I’m honoured to have been voted in as CIPR President elect for 2020 as noted here.

One of the things I’m really passionate about is sharing best practice from the public sector with PR practitioners working in all sectors – public, private and voluntary.

Behaviour Change is one area where my CIPR committee, which represents public sector PR people, has focused on, particularly how organisations can benefit from low cost nudges to help their customers and residents make better decisions.

We’ve already held one Behaviour Change workshop – and will be running another event later on this year to formally launch a Behaviour Change network.

My vision for CIPR is all about offering more opportunities for our members to learn and develop online, as well as face-to-face. Our membership is spread out all over the UK, so we need a mix of online and offline activities to give the best possible value.

That’s why we’ve set-up a Facebook Group to share best-practice on behavioural insights and nudge theory. We will be looking at how small changes to messages can have a big impact on people’s behaviour.

In practice, this can help all organisations - across all sectors and of all sizes - with take-up in services and encourage people to change their behaviours without directly instructing them to do so.

The network will also provide a space for comms people to share case studies. We can see what behaviour change techniques have worked well and where there’s room for improvement.

Do join the group, ask questions and learn from other comms professionals.

I am one of a small group of people who are both Chartered Marketers and Chartered PRs. I’ve also managed large interdisciplinary teams, so have first-hand experience of the vital role marcomms plays, as part of a strategic management function that drives results. I understand the pressures and challenges you face.

Value of marcomms: content and conversations

In the public sector and in many agencies an integrated approach to PR and marketing is common. Practitioners work across media relations, public affairs, behaviour change campaigns, digital, SEO and customer relations. The Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned (PESO) model provides a blueprint for activity.

Marcomms has never been as critical to organisations in providing the content that drives conversation offline and online as it now. The work you do is critical in building organisational trust and encouraging advocacy through the use of behavioural insights, providing the campaign content to get people to know, feel and do.

Senior management can clearly see the return on investment (ROI) from sales or fundraising. It’s why marcomms must own the commercial value of reputation and brand and be able to show the contribution marcomms makes through setting SMART objectives, using online tracking to link content to action and being able to monetise that contribution within Google Analytics.

Opportunity and threat of automation and AI on marcomms

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform marcomms. Already a wide range of tools both paid for and free are available to automate regular online activities. Sophisticated dashboards can be built in Google Analytics to track the contribution of marcomms to ROI. These tools can be used to assess social sentiment, identify keywords and tags and schedule activity.

True AI will do far more. It will be able to undertake many of the tactical activities currently provided by practitioners from tracking impact to number crunching the stats, from analysing data to managing customer relations. This will enable Marcomms professionals to focus on more strategic activities. That is exciting but may be a concern as change can be unsettling. We need to support our practitioners to make that transition.

There are three key ways I would support marcomms practitioners:

1. Champion the strategic role marcomms plays in delivering economic value.

2. Provide affordable accessible training and qualifications, such as the new Specialist Diploma in Digital and wider business training to develop strategic skills.

3. Provide greater support to the sectoral groups and volunteers, as well as regional, national and international, so there are more opportunities to learn and network where people live and at convenient times recognising busy lives.

Lobbying is an area of work where the public perception of PR and the reality are perhaps most divergent.

In my experience the PA professionals I have met through CIPR have been the practitioners most aware and sensitive to ethical dilemmas. We need to develop better understanding of PA within CIPR, the industry and the wider public.

I currently Chair the CIPR Policy committee and have sat on it for many years. I have been involved with the work to have our own voluntary register of lobbyists and support the move to transparency in lobbying.

When I worked in-house in local government I was responsible for lobbying activity around issues such as the structure of local government, funding settlements and infrastructure investment.

I am aware of the additional skill sets that PA professionals have in addition to those of everyday PR such as the ability to critically analyse very technical information and data and turn it into intelligent briefing materials. We have a huge amount to learn from PA colleagues about stakeholder management and I’d like to highlight the work more.

I also support the idea of having Chartered assessment days for our specialisms where the case study materials explore the key areas of strategic thought, ethics and leadership but are focused on the specialism. This would allow practitioners to show their skills and experience more readily.

I also feel that we need to beef up the CIPR’s training offer in PA. I was recently looking for a strategic PA course and couldn’t really find anything that met my needs. This is an area where the views of the CIPR PA group could be instrumental in developing our offer to meet both the needs of senior PR practitioners for whom PA is part of their work and for those where it is their full time focus.

I welcomed the important piece of work the CIPR PA group conducted on horizon scanning. It will be really helpful for CIPR in developing its own strategy 2020-2024 which Board and Council are working on as well as an aide for PR leaders to develop discussions with their teams and organisations.

The concerns over polarisation and echo chambers are well made. We’ve seen it particularly with the increasingly fractious debate over Brexit. As a trainer in social media I am always at pains to point out the dangers these present.

The potential for inherent biases to be built into AI systems is well highlighted and is particularly critical to governmental institutions as the recent issue over bail bond AI in the US showed which after critical pressure from leading thinkers was suspended. Big data and it’s potential for both good by highlighting patterns and correlations not previously seen and bad from wilful misuse was well identified.

The governmental and economic challenges arising from Brexit, political and financial market instability were well made and should be at the forefront of PR leaders in the advice they give to clients and organisations.

The horizon scan is a great piece of work and the accessible presentation in a graphic was particularly well executed.