I’m remedying that with the outline below, which covers proposal processes: What to look at and how to divvy up the work, from the time an RFP first comes in the door until you put it in FedEx. It’s a framework that can work for everyone from one-person shops to large agencies.

Basic Proposal-Response Processes

Review

• Management function
• Good fit?
• Competitive landscape?
• Risk/reward ratio?
• What questions must be answered by the potential client before proceeding?

Outline

• Start with order / requirements of the RFP, if listed
• Determine unque/highest values of your team’s approach
• Write the executive summary first; build document from that foundation

Write

• Assign boilerplate retrieval to admin staff
• Small proposals generally written by one person (proposal manager); larger ones may be assigned by section to team members
• Price the work after the workplan narrative is complete, not before

Critique

• Requirements Review (“Did we answer all the requirements?”)
• Risks Review (“Have we identified and mitigated, to our satisfaction, any risks in the potential client’s desired approach?”)
• Red Team review (“What will someone think seeing this for the first time?”)
• Flyspecking (“Is it free of typos or other embarrassing mistakes?”)

Financial review

• Is the work priced competitively?
• Have contingencies been identified?
• Have we left room for negotiation?

Submit

• Admin process (leaves proposal manager free to move onto the next thing)

The smart folks over at McKinsey have a real winner in their most recent article on marketing, and it gets to the heart things every marketer should be asking themselves today. McKinsey author

• What exactly influences our consumers today?
• How well informed (really) is our marketing judgment?
• How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans?
• How are we coping with added complexity in the marketing organization?
• What metrics should we track given our (imperfect) options?

Some will scoff and claim those are the basics, but that’s the point: In a rapidly shifting marketing landscape, it’s hard to do better than just being consistently brilliant at the basics.

As they sum up:

The marketing environment continues to change rapidly and often feels like a moving target that’s impossible to hit. It’s genuinely difficult to overemphasize the magnitude of the change or the challenge. Yet time and time again, we find that marketers who have good answers to the five basic questions are better equipped to do battle for the effectiveness of marketing and to win the war for growth.

Go read it. (You’ll need to register on the site, but it’s free.)

A colleague from another shop and I recently talked about hiring and how you ferret out talent in an interview. We traded interview questions and, while I don’t want to post his without permission, you’re more than welcome to use mine.

“Nice {article of clothing, briefcase, portfolio or whatever} Where’d you get it?”
Tells me a bit about their ability to handle unanticipated questions — how well do they communicate when the topic moves beyond something they’re prepared for?

“What are your co-workers like?”
Tests for tact, diplomacy and descriptive skills.

“Tell me about the job you’re interviewing for three years from now — why will you land it?”
Frankly, I never hired people who didn’t have a solid answer for this because I distrust people who don’t have a plan. You can vary from your plan, but you need to have one.

“How much do you want to make in this position?”
Yes, it’s an uncomfortable question for a lot of people, but how you answer it tells me quite a bit about how you’ll act under pressure with clients, how confident you are, etc.

The last question isn’t a question at all. Whenever I was interviewing account-executive types, I’d try to get them an agency backgrounder and a copy of my own, personal resume to look over before the interview. The questions a candidate asked based on that information tell you more about them than just about anything you could ask directly.

• The team which, going into the presentation, is the project owner’s favorite;
• The team seen as due for a win, for a variety of reasons; and
• The team that gets it — that understands not just the owner’s project, but the owner’s mindset.

The first two are not defensible positions — they rely on externals you can’t control. The only defensible position is to be the team that gets it, and that means understanding far more than the technical requirements of the project.

Ask yourself: Is your presentation an exercise in ticking off requirements of the RFP? Does it sound forced and does it reek of CYA?

So, reason No. 1 why you probably lost is: You lost because you could not get beyond technical understanding to something more binding and resonating with your potential client.

You may have lost because your people talked about process too much. Everyone — everyone! — who comes into that room can talk about process; it’s a lowest common denominator. Instead, talk about results, outcomes and savings. Talk about what the project (and your approach) will mean to their business, to their stakeholders and to the bottom line. Let everything you say and do in the presentation reflect that this project is important to them, not just a piece of work you re trying to win. Review committees (particularly at public agencies) never have anyone tell them how important their work is… remind them that it matters.

So, the No. 2 reason you may have lost is: You lost because you talked about the trip instead of the destination, and undermined your own value by not elevating the project’s importance to those who would own it and be affected by it.

The No. 3 reason is brevity itself: You lost because your people seemed nervous and your graphics were poor. As a potential client, I’m not inclined to trust you with my project if you can’t work up the gumption to look me in the eye and speak in a confident tone of voice.

The folks over at Goldberg Advisors have a great piece on Eight Problems With Your Firm’s Strategic Plan. I’ve seen the listing in other articles — it first came to my attention as part of an American Planning Association piece back in 2003 — but the information is as solid now as it was then.

Two of my favorites:

Is anybody doing anything? Someone has to follow up to ensure that people execute the plan. People say they will work on strategic initiatives, but then go back to their everyday roles and spend all of their time on “real work.” After all, it’s more immediate, tangible, and within their comfort zone. I’m not advocating management by embarrassment, but there must be enough follow-up, rewards, and consequences to put teeth into the actions. If nothing else, the process should enable you to get more done than you would have otherwise.

And this beauty…

Is our plan “strategic?” Two issues are involved. First, did you use a model that lends itself to a strategic plan—not to be confused with a business plan, a marketing plan, or a five-year financial projection? Second, did you deal with strategic issues? Many planning teams wind up discussing operational issues if the facilitator does not remain vigilant

The biggest truths in management and organizational planning — whether you’re doing it for your own company or assisting with an effort as part of a consulting team — are timeless, despite what much of the tech-and-social-change-everything crowd would have you believe. The article is good, concentrated management wisdom — go read it.

A weekend conversation about social media and the value PR brings to the table got me thinking about our industry’s value cascade — how we transmit value to clients and employers under the best scenarios, vs some less-than-best variants. Here’s what I think it looks like on the consulting side:

Ideally, we deliver expertise, which drives the formation of custom strategies. These strategies, combined with access, deliver results and value.

If we lack any one of the three legs of the proverbial stool, we can still make things work, albeit with different approaches.

• Got expertise and access but lack strategy? Your media channels and social audiences will tell you what they want and strategy becomes a recursive exercise.
• Got strategy and access but no expertise? Congratulations – you’re an account coordinator at a typical agency. You likely have a framework of people (they’re the ones who gave you the strategy) who can support you with advise and counsel.
• Expertise and strategy but no access? That’s the easiest nut to crack of all, because a good pitch (good in the sense that it serves both your client/employer and the reporter/blogger/whatever) requires less access than we generally like to admit.

When we lack two of the three elements (or maybe all three – shhh!), we start selling buzzwords and new-and-improveds, hoping the novelty will overshadow the lack of measurable, repeatable impact on the business. (See: “Let’s start a blog!” a few years ago or “Let’s start a social media campaign!” today.)

That might be a good way to muddle through some situations in the short term, but getting repeatable, long-term results that way is nearly impossible.

Executive Summary

• Write it first — let it guide the tone of the other proposal elements
• Umbrella statement of your case and summary of the entire proposal
• One page; two on a larger proposal

What you say: Lead with value — the impact and benefits of what you’ll do, not the laundry list of tasks. Focus on the fit between your team and the project at hand.
What you demonstrate: Banners flapping in the breeze — create the vision of what success looks like.

Statement of Need

• Why the project is necessary
• Ideal place to show strategic knowledge of how the project fits into a bigger picture
• One to two pages

What you say: Lead with knowledge — start strong with information that shows you know the lay of the land, but finish even stronger by pivoting to experience that exceeds what the client has in-house or leverages your expertise from other projects. Remember: Showing that you know the industry, issue or product as well as the client isn’t enough; to sell premium services, the client has to feel like your domain knowledge far exceeds their own.
What you demonstrate: You’ve done your homework, this is not your first rodeo, and you get it — ideally, with insight beyond what’s been demonstrated by the client.

Project Description / Statement of Work

• Nuts and bolts of how the project will be implemented and evaluated
• Resist the urge to go into deep technical detail
• Scoring (in a competitive bid) matters a great deal in this section – be sure all RFP elements regarding scope are answered
• Three to five pages, generally

What you say: What you’ll do, how you’ll do it — including schedule issues and nods to any external or client-induced constraints.
What you demonstrate: You’ve got a plan, it’s cohesive and it has contingencies.

The scope of work isn’t just about laying out how you’ll do the job — at the proposal stage, it’s about providing a level of emotional comfort (“These guys know what they’re doing!”). Remember: People buy for emotional reasons, then back it up with data to rationalize the decision.

Budget

• Financial description of the project plus explanatory notes
• One page (two if a particularly detailed or large budget is involved)

What you say: The minimum required to clearly explain your pricing and the value delivered. This is not the place for fine print and three pages of footnotes.
What you demonstrate: Value (which is not the same as price), low risk (through warranty, fixed pricing or other measures) and transparency (through streamlined pricing and billing practices).

Organization Information

• Organizational bio (one page, edited every single time to make it relevant to the project at hand)
• Senior team member bios, as needed and edited every single time for relevance, to demonstrate appropriate expertise

What you say: Here are the people you can expect to interact with, and they all have relevant expertise.
What you demonstrate: Your team isn’t just good — it’s the only rational solution to their challenge.

Conclusions

• Summary of the proposal’s main points
• Focus on value delivered, not specific tasks
• Generally just 1-4 paragraphs, certainly no more than a page

What you say: Focus on unique value propositions; ask for the work (it’s surprising how seldom proposals fail to explicitly ask for the work)
What you demonstrate: The yin to the executive summary’s yang — a chance to bring the process full-circle back to an emotional (albeit not too emotional) appeal.

Do I follow it myself? Sometimes, but there are a couple of clear exceptions:

• With public-sector work, potential clients tell you (usually in mind-numbing detail) how you have to structure your proposal.
• For most private-sector work, I’ve developed an unusual format that works and has a high close rate — something I’m happy to share one-on-one but less eager to post on the wide-open web.

Talk to PR and marketing agency types, and you’ll hear all manner of moans and groans over Requests For Propopsals (RFPs) or their lesser-seen siblings, the Request For Information (RFI) or Request For Quote (RFQ).

Why? Well, part of it is just Pollyanna-ish thinking about how business comes in the door — a surprising number of agencies grow their practices through purely organic networking and word-of-mouth marketing. This isn’t a bad move (more on that in another post), but it’s hard to be known by all the right people all the time. Now and then, a great piece of work will come up and you’re going to have to walk through the beauty pageant just like everyone else.

But the other reason agencies sometimes shy away from competitive bids is a little more basic: There are a lot of unreasonable, unclear or otherwise undesirable RFPs out there. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

I answer a lot of PR and marketing RFPs, I’ve written many as well for colleagues and clients, and when I worked client side I had the opportunity to go through the whole process from that angle as well. A really good RFP should do a few things:

• It should create a level playing field for you, the client, to make apples-to-apples comparisons of key factors. Your job is hard enough without having to compare Agency A’s 40-page proposal to Agency B’s 5-page document.
• It should give respondents the basics they need to determine whether the project is a good potential fit or not. Not all shops do all things well, and your RFP should screen for that. This can be a function of budget, of anticipated tasks and hours, etc. There are may ways to lay this out, but one way to find out how respondents think is to list “two legs of the stool” and let respondents offer counsel on the third leg. Examples include:
  • You can list one-year goals and anticipated budget, asking respondents to outline objectives and strategies they might undertake with that direction.
  • You can list goals and objectives, requesting a strategy outline and budget.
  • You can list strategic business needs that the PR effort should address, and ask the respondents to develop goals and a rough budget. (This is the highest-level approach and isn’t appropriate under some circumstances.)
• It should filter for two types of experience:
  • Expertise in a horizontal market (i.e., you define the types communications services you need, such as annual reports, international media relations or crisis communications); and
  • Expertise in a vertical market (i.e., broad-scale B2B communications, prior success with social media or online networking portals, etc.).
  For a successful engagement, you’ll need both, and it’s surprising how often you can’t ferret out the details of these two areas unless you spell it out clearly in the RFP.
• Finally, it should respect the confidentiality and work product of the respondents. There are a lot of strong opinions in the PR world about how much (or rather, how little) original strategy you should put into a proposal – a shocking (to me) number of firms and solo practitioners simply won’t put anything other than basic qualifications into a proposal.
  
  The former client-side guy in me says that makes for weak proposals, and I wouldn’t choose someone who didn’t show me a good deal of how they think and develop strategy. However, in order to foster that kind of thinking in an RFP process, you need to respect confidentiality by allowing respondents to mark some or all of their proposals as confidential and not subject to wide review. (This is a thornier issue in the public sector, where I chase a lot of work, but shouldn’t be an issue for your project.)

Ongoing employee development gets a polite nod — if that — at most small to mid-sized PR agencies. And that’s a shame, since it’s one of the highest ROI activities agency owners can engage in, along with systemic business development.

While I haven’t worked at endless agencies in my career, a couple of them have been deeply committed to employee development. Additionally, I did a stint at Peter Kiewit Sons’, Inc., a company generally regarded in the construction industry as the leader in terms of employee development. All of which is a long-winded way of saying: I’ve got opinions.

Good training programs follow career arcs. If the first time employees encounter your training is when they’ve been there a few years or gotten promoted into management, then it’s not a good program. Better to have less to offer at each level and something at every level than to aggregate all the training into launchpad stuff like courses for new account execs, supervision 101, etc.

Employees on a track to management (or more specifically, on a track to positions with significant P/L authority) should be trained together no matter how many offices you have to fly them in from. Can’t fit ‘em all into a big hotel meeting room? Then break ‘em into multiple groups but the big idea is to get all these people together to meet and exchange experiences. They’ll learn, but they’ll also forge personal friendships and work relationships that will help the company. If you have an account coordinator making a decision, it’s unlikely to have a huge impact on the company — but a newly minted VP? You want him/her to know lots of other people in the organization so ideas and experiences can be shared.

Don’t be afraid to make it rigorous and make it a full-time job for a while. This applies most to training for people going into significant P/L roles — they should have to work their ass off while in training with homework, reading assignments, group activities and (this is crucial) little or no interruption by their “normal” work duties while they’re training.

Related to above: Make success during training part of a successful career at the firm.That means two things:

• Grades of some sort — If you do very well at some aspect of training, that’s noticed, noted in your record and can positively impact your career; and
• Proactive personnel management — It’s OK to suck at some stuff you’ve received training in, but if you are an otherwise average employee who doesn’t grow based on the training resources spent on you, then it’s management’s responsibility to ask “Do we need someone else in the job?”).

Don’t just teach public relations. I shouldn’t even have to say that, but it’s surprising how narrow practitioners sometimes view their own industry. A good account executive, for example, ought to know — really know, at a professional level of competency — how to be a good project manager. He/she should know enough about classic rhetoric to be compelling when asked to make a case. He/she should be comfortable with Excel and be on the way to knowing how to schedule and budget work in a way that generates profit. He/she should know enough about business to not embarrass you in a conversation with a client CEO, and should understand how the agency makes money. (Hint: It’s not “doing PR.”)

And since I mentioned how narrow some people view the industry, I’ll admit my own narrow-minded bias: I think everyone needs to be taught business-development skills appropriate to their career level, even at large firms where the practice is walled off and relatively isolated from day-to-day execution. Why? Because employees who understand how the firm makes money and understand how to spot and prosecute an opportunity are very valuable over the long term.

We constantly hear from clients that they want the people in the interview to be the ones doing the work. For a small shop, that’s a huge advantage because small shops generally have a greater percentage of senior folks as a portion of their overall staff.

But before you get to do the work, you have to win them over. Herewith (c’mon, where else but my blog can I get away with a word like that?), some rules we follow religiously that tend to break the conventional wisdom…

• We’re not all things to all people. We have certain passions, certain things we think are right and certain things we believe are just stupid, and we let that passion come through in the presentation. We spend a lot less time explaining why we’re perfect than we do explaining what we believe and how it relates to what the client believes.
• No PowerPoint, no matter how good, will make up for an awful speaker. Only those who can present well get to do much talking. Corollary: If the room can’t be set up in such a way that the speaker (not the screen) is the focus of attention, then we’ll skip the A/V.
• Slides are against light backgrounds, not dark ones. That makes the text easier to read in a well-lit (or at least half-lit) room, and we don’t want people trying to take notes in the dark. And they will take notes because we make sure they have nice pens and note paper at the outset.
• Everyone on the team coordinates what they’ll wear. Not so we all match, but so no single person sticks out.
• No one is allowed to read from of a slide or repeat verbatim something that’s on a slide. Slides are there to augment the points you’re making, but the main points must be verbal.
• We brainstorm what we believe will be the top 10 post-presentation questions and have slides ready for them. You get ooohs and ahhhs if they ask a question and you can jump right to a new, relevant slide or slides that address it.
• Lead speaker is the project manager, not the agency principal. The agency principal may open and close by talking about our resources and commitment, but the project manager spends the bulk of the time talking about how we’re going to get the work done and his/her role as an internal advocate for the client’s success.
• Given a choice, we like to set up the room ourselves, including the tables, chairs, pitchers of ice water — everything. That doesn’t happen as often as we’d like, but it does happen. And when it does, it speaks volumes about our attention to detail, as well as rattling the hell out of whoever speaks after us.

Over at the weird, encyclopedic Everything2, I found this entry under “The four types of activist.” Good stuff, even if the quoting source is the otherwise lunatic screed, Toxic Sludge is Good For You. I’ve summarized the post, which is itself a summary of a 20-year-old speech to the American Cattlemen’s Association, below.

Back in the day, I helped defeat several slow-growth movements on behalf of the National Association of Homebuilders; from that experience, I’d say this summary is right on the money.

The short version: There are four basic types of activists — radicals, opportunists, idealists and realists. Dealing with movements antagonistic to your clients involves dividing the different types, using different tactics for each group:

• Isolate the radicals.
• Get the opportunists on the payroll if needed, or ignore them.
• Cultivate/educate the idealists and convert them to realists.
• Co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry.

Radical activists have socio-political motives for subverting the system. They see multinational corporations as inherently evil, and do not trust the government to protect the people or the environment from the interests of big business. Their larger goals can be characterized as “social justice and political empowerment.” Radicals cannot be converted. Therefore, they must be isolated. Their credibility must be destroyed through conversion of the other factions or by personal attacks.

Idealists can be the most difficult activists to deal with. Idealists tend to want a perfect and ethical world. Typically they have nothing material to gain from their beliefs. This, combined with altruism, gives them great credibility and disproportionate influence over the public and the media. Idealists must be dealt with by education, for they will change their positions if it can be shown that their policies cause harm to others. However, the education process can be intensive and difficult, requiring great sensitivity to the issues concerning the idealist.

Opportunists are those who engage in activism for their own gain. They may be after power, increased visibility, or even money. Opportunists can be easily dealt with by providing them with at least the perception of a partial victory.

Realists are the key to most PR campaigns. They are the ones who are willing to work with trade-offs, and their pragmatism makes them the ones most open to negotiation. They will work within the system, often being willing to enter into partnerships with the business concerns that PR firms represent. Once these relationships have been established, the opportunists are always willing to share the credit, and the radicals will lose credibility and be neutralized.

Let’s start with a basic premise: You like to win.

Whether it’s chess, cards or the communication campaigns you work on, you (like me) probably like to come out on top. Victory is sweet most of the time; profitable most of the time; and fun damned near all the time.

The bad news: No magic pixie dust guarantees a win. The good news: There’s a framework for identifying how you can control the debate in most communications situations. And if you control the debate, you’ll win more often than not.

I learned research — and how to use it in PR — at the knee of Dr. Gary Lawrence, a longtime pro who’s been doing issues and political research longer than I’ve been alive. (Sorry, Gary!). He’s probably learned and forgotten more than I’ll ever know on the subject, but the most valuable thing he ever taught me is this: Know your audience’s values, frame your issue inside them, and you’ll control the debate. Do that, and you have to screw up or be massively outspent to lose.

“Values” is a word that’s been devalued (no pun intended) to the point of ridicule — we have family values, community values, corporate values and values too low to advertise, to name just a few. But in when you’re trying to get to what people resonate with and engage with, values are a very specific thing at the foundation of a three-level pyramid of thought that guides people in virtually all the decisions they make:

At the top level are opinions, the myriad thoughts and considerations people have about any subject. Opinions are choppy surface foam in the ocean of thought — constantly changing and subject to review or revision as new information comes along. I like my blog, and that’s an opinion; you may not like it, and that’s an opinion, too.

At the next level of thought are attitudes. More strongly held than opinions, the attitude level is where debate about many “big-picture” issues stalls in policy making and the press. Attitudes are less subject to change than opinions, but can be changed over time by providing credible arguments that appeal to deeper values (see below). Continuing the self-indulgent metaphor: An attitude about blogging is the concept of personal and professional expression.

Forming the bedrock of opinions and attitudes are values — the sum total of our hopes, needs, fears and dreams. Values are instilled in us at an early age and remain unchanged except through the most major of events, personal upheavals or societal change. Because they are so basic to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, values are shared across broad socioeconomic ranges. Values related to this blog? Hopefully, knowledge and creativity.

We could debate opinions about my blog and probably even attitudes about it, but you’re going to have a tougher time finding people from the anti-knowledge and anti-creativity lobbies. That’s a characteristic of values: Because they are so basic, they tend to have wide acceptance — and that’s what makes them so powerful when you’re trying to get traction for your issue or client.

So if values-based communications strategies work so well, why don’t we use them more? One reason is that otherwise well-intentioned people can’t help but muck with a stated value — they try to add things onto it, “refine” it to make it appeal to a particular group or otherwise wordsmith it to death.

I see this a lot in public involvement, where simple, one- or two-word values that are clearly identified through qualitative and quantitative research get turned into paragraph-long statements by stakeholder committees or other privileged participants. That’s a shame, because a good rule of thumb is that if your value needs a sentence to state, then it’s too narrow.

Figuring out your target audience’s values isn’t hard and doesn’t take much time or money. Focus groups, if done correctly (and I have my own ideas of what that means) can get you most of the way there. And the good news is: When you’re hitching your wagon to people’s bedrock values, you’ll know right away whether you’re on track or not because the public will let you know.

(Note: This makes a whole lot more sense if you start with part 1…)

In the first part of this post, I looked at (some might say ranted at, but not I!) the challenges of branding in the public sector, focusing mainly on common mistakes. In this installment, I’ll talk about turning lemons into lemonade, hitching our wagons to customer values and implementing strategies to get started in the right direction.

Challenges and Opportunities

Several characteristics shared by many public agencies can be both challenges and opportunities as part of a rebranding effort:

Characteristic: Dominance — Often, a public agency owns something highly visible with no competition. (Think: roads and state departments of transportation.
Challenge: Competition is a natural brand strengthener — if the object of branding is to get to “when I think of x, I think of company a,” in the mind of the customer, then the unspoken conclusion of that thought is “… in comparison to companies b, c and d.” An agency that utterly dominates some aspect of public life (again, the roads/DOTs example is apt), it is, ironically, subject to less appreciation because there are no other alternatives.
Opportunity: In a situation like this, the agency doesn’t need to consume branding resources getting to the position of category dominance that’s required of any strong branding effort — the agency is already there. That means management can focus on dominating categories of perception, rather than product, i.e., if the agency is already known for transportation (or providing social services, etc.) and there is no strong competitor on the horizon for the public’s attention in that area, then the focus should on dominating in perceptive categories, such as efficiency, good stewardship of state resources, environmental leadership and project delivery.

Characteristic: Ubiquity — Certain public-sector agencies have the blessing and curse of truly pervasive presence. The department of transportation is a perfect example of this, but so are police and fire services. For these lucky (and, as you’ll read below, unlucky) agencies, name recognition likely surpasses that of the elected officials who govern them.
Challenge: An agency that is virtually everywhere can be, in the mind of a public quite capable of screening out excess information, nowhere.
Opportunity: Physical ubiquity parallels dominance as an area where resources often don’t need to be expended in building the brand. But before you think you’re off the hook, ask yourself: Does all that physical ubiquity translate into the same level of mission understanding that other agencies enjoy with the public, legislators and the press? Branding opportunities lie in leveraging physical presence with positive brand-reinforcement messages.

Bringing Up The V-word

Another action with high potential upside is to align the agency at every reasonable level — from its mission and goals to its communications practices and even, in some instances, its operational practices — to the core quality-of-life values shared by most of its constituents. (More about the difference between opinions, attitudes and values can be found here.)

Although a broad, rigorous public process is the only truly safe way to identify what the various publics believe their cornerstone values to be, experience with public agencies around the country reveals a few (reasonably) safe bets:

Safety: In groups of varying demographics all around the country, I’ve heard safety consistently come up as a primary quality-of-life value — often the overriding one. The concept of safety means different things to nearly everyone, but for public agencies, the message is clear: Visibly putting safety first and making a commitment to safety-centric policies and goals is going to play well in Peoria.

Stewardship: For most agencies, but particularly those that control extensive public infrastructure, the current status quo is the end result of decades of local, regional and state effort. Often, even the largest individual project catching current media attention is but a rounding error compared to the the intrinsic value of of the overall system (think: roads, airports, water/sewer systems and schools). Communicating the fact that an agency takes stewardship seriously often falls by the wayside or gets drowned out in more-political discussions of urban vs. rural equity, geographic squabbles, etc. That’s a shame, since it’s an understandable topic that nearly all audiences can relate to. Hint: Get people to understand what your system is worth (whatever that system may be), and they’ll be a lot more on board with individual projects.

Economic vitality: There is perhaps no greater physical asset to local and state economies than their infrastructure, but when is the last time you saw a public agency (other than maybe the economic development department), push its value as an economic engine of change? Whether you’re talking roads, sewers, water utilities or power/gas, our infrastructure affects the ability to move goods, the willingness of people to relocate here and the decisions of business to establish. While other forces are certainly in play (taxes, etc.), public agencies could strike a resonant chord in these unstable economic times by positioning themselves as agencies dedicated to improving local/regional/state competitiveness by improving the infrastructure that business relies upon.

Marketing: Communicating The Brand for a Desired Result

Go to Google and type in marketing, you’ll come up with millions of Web pages. With that many people claiming to be experts in marketing, opinions on what the word even means are apt to vary greatly.

When most people think of marketing, they think of marketing tactics. Why? Because tactics are fun and visible. But tactics, while the most salient aspects of marketing, are steps you take to get down the road; Figuring out where the road starts and where it leads are the first steps.

Marketing is far more than tactics; marketing is analysis, and a sound strategy based on this analysis. But what sort of analysis? The following (admittedly broad) framework can apply to the public sector:

Customer analysis: Most agencies serve several types of customers, ranging from the legislative officials who set its budget to the public, property owners, local officials and vendors. Having a solid understanding of customers means having a grasp about how customers behave, their motivations, their perceptions and preferences. Although they may not be buying a product from the agency in the traditional sense, the attitudes they form based on interactions with the agency are just as potentially damning as bad sales experiences — if someone has nowhere else to go, they may continue to come to you for help, but it’s a certainty they won’t want to help you if you ever need it. Without having this customer knowledge, the tactics of marketing are just blowing in the wind. You’ll hope that the tactics work, but be blissfully unaware about whether anyone would want to pay attention or listen.

Competitive analysis: Marketing is also about understanding competition. And while most agencies don’t have direct competition in the service they provide, there are scores or even hundreds of public agencies that compete for the public’s attention, legislators’ favor and state or federal dollars every day. In a very real sense, they are the competition, and an understanding of how your messages compare with (and compete with) theirs is crucial.

Capabilities analysis: To think about marketing, a public agency has to consider what it can actually deliver on the expectation of value. As with any large, public agency, it’s nearly impossible to make all people happy all the time. However, a culture focused on process over problem solving (as an example) is less apt to deliver compelling value over the long haul.

Growing out of these analyses (and others — this article is already too long as it is), an agency can then begin to position itself, combining this data into an overall understanding of what segments exist in public perception, deciding on targeting some or all segments, positioning messages, and then doing what’s necessary to deliver on that positioning.How does a public agency deliver on its positioning? By branding correctly, advertising correctly and communicating correctly through channels and messages that are consistent with the analysis that marketing is really responsible for.

Potential marketing strategies

Although I’m against one-size-fits-all approaches, some sample strategies are useful to highlight how a public agency might turn its branding and marketing efforts into action. As samples, take these with a grain of salt — you should never embrace a strategy or tactic without some serious consideration as to whether it fits into your overall branding and marketing effort.

Strategy 1: Don’t start with the brand; start with what people value. Your agency doesn’t have enough money — nor is it likely that it ever will — to engage in a sustained, service-area-wide media blitz. The good news is, there’s no reason for that blitz. If your agency has tremendous name recognition (if not equally tremendous support), then what’s required is not greater linkage of the name with the service provided, but rather greater understanding of what the agency does and how it relates to what people value.

The public is not used to being engaged by the agencies that serve it — an unfortunate fact, but one that can be used to your agency’s advantage. Leading off with grassroots-based initiatives to determine what people’s core quality-of-life values are and how they can be linked into the agency (a process that’s a whole other topic in itself), has two major benefits:

• It provides authentic, nuanced input that will be more valuable to the agency than merely doing a phone survey or similar quantitative process. The difference lies in the “hamburger analogy” — if you get a call from a pollster who asks if you like hamburgers, you may answer “yes.” However, if you’re in a discussion with your neighbors or co-workers about hamburgers, you may get into grilled vs. fried, the merits of whole-wheat buns, who makes the best mayonnaise, etc. People give more authentic and more nuanced answers — and feel very gratified for being asked — when you duplicate the environment where most opinions and attitudes are formed: Discussion with peers.
• It is a highly visible process. Although it may seem easier to merely put up billboards and tally up the number of daily impressions they make, the relatively small number of people impacted through a values-gathering process are magnified by the publicity and word of mouth that such programs generate.

This values-gathering process may be done through many forms. But it should be done, as an organizational development activity that will validate the agency’s mission and goals against what its constituents value; as a re-branding exercise that will take the first steps to educating the public while positioning the agency as responsive; and as a marketing exercise that will generate publicity.

Strategy 2: Resist the urge to say; embrace the urge to do. Government agencies are infamously inefficient — that’s why it’s news when one actually does something instead of just talking about another plan or program. Use that in your agency’s favor; become the agency that consistently talks about results and people. Spend less time talking about long-range planning and more time hitting what’s been accomplished. Give less time to fulminating over long-range budget issues (at least in public) and more time to an annual “state of the asphalt (or sewer, or schools, etc.)” address where you can point out every fix, new project and economic benefit the agency has provided. Remember: The priority is to talk about results. If you can’t talk about results, then you can talk about people. If you can’t talk about people, then — and only then — do you talk about process.

Strategy 3: Get others to say it for you. Any claim the average public agency attempts to make about itself is going to be more credible coming from a third party, even if that party is an average citizen. If advertising plays a significant role in the final rebranding and marketing effort, then make sure you have faces of real people (i.e., not someone from the agency) talking about results. The same holds true all the way up and down the communications ladder, from public-involvement practices to communications with legislators at hearings — get other people to sing your praises.

Strategy 4: Market to the public at natural intersection points. Most public agencies are like utilities in the sense that no one notices unless something is going wrong. Getting past that is possible, but takes years and may be more than the agency wants to tackle in terms of time, effort and cost. In the meantime, aggressively trying to saturate the public with pro-agency messages leads to a waste of resources (because the public doesn’t care) or outright hostility (because they will wonder why the money isn’t being spent to fix their personal pothole, flooding storm sewer, etc.).

A more-efficient, more powerful strategy: Talk to the public when they’re actually dealing with the agency or its work. Given that these interactions are typically sources of negative experience (construction delays, meetings to find out whether a new alignment will impact property, etc.) they represent a good opportunity for the agency. People who come to the table with an issue are apt to be listening — either for something to make them angrier or for something to answer their specific concern. Use that moment of their focus to answer the concern, but also to deliver the branding message and marketing tactics that are developed.

Construction-related communications, announcements of major new programs and public-involvement efforts are a natural channel for this. However, some of the greatest success will likely come from creating events that people want to engage in, such as regional summits. And that leads us to…

Strategy 5: Get personal. Get physical. Get out on the stump. In a sense, this is a summation of several of the other strategies. It is so important, however, that it bears repeating.

People need to see the faces of your agency rather than just its logo. They need to hear its personnel asking questions and they need to be allowed to ask questions of their own, even if the answers aren’t what they want to hear. In short, your agency needs to engage the public rather than just serve it at a distance. Remember: Great brands are born of publicity rather than advertising in the message-rich environment that exists today. Personal engagement is a compelling act of publicity (particularly for a large state agency), and every in-person impression you can make has the value of many, many advertising impressions, often at a lower overall cost.

To paraphrase the an old phrase, “When I hear ‘rebranding,’ I reach for my gun.”

When it comes to public-sector communications, too many managers equate a new logo, a zippy tagline or other cosmetic fix with the cure for public apathy or ill will.

They’re wrong… but you already know that. What you might not know (or at least, what you might not have thought about quite as obsessively as I have) is how branding in the public sector is different.

First, a pair of definitions:

Branding is based on singularity; it creates the perception that there is no product on the market quite like your product. Nouning and verbing are both good branding tests, i.e., Instead of imported beer, you can ask for Corona and instead of looking something up, you Google it).

The lesson? A brand is a singular concept you own in the mind of the prospect/customer. In this sense, many public agencies already own what Fortune 500 marketing executives dream of: They are completely associated with the service they provide.

But being joined at the hip with your product or service isn’t enough.

A great brand won’t appeal to everyone because singularity ensures that no brand can have a universal appeal.

Marketing builds the brand in the mind of the customer. There’s a symbiotic relationship here — if the brand doesn’t reflect the realities of your organization, then all the advertising, and public relations in the world won’t help achieve your objective.

Conversely, a strong brand can, naturally boost any marketing effort, which in turn strengthens the brand even further.

OK, so when are you going to get to the public sector?

Good point. Public-sector agencies are in the business of stewardship and service. Any branding effort for an existing, high-profile public agency or jurisdiction has to start with a simple truth: there’s already a brand in play, albeit one that likely exists by default rather than design.

Expectation of value + sum total of customer experiences and perceptions + recognized sensory imprint = brand

Branding gets thrown about as a synonym for “new logo,” but if that were the case, then branding would be the domain of graphic designers alone. A brand consists of:

Expectation of value: When I see, hear or read about the entity behind the brand, what do I expect from them?

The sum total of customer experiences and perceptions: In a well-managed brand, this will be close to or identical to the expectation of value; in a less well-managed brand, these experiences and perceptions may vary wildly from the expectation of value. Experiences always overshadow the expectation of value in determining how the public reacts to a brand.

Recognized sensory imprint: For most companies, this means a logo. But it can also include taste, scent, sound or other factors depending on the brand. Whatever it is, it serves the same purpose: A quick touchstone to elicit the expectation of value.

Touchstones aren’t always what clients think they are

While working with a utility that wanted to (sigh) “re-invent itself,” I stunned the room into silence when I pulled out a copy of their monthly bill and said: “This is your logo. Everyone knows it by sight, everyone knows exactly what it means to get one and it is the one time each month when your customers consistently think about you. In the corporate world, marketers would kill for that sort of recognition and attention — so what are you going to do to leverage it?”

More in part two — this is getting long.

Nine years ago, I wrote the following as part of an essay. For the archeologists among us, that’s before Facebook and before social media became everyone’s darling.

I don’t predict the future well or consistently, but with nine years’ hindsight, I’d say I had the current landscape pretty much nailed.

As I tell anyone who’ll listen, “I used to do PR.”

For years now, it’s looked/felt a lot more like community relations, but sometimes the community is a pool of editors and reporters, sometimes it’s a market of end customers and sometimes it’s a group of opinion leaders.

Back in the day, we all relied on the media to reach the end user and the opinion leader — that’s why they called it media relations, and there are still times when that approach is the right one to take.

But my guess (and of course, when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail) is that the future of PR looks a helluva lot like the present of community relations.

There are probably two things at work here…

Thing one: People are more connected than ever, but more personally isolated than ever. We chat with people online, but seldom (if ever) see their faces. We don’t know — and often fear or detest — our neighbors. The great social institutions that people built communal relations around in the past, such as church, have eroded or modified so that they’re no longer the hub that all these little spokes of communication and relationship grow out of. Our firm did some research not too long ago that confirmed this on another front: the ongoing rise of arena/stadium events as a preferred form of entertainment. Whether it’s sports, concerts or Promise Keepers, people want to gather, celebrate and be a part of a greater whole.

Why? Because they’re disconnected from each other in most aspects of their lives.

(Warning: community relations/public involvement segue approaching…)

That ties into blogging, I think, because if there’s one truism about people, it’s that they have something to say, they think it’s important, and they want to be heard. So blogging is a way to voice an opinion. For those who get into it, it’s also a community because bloggers link to each other’s stuff all the time. And that brings us to…

Thing two: If you’re really trying to engage people, media relations isn’t the best way to do it. I know that, even as I type those words, there are heresy tribunals being prepared, but it’s the truth.

Now, by “engage” I don’t mean tell them about the latest Rotary Club fish fry. What I do mean is that if you’re trying to elicit broad-scale behavior change, get consensus on a matter of policy or insert discussion of your client’s issue into civic life, the press is good for publicizing an issue, but publicity is not the method that most people choose to use as the primary factor in developing their opinions about such things.

The conventional approach to public debate on big issues is based on publicity, with public agencies, major stakeholder groups (often defined by budget) and politicians staking out positions and trying to sell the public on plans. Yet the process of publicizing a plan to sell it isn’t the process in which the public forms its opinions.

That process demands interaction with other citizens, with consideration for the full spectrum of emotions as opposed to pure objectivity, and with dialogue moderated by recognized community or social-group leaders.

This is a key factor in the runaway success of talk radio and the exponential growth of the Internet. People want to talk to each other, to test ideas and to take in others’ experiences. Where talk radio and the Internet often fail, however, is in providing any sort of filter or mediating voice to the cacophonous public debate.

Want to really get people to buy into your message, whether buy in is a commitment to debate its merits or a flag to rally ‘round? Then stop publicizing to people and start engaging them in a dialogue.

Whether I’m a heretic or not, don’t spend much time weeping for the traditional, media-centric model of public relations. After all, it’s not like the media are all that special in the minds of the public. They don’t rate highly in trust surveys and the tremendous saturation of media and messages has spawned a whole generation of non-traditional news sources. The thinking: If news is everywhere and everything is news, then why the hell can’t I be reporter, editor, copydesk and anchor, all in one?