Can recruitment consultants help?

I mix freelance projects with longer interim posts so I’m a bit of a recruitment consultant connoisseur.  There are lots who specialise in placing interim managers .  Some are brilliant – finding out my strengths and skills, asking where I want to work and what’s important to me, keeping in touch.  The best one I’ve come across is happy to share my details with partner agencies if she feels they might have clients who can use me, knowing  they will reciprocate.

The bad ones are woeful.  ”Never mind the quality, feel the width” they  cry, as they pitch CVs by the bucket-full at clients, in the hope that somewhere in the human mix is a round-ish peg for the round hole they’re trying to fill.  They’re generally easy to spot – they don’t return calls, give no feedback on  applications, suggest you exaggerate the rates you charged in a previous role so that “you’ll be taken more seriously” and NEVER counsel you that, on reflection, the role they’re filling doesn’t meet your needs (or that you don’t fit the client’s).  It’s disappointing to come across one of them, it shouldn’t be surprising.  Recruitment consultancies work for the companies that hire them, not the candidates they place.  We’re the raw materials.

Working your personal network

There’s loads of advice online for getting the best out of a  recruitment consultant and it’s worth working at – I say again, many of them are excellent and great sources of support and advice.  The web also bristles with job-hunting guides.  I liked the self-explanatory 49 Best Ways To Get A Job in Today’s Horrible Economy. But I’ve had more leads on actual, chargeable work through personal networking and recommendations from previous clients than  any consultancy. This makes LinkedIn and other social networks the most valuable job-hunting tools you can wield these days.  This classic advice still holds good, even though 2009 sounds as distant as the Middle Ages in communications now.

The rise and rise of the #Mumpreneur

A brief and good-natured Twitter spat between me and Marketing Donut about their “Mumpreneurs Week” made me think again about women and business. And I’m still baffled.

I am a mother.  I have a business.  Without me even having noticed, this  makes me a mumpreneur,  eligible to attend special conferences and receive my own awards.  I have no idea why. 

I won’t repeat the  questions I raised in the “Is business really harder for women?” post except to say that on none of the mumpreneur supporter sites I’ve speed-read this morning have I found any advice that applies exclusively to self-employed mothers or answers a problem that’s only faced by mothers.  The advice – and it’s generally very good advice – is about time and resource management, about planning and budgeting, about choosing between working at home or finding premises, about marketing.  All of that stuff is relevant to start-up businesses whoever they’re run by.

The one issue that’s raised consistently on these sites that doesn’t featured much on the CBI‘s is, of course, childcare.  There’s an awful lot of “how heroic it is to juggle children and your own businesses” when actually the focus should be – “how heroic  working parents are to juggle childcare and working life in the absence of available, affordable childcare“. 

A lot of us mumpreneurs (I’m trying to get  used to using the word – there may be a grant in it eventually) have opted out of regular working life and into self-employment precisely because it offers an easier way of managing the work/ life thing.

Personally when I was in full-time work I got tired of being tired: of running everywhere and always being late anyway; of worrying that I wasn’t  a good enough employee nor a good enough mother;  of having to negotiate flexible working hours but still not being able to attend school plays; of worrying about work when I was at home and about children when I was at work.  And I say this despite the fact that my husband has always done more than his share of childcare – not because he’s helping me out with something that’s really my responsiblity, but because it’s a shared responsibility. 

Being a parent and running a business is tough.  But in my experience it’s no tougher – and in some ways it’s a lot simpler – than being a parent and having a job.  Oh, and while I’m at it.  Why are there no support services for Dadpreneurs?

Is business really harder for women?

Feminist to my fingertips I may be, but I’ve never been one for all-women events.  So I should have known that going to Business Link’s Women in Business networking event probably wouldn’t end well.  But … I’m trying to launch a new project, and if there’s advice to be had or a potential market to tap, it seemed worth sampling. 

Then I went.

Trampolining for success and Feng Shui-ing Congleton

“It’s so fantastic to be here with all you girlies.” trilled our keynote speaker.  She insisted that we”girls” weren’t entrepreneurs with a strategic vision for business  - “that’s the boring words”.  We were “dream catchers”, with a “team dream - to be MAD – Making A Difference” as we brought love and hugging to the world of business.  I remained seated as we were encouraged to stand and shout out our mantra:  “I am amazing!  I am incredible!  I am fantastic!”  Apparently it works best if you shout it to the universe first thing in the morning, while trampolining.  I spent an entertaining few minutes trying to imagine other successful women doing this – Margaret Thatcher?  Margaret Mountford from The Apprentice? –  but found it strangely difficult.

The kicker is, of course, that I was the one sitting sourly in the audience planning a dash for the drinks table.  She was the one on stage with £50million in the bank, advising Vince Cable on entrepreneurialism and living her dream of Feng Shui-ing Congleton (really). 

The ditsy route to success?

This means one of a number of things: either kooky and wacky is the way ahead in business (I  doubt it); or women have come so far that however ditsy we are, we can still be taken seriously (debatable); or it’s an act to disguise the fundamentally unfeminine pursuit of managing things (I hope that’s not the case now, though it may have been 20 years ago); or it’s just patronising drivel. You’ll be unsurprised to know that that’s my preferred option.  

Women as entrepreneurs vs women in the workplace

Ironically, the last place you should have to play the air-head is in your own business – your gaff, your rules.  The statistics on women starting up business suggest that women appreciate the freedom that self-employment offers and are making a success of  it.  The least they deserve is to be taken seriously and treated like adults – especially by other women.  I read one consultant recently recommending that a way to get women to think about business planning was to tell them that it was like preparing a shopping list – dear God …

There are, undoubtedly, big issues facing women in the workplace.  The statistics on equal pay and the gender imbalance at the top of  major corporations suggest that women are  still at a disadvantage in business.  And, of course,  there are barriers to  joining the ranks of the self-employed too.  I’m just struggling to think of many that are unique to women.  

Are women’s businesses different?

These are the characteristics which were shared by the 50 fastest-growing women-owned business in the US last year:

• A commitment to high growth — 71% agreed or strongly agreed that their goal from the very beginning of their leadership of the company was to build a large company
• Inspiring leaders — 64% believe their “ability to motivate employees” is the most important characteristic for being a successful woman entrepreneur
• Surrounding yourself with a skilled team – 78% say “Hiring the right people” was the most important action that contributed to their company’s growth
• Adapting to a changing environment – The strategy most frequently chosen (64%) to meet the challenge of the current economy is to “enter new markets”. Sixty-one percent admitted current economic conditions caused them to change their business strategies

Those are the successful characteristics of businesses.  Not women’s businesses.  All businesses. 

Having cast around for hints as to what the gender issues facing women entrepreneurs are, I found this which suggests our major problem is that we “care too much” And maybe we do.  I feel quite un-sisterly in criticising last night’s event. It was done with the best of intentions and may have helped hundreds of women.  But I’m nonetheless slightly baffled at the proliferation of organisations desperate to help us cope with the burden of being women in business.  Do we really need them? I’m genuinely interested to know.    The West Wing’s Ainsley Hayes would probably have a view. (If you’re short of time join her at 3.55′)

I can stand the despair, it’s the hope

Just as I’d given up on the piece of work that had looked so promising back in September, it comes back to haunt me.  They still want to work with us (and so they should, we’re great) they just need to sort out the incumbent agency and re-draw the spec.  But they LOVE the proposal so could we just bear with them until, maybe, November?  So the waiting continues.  And while I’d love to affect a blithe indifference, I  really, really can’t.

In search of plan B

Flickr: Ms.Tea

I was talking to a friend who is packing up her London home and buying a Christmas tree farm in Sussex – presumably on the grounds that of all the types of farm she could possibly have this one will need least in the way of  feeding, breeding or early morning milking.  Part of her motivation is a vision of the future so apocalyptic that she wants to make herself  self-sufficient before the Second Great Depression hits  (she’s planning to grow veg and keep chickens as well, I don’t think she just wants to be self-sufficient in Christmas trees). 

It struck me as I listened to her that  I need a plan B, too.  My own Christmas-Tree-farm-equivalent which I can pour some energy into while the economy implodes and the bits reform into something recognisable again.  Now all I have to do is work out what it is…

Singing the public sector blues

It’s unlikely that 38Degrees will be organising flashmobs to protest about the cutting of marketing and consultancy budgets in the public sector.  There won’t be a harrowing Boys From the Blackstuff sequel showing the  impact of unemployment on the PR consultant communities of north London.   Newsnight’s package last night about the potential impact of cuts to services in Sheffield has already been called “lefty bollocks” by one esteemed Tory blogger, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for an outraged  backlash from the commentariat either.  But, other than the Guardian (inevitably), no-one much seems to have noticed that cutting the government comms budget is going to have a hefty impact on the private sector too.  Lots of small consultancies  mixed public sector with private sector work.  It helped them to stay in business so that they could employ their own staff and sub-contract printers, designers, writers  and event management companies.  It paid for ad space in print and on TV, direct mail, web development , exhibition stands and a multitude of other things.  The money got spread around and (whisper it) a lot of the campaigns it paid for did a lot of good. 

It’s not that I didn’t expect cuts to comms – an obvious target if ever there was one, and much more sobering cuts were also made yesterday.   I’m just concerned about what happens when you take £270m worth of business out of an industry containing a large number of  SMEs that’s just coming out of a recession.