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If there is one thing public sector communications professionals are frequently criticised for, it is holding ‘sham’ consultation exercises. Usually these accusations spring up when views are being sought over changes to local services – changes to health services for example, or local schools, or bin collections. It is down to the relevant authority’s communications…
Continue readingCommunications professionals employed by the public sector do much more than pump out press releases on behalf of their organisations. Or at least, they should do. Because their job is about much more than just the obvious requirements of the role. Most organisations’ staff look to their press offices with comfortable acceptance that they are…
Continue readingWhen times are hard and money is short, friction and pressure and conflict are often the outcome – whether on the streets of the city, between competitors, among organisations, or among sectors. This is particularly true of the public and private sectors. The interface between the two appears especially tense when public funds are short,…
Continue readingThe new drive towards this thing called localism poses some interesting challenges for communications professionals in the public sector. Localism in theory means that more services are delivered locally, away from central government control, and more autonomy is handed down to the borough, district or even parish level. The enormous organs of state in Whitehall…
Continue readingThe thing about creativity and the creative process is that it can all too easily become tangled up in jargon and management-speak, whenever it comes up as a subject for discussion. Thinking out of your box, even as you are pushing envelopes, breaking down barriers or undertaking a brain dump, all make the hackles rise…
Continue readingIf I start this column with the words ‘local government finance’ in the first paragraph, I realise that you may read no further. And who could blame you. Local government finance, like income tax and mortgages, has that fantastically irritating combination of being very very dull, very very complicated, and yet is something that, annoyingly,…
Continue readingSo another public body – this time Tameside Borough Council – has turned to social media to reach out to its customers. Inspired by Manchester police putting on Twitter all incidents dealt with over a 24-hour period last October, around 60 staff at Tameside started tweeting what they were up to from midnight last Wednesday….
Continue readingOne of the more interesting outcomes of the current economic pressures facing the public sector has been the springing up of new organisational models based on the social enterprise idea. David Cameron has been keen to embrace this as part of his Big Society approach, placing social enterprise models at the heart of the Coalition…
Continue readingHot off the PR Week Press this morning we are delighted to announce that LCA has recorded our best ever position in the PR Week league tables – 69th place and into the top 70 for the first time. The tables which rank the UK’s top Public Relations agencies according to fee income are compiled…
Continue readingThese must be hard times for the in house magazine. When times are tough, expensively produced internal communications publications are probably the first to feel the pinch. I can understand why. Having recently spent a few days leafing through about 30 of the best examples our industry has to offer as part of a CIPR…
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