BAME voices takeover #FuturePRoof for fourth book
Sarah Waddington has handed over #FuturePRoof to the BAME community for her latest book. I caught up with some of the contributors to talk about the future of our profession.
#FuturePRoof was founded by Sarah Waddington in 2015. Her goal was to create a platform to assert the value of public relations as a strategic management function and promote best practice. Along the way she has published three books and created a vibrant community.
The fourth book, Celebrating BAME Talent is published today in digital and print formats. A chapter a day will also be published on the website and shared via @weareproofed on Twitter.
Topics range from audience targeting, social media, partnership working, reputation, pitching to radio and community building through to public affairs, internal comms, leadership, coaching and the psychology of decision-making.
I caught up with four of the authors this week ahead of publication to ask them about some of the biggest issues facing our profession. My thanks to Anouchka Burton, Mita Dhullipala, Katy Howell and Alicia Solanki.
Anouchka Burton
Q. What’s your chapter about and what will I learn?
A. Our industry is grappling with ways to improve race equality, and support, encourage and retain BAME talent. My chapter offers coaching as part of the solution. It's not the whole solution - long-term, systemic change is required - but professional coaching can transform the careers (and experiences) of people from demographic groups that remain under-represented in PR, particularly at a senior level.
Q. Should education and qualifications be mandatory in public relations, as they are in other professional services such as finance and law?
A. I'm more interested in creating an inclusive approach to entry into the industry, which means abandoning the implied requirement for a Bachelors' degree alone and instead looking for people who are qualified in diverse ways. I'm pleased that there is a PR apprenticeship. I think we should place greater value on working experience, both inside and outside of traditional PR. And we should improve access to professional development qualifications for those that wish to pursue them, which means extending those training budgets so that people don't have to rely on self-funding.
Q. What practical steps can public relations practitioners take to ensure wider diversity in recruitment and the make-up of their teams?A. I’d make four points:
Decide that you want to diversify your team (this can take seconds or years).
Take steps to create an inclusive culture with your existing team.
Broaden your recruitment practises, including sourcing, job descriptions and interview panels. Work with people who specialise in this stuff - there are several consultancies out there that support diverse recruitment.
Recruit. Check that you still have an inclusive culture.
Q. Public relations has traditionally been lousy at proving its value. How do you recommend planning and measuring success?
A. I don’t think we are bad at proving value, there are lots of ways to measure value that supports our industry. I just think we need to claim our wins faster and louder - a lot of the time people don't realise PR has been at work.
Q. The recruitment market is tough. How would you recommend graduates from the class of 2020 get hired and get ahead?
A. Start your own business and pitch for work. Seriously. I am in awe of the creativity, drive and insight of Gen Z (or, apparently now Gen Alpha!). Younger people are so important to our industry. You don't need a huge amount of resources to get started, you'll probably make loads of mistakes to begin with, but who cares - you definitely know more about some things than any of us already working here. Work out what that is - the value that you will bring - and pitch it!
Mita Dhullipala
Q. What’s your chapter about and what will I learn?
A. My chapter is all about public affairs and political campaigning in the emergent COVID-19 lockdown landscape. We are truly in a new paradigm for external engagement.
Q. Should education and qualifications be mandatory in public relations, as they are in other professional services such as finance and law?
A. I think our industry needs to be as diverse as possible, great writing and creativity can come from anywhere. Inclusivity will only ever enrich the landscape.
Q. What practical steps can public relations practitioners take to ensure wider diversity in recruitment and the make-up of their teams?
A. Mentorship, encouraging young talent and empowering junior members of the team to embrace diversity.
Q. Public relations has traditionally been lousy at proving its value. How do you recommend planning and measuring success?
A. I think measuring success is going to begin looking radically different going forward, it needs to be much more about overall influence and tangible societal/behavioural change – instead of dogmatically focusing on a set of fixed KPIs.
Q. The recruitment market is tough. How would you recommend graduates from the class of 2020 get hired and get ahead?
A. Knock on every door, ultimately the people you are approaching are humans too. The worst thing that is going to happen is that you’ll get a rejection. Fine! You aren’t going to remember that in a week. Just always ask the question.
Katy Howell
Q. What’s your chapter about and what will I learn?
A. Social is sophisticated. Not just because of the growing number of channels, formats and approaches, but because our audiences demand more. They are looking to brands to be ethical, sustainable, moral; and do a lot more than sell product. You’ll learn how to raise the bar on your social marketing and set the right goals, not vanity metrics; why data is the backbone and why test and learn is your future for innovation. It hard hitting, but it needs to be. We need to do better, much better on social.
Q. Should education and qualifications be mandatory in public relations, as they are in other professional services such as finance and law?
A. Yes. Yes. Yes. Everyone who works in the industry, should have a foundation knowledge in PR. It’s the basics and a must have. More importantly, it means we don’t keep reinventing the wheel because everyone starts with the same level of knowledge. It would stop some of the myths that perpetuate and bring the standard up across the industry.
Q. What practical steps can public relations practitioners take to ensure wider diversity in recruitment and the make-up of their teams?
A. It starts with action. Speeches, policy documents, frameworks etc are all well and good, but tend to be forgotten in the everyday or left gathering dust in the corner some months later. Like any operational change it means integrating process. For instance – no one can make selections or interviews without unconscious bias training. All names, ages, genders to be redacted on any viewed CV. A list of core questions to ask and a way to justify how they are measured. Oh and regular benchmark analysis of the numbers, to document a move to greater diversity.
But that is just the basics. PR businesses need to change fundamentally if they are to be truly diverse. It means considering flexible working and support for new parents. Extra training to support those that didn’t come in through the university route (we have run English classes in the past to bring everyone up to the same level), acceleration programmes for BAME or female workers to bring diversity to the top table. The reality is that to affect true diversity there is a wider root and branch requirement for change. And that means active management from the top down.
Q. Public relations has traditionally been lousy at proving its value. How do you recommend planning and measuring success?
A. It starts with understanding what success looks like to the business or client. Often, we find ourselves guessing what they want to hear. That gives us the opportunity to re-educate too. The truth is that PR is rather like social – the impact is far more than gaining reach. It is a leaker channel that will raise search demand, drive traffic to a website or footfall to a store. I am a lover of attribution modelling across the channels. Looking properly at the way impact is felt across the marketing and comms mix.
Q. The recruitment market is tough. How would you recommend graduates from the class of 2020 get hired and get ahead?
A. We recently recruited. It was eye-opening! In three days we had several hundred responses. But so many candidates never made it past the basic criteria. They didn’t deliver what was asked for (a CV, a cover letter and some basic confirmations of skills) or had skills that were just not relevant (they appeared to be just applying for every job that came along in the off-chance – like spam). It was the ones that created bespoke cover letters, that had at least looked at our website and tailored their message that stood out. And those that went the extra mile and told us something we didn’t know or showcased an aspect of their life (work or otherwise) that made the grade. They wanted to work with us and it showed.
Alicia Solanki
Q. What’s your chapter about and what will I learn?
A. My chapter is all about understanding audiences better. We use the word ‘audiences’ a lot in public relations but I’m not convinced clients and consultants understand the nuances of this word. Too much has happened around the world since the pandemic struck which has made me feel that it has never been more important to understand people beyond their age, sex, gender or geography. In this article, I want to help PR practitioners understand the role culture plays in defining who we are (beyond demographics); how digital crumbs can give us clues on how we might flex our vernacular; and why it’s time to cut wastage with smarter audience segmentation and media selection.
Q. Should education and qualifications be mandatory in public relations, as they are in other professional services such as finance and law?
A. In a general sense, no, I don’t really think so. However, I do wonder if we’re better off thinking about education and qualifications in the context of career progression, not career entry. I say this because I think having qualifications in areas like data science, anthropology or macro economics may actually help the PR industry gain gravitas and enhance its reputation amongst its marketing communications cousins. At the same time, I also think it could help clients buy into our consultancy offer and expertise in the same way they would a law firm or a management consultancy.
Q. What practical steps can public relations practitioners take to ensure wider diversity in recruitment and the make-up of their teams?
A. This is one area where sticking plasters are not allowed. If we want to ensure wider diversity in recruitment, we need to fundamentally rewire our recruitment systems. Bias exists all over the place. We see it in the CVs we get from recruiters…where are the 3 or 4 candidates who got screened out? And on what grounds? I also think we need to start further back in the process. I remember having conversations with my elder cousins about career choices in my teens and as the first to do an arts degree in my extended family, there was huge nervousness. Not because they didn’t think I could build a career here, but you don’t know what you don’t know. And you don’t know what you can’t see. If we get this bit right, we should see an opening up of the talent pool. But it will take time.
Q. Public relations has traditionally been lousy at proving its value. How do you recommend planning and measuring success?
A. This is a massive bugbear for me! We need to curb the need to share vanity metrics and get better at working with the information and tech we can now access to prove our value. At Ketchum, we’ve gotten much sharper at establishing KPI frameworks which work from the campaign objectives set and push against industry benchmarks to align on ambitious goals for our clients. These metrics don’t just align to ‘awareness’ goals; they consider engagement metrics (what people do as a result of seeing something) and how PR can help drive to dotcom with a sharper understanding of how SEO and backlinks work. My advice to anyone in PR is get your results as close to the commercial realities of your clients as possible.
Q. The recruitment market is tough. How would you recommend graduates from the class of 2020 get hired and get ahead?
A. Two of my cousins have graduated with brilliant degrees this year and so I can sympathise with the class of 2020. It is tough out there. However, I would urge graduates to not lose faith. Some of my top tips would include: be tenacious and grow your network, even if it means taking a few knocks; don’t be afraid to take this time to further your learning, just do it in the areas that will make you standout; pick up a side hustle that will differentiate you in the market and get you in front of new people – could you pick up a local PR gig for example by helping a small business?
