#votemandy

My vision is to lead a modern PR movement that values diversity, positions public relations as a profession integral to organisational success and ensures the sustainability of the CIPR.

Here’s how...

1) I strongly believe that organisations need public relations to thrive. I will continue the excellent work, which has positioned the profession as a strategic management function through active engagement with the business community showing how ethical communication can enhance economic performance.

2) The CIPR needs to be seen nationally and globally as a thought leader on business issues such as AI and big data. I will draw upon our talent pool of Fellows and Chartered practitioners to deliver this.

3) My ambition is to continue the CIPR’s modernisation delivering more online learning ,live streaming, engagement opportunities and building reciprocal arrangements with allied professional organisations. I also want to share the best practice I have seen within the public sector with the wider industry.

4) I will create a research fund to promote the study, research and development of PR where the results are published for the benefit of the wider PR community.

5) Volunteers are the lifeblood of the CIPR and I will reward them with development opportunities as well as provide support to deliver greater member engagement in the nations, regions and sectors.

To build a strong sustainable institute we have to be recognised for giving great value and be member-led.

How we go about this is important. In the 21C I have a vision to be a modern, diverse and inclusive membership body. One where practitioners are celebrated and supported no matter their age, social background, industry sector, type of role or where they are based.

We have taken great strides forward in recent years to deliver good value such as introducing Influence magazine, holding a national conference, creating a more effective Chartership process.

All are really important and I would build on them by strengthening our research capability and giving greater support to our volunteers

But we need continually strive to do better. I don’t intend to sit back and drift in the name of continuity.

That’s why I am committed to modernising our institute.

I don’t shy away from what I hear when I talk with those who aren’t members but should be, those who were members but let their membership lapse and those who annually reflect on whether membership provides good value for money.

Non members

When I talk to people who don’t join the reason often cited is the entry cost appears high, they can’t see clearly what they get and they don’t see other people like themselves.

Drop the joining fee, improve our website and give more profile to the talented people we have who are not white, middle class and middle aged. And yes, I do know I score 2 out of 3 on that one.

Lapsed members

These people fall in two groups. They were members while studying but then didn’t continue because the pay in their first job was low or they are senior practitioners whose job is strategic and encompasses a broader span and they don’t see enough to grab them.

Let’s fix this.

Give a discount on membership for those whose earnings fall below a threshold. This helps those in their first role, those working part time, those whose pay can be subject to discrimination (women, people with disabilities, BAME and those from disadvantaged backgrounds) and those who have scaled back work because of caring responsibilities.

Second. Work with other institutes to create a wider package of learning and events for senior practitioners through reciprocal arrangements and give these people (who are often agency owners in the regions) more opportunities to meet. An example here is the work done by the CIPR NE group Senior Leaders Forum.

Value for money

And lastly, there are those who reflect on value for money every year when they renew. This is where I hear people say they want more online learning, more local training and more local opportunities to engage.

I’ve talked about how we tackle this in my blogs on Training and Volunteers.

We can do all this if we have the will to challenge, speak up, modernise and become an exciting place for practitioners to be.

The volunteers are the lifeblood of the CIPR. Over 200 of them work on the regional, national and sectoral groups as well as those who give up their time to sit on panels, judging for Excellence, Sector and Pride awards and standing to be elected to Council and Board.

Over my nine years volunteering with CIPR I’ve done pretty much every role. I think it gives me a unique perspective on how to support volunteers.

I want to build on the work done by Sarah Pinch, Sarah Waddington and Emma Leech to recognise our volunteers. There is still a huge amount more we can do. President elect Jenni Field has some great thoughts on this.

In my view the balance of resources and rewards allocated to group activities needs to be reset. Last year less than 1%* of the overall CIPR budget was spent to support our groups and their volunteers. I want to redress this and I want to give the volunteers more say in how activities are delivered in their region, nation, sector or country.

Volunteering is a two way street. It has to be win:win for the volunteer and the organisation.

My win has been the amazingly talented other volunteers I’ve met. However I would guess for the last five years I’ve averaged 0.5 to 1 days a week on committees, speaking at events, judging awards, promoting CIPR online. It is a big commitment.

I’ve been lucky that for most of those years I have run my own business which gives me greater flexibility to work while travelling across the UK and around how I organise my time. But I also know when I was working in-house the commitment it takes after a long day at work to sit down at a screen at 9pm to start working on committee activities.

I salute every single one of our volunteers many of whom have been involved for far longer than I.

To keep people engaged there needs to be:

- strong leadership and strategic narrative

- great communication within the organisation/structure

- people need to feel listened to, trusted and recognised

.. and they need to have development opportunities

Volunteers especially those on regional and sectoral groups need greater recognition for the work they do. I would showcase them in a campaign during volunteering week and give them a higher profile in mail shots and online. This would have the dual benefit of saying thank you and encouraging more people to get involved.

We also need to help our volunteers develop wider business skills that complement their superb PR skills so more support around financial management, forward planning, scenario planning, research and evaluation.

This helps volunteers especially those earlier on in their careers become even more valuable to existing employers and clients and make greater strategic impact as well as driving forward CIPR. We have the talent among our Fellows and Chartered to deliver this.

If you like my vision for a modernised CIPR then vote Mandy when voting opens on 2 September.

Update 26 Aug. This note provides more detail on the figures quoted.

Published accounts for 2018 show Group income as £137,192 - which includes revenue and sponsorship generated locally from events and conferences run by the Groups.

Expenditure was £193,614 - leading to a net deficit for the Groups of £56,422. Reading the 2018 Balance Sheet shows that the deficit was covered by reducing the reserves held by the Groups, not the amount allocated by HQ to fund group activity

Exciting new fund to nurture talent

The need for strategy to be based on evidence and insight is a perennial topic with clients and when delivering training.

CIPR as part of its Royal Charter has a duty to undertake research and publish it for the benefit of the PR industry.

Yet, we have no specific fund to do this and no formal process. I’d like to introduce one.

Sometimes through the commitment and leadership of individuals we produce ground breaking work such as that on Artificial Intelligence.

Under the chairmanship of Wendy Moran, Manchester Metropolitan University, the CIPR LPS group engaged with over 200 public sector communicators via focus groups and depth interviews to produce our Influence for Impact Report. I was delighted to be part of that team conducting focus groups in Exeter and Bristol with Tim Borrett.

However, a lot of the work CIPR produces are best practice or skills guides. This is really important in helping practitioners in their day to day but it is generally not research which moves the industry forward.

This new fund would be an exciting place to nurture talent and build a more inclusive industry by allowing those from diverse backgrounds to access seed funding for research.

We will invite proposals or pitches once a year. The whole process to be transparent with proposals published and a panel meeting to award small grants.

This isn’t going to fund the type of research already being conducted by some of our leading academics in Universities. That is already well served, although I would welcome greater promotion through the CIPR channels and the website.

This fund will research specific topics that are relevant to the PR industry and show how PR delivers value. It will also seek to build on primary data such as the CIPR State of the Profession.

Examples of work might include research to show how effective reputation management increases brand value or the economic value of behaviour change campaigns in the public sector.

Applications will be open to any CIPR member.

PR as an industry needs to modernise and fast. The business world PR operates in is changing at an unprecedented pace.

We have to show where PR adds strategic value to business or be consigned to being a tactical discipline subservient to marketing, customer service or HR.

The AI in PR panel’s work has identified that within a short period AI will be able to deliver many of the activities PR practitioners have owned. AI is already rapidly eating into newspreporting with both Reuters and PA employing it.

The CIPR has a key role in helping to equip practitioners for this new operating environment through its training programmes.

I particularly reference training because that is the topic I hear consistently when I meet practitioners. Some have qualifications in PR, many do not. They come from a wide set of disciplines- marketing, web and digital, customer service, media production. They work within organisations and at SME agencies. They are not based in London.

What these people want is a blend of training days delivered at cost in their area, structured online learning and bite size learning events.

Although many might at some point take a qualification such as the CIPR Diploma or specialist diplomas what they need now is learning opportunities designed to fit round their working lives.

This means we as an institute need to transition from a model where the majority of our training events, conferences, round tables and more are held in London to a more flexible, agile model.

It means shifting the balance from headquarters to the volunteers. The huge majority of all learning events in the regions are organised and run by volunteers in the evenings because that is where and when practitioners can attend. Yet the vast majority of spending is centred around headquarters and the volunteers get very little financial support.

By creating more of our training content available in structured online sessions we can support the groups better. By streaming our London conferences and events we can bring them to people working in the regions, nations and internationally.

We can think outside the box. A great example of this is the Facebook learning and discussion group set up by Stephen Waddington and Marcel Klebber.

We can provide more masteclasses through YouTube with senior practitioners.

But to do this we have to change our mind set about what modern learning and PR lifestyles look like.

I run my own business. I have an office but I don’t spend much time in it. I work with my clients and in fact pretty much anywhere because the technology allows me to. I provide consultancy and training anywhere I need to because we live in a connected, global environment.

The same is true for many colleagues in local government. The financial challenges of reducing estate footprints and introduction of better mobile technology mean many do not work in a town hall. They work with partner agencies, at home or in collaborative shared space.

People want to access learning through a mix of methods- face to face, video tutorial, webinar, streamed events, Facebook live and podcasts.

Best and brightest in the PR industry

CIPR has an amazing talent pool in its Fellows and Chartered Practitioners. I would like to see us do far more to celebrate this talent and use it to great effect to keep CIPR at the forefront of discussion on the pressing issues our industry faces.

The brilliant, globally-leading work by the AI in PR panel chaired by Stephen Waddington, including the many events, Kerry Sheehan Panel VC, has spoken at, the excellent primers just published and high profile collaboration with the global AI and tech industries, as well as governments, has shown just what we can do.

Kerry Sheehan, Vice Chair AI in PR Panel talking at CommS Con X Insights

Similarly the Crisis Management for Terrorist related events Guide produced by Sarah Pinch, Dan Gerella and Claire Spencer in conjunction with Government's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) as been an outstanding piece of work.

The guidance is based on extensive research undertaken by CPNI and is being rolled out through a series of events and webinars. At a time of heightened security around both cyber and terrorist attacks this is a vital piece of work for communications professionals.

I would also reference the superb set of essays included in the Platinum book championed by Sarah Waddington in her Presidential year and edited by Stephen Waddington.

Another example is the excellent Horizon Scan document produced by the CIPR Public Affairs group led by Rachel Clamp

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we could achieve if there was a comprehensive plan of work. We should annually seek expressions of interest from Fellows and Chartered Members on papers on cutting edge topics.

A clear process for pitching would ensure complete transparency and enable a manageable number of topics to be agreed and built into the year’s workplan.

This would allow all Fellows or Chartered Practitioners who felt they had material to contribute to be clear on who was leading the work and how to get involved.

The importance of PR as a strategic management discipline has been championed by Sarah Waddington and others. It is a vitally important conversation.

But we have to be talking to the right people. Indulging in an echo chamber talking to ourselves about the need to have a seat at the top table achieves nothing.

That is why if I am elected president I will be taking the conversation to the places it needs to be. One of the things I have learnt over 20 years of experience of engaging with stakeholders and communities is that it’s about you going where the stakeholders are rather than expecting them to come to you.

Taking an MBA gave me the confidence, skills and language to be able to engage with C-suite and CEOs no matter what background they come from. I can talk profit and loss with accountants, risk with lawyers, tech with ICT professionals and organisational development with HR.

I’ve run my own business, I’ve set up and run a large charity and I’ve worked in public sector organisations with turnover in the millions and thousands of staff. I know business top to bottom.

The conversation we need to have with CEOs is about how PR delivers economic value.

We need to show how reputation affects the bottom line, how employee churn and it’s costs can be cut by effective internal communication, how positive community relations reduce the costs of expansion, how effective media relations impacts on buyer behaviour and how understanding reputational risk improves decision making. And most of all we need the evidence to show PR works.

To make that argument we have to improve our industry practice. That means setting smart objectives and conducting proper evaluation as well as producing stunning campaigns.

It means working on long term organisational change. You don’t achieve significant change in organisations in a year it takes a three to five year timeframe. You need to be in it for the long haul.

This is why if I were elected I would be focusing over a three year period as President elect, President and past President working with my Board colleagues on building those long term relationships.

I am a highly experienced strategic adviser regularly working with Chairs, politicians and CEOs with my roots in business, marketing and research.

My MBA underlined for me the importance of leadership, ethical and strategic skills for today’s PR practitioner. I am keen to encourage others to become Chartered and develop the management expertise sought after by CEOs, increasing investment into public relations and unlocking people’s earning potential.

My board experience is significant having set up a multi-million pound charitable trust, and been elected to a Health Foundation Trust.

I am committed to CIPR. I sit on Board, have been on Council for five years and volunteered for ten, most recently as Chair of LPS and Policy Committees.

I understand the PR industry. I’ve worked in-house, run my own agency and consulted as an associate for others. I have particular experience of the public, construction, energy, technology and charitable sectors.

I am the first in my family to go to university, I’ve worked in male dominated environments and been the sole breadwinner. I know the challenge our members face in balancing family life with a demanding career.

Nine years ago I beat cancer. It was a life changing moment. I realised what motivates me is my profession and my career took a different direction.