Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Review: FuturePRoof: edition 3; The NHS at 70

FuturePRoof, the crowdsourced publishing project founded by Sarah Hall, has shifted its focus to the NHS for its third edition. The NHS turns 70 this year and, noting both the huge affection the public hold for it and the many challenges it faces, it is a good topic for study.

As with previous editions, the contributions are varied and most readers will find a few chapters that will immediately pique their interest. Personally, I moved quickly to chapters focusing on digital communications, technology and data, before moving back through the book to read the sections on trust and brand.

Rachel Royall’s chapter titled “Doing digital” provides an insight into the type of strategic comms that most practitioners are keen to be involved in. Nicola Perrin’s “Why do we need to talk about patient data?” lays out the importance of leading public conversations about the use of data. Taking recent data scandals into account, it is a timely call for better understanding and greater transparency of how personal data is used.

Regardless of the sections you read, what is immediately obvious is that the challenges faced by the NHS are faced by almost all organisations. For example, the chapter on doing more with less will be familiar to everyone, whether in house or consultant, indeed whether in PR or not. More for less programmes seem to be a permanent feature at all organisations these days.

There is a wealth of knowledge in these pages that applies much more widely than within the NHS or even healthcare. Those in totally unrelated industries will learn much from both the broad, strategic chapters and the more detailed practical ones.

FuturePRoof: edition 3 is out today. You can learn more about the book and purchase it at futureproofingcomms.co.uk.

How to apply a narrative arc

Within public relations it is taken as given that we are good storytellers.

Most PRs will have developed their craft by writing stories for journalists. These stories have a fairly standardised structure. They come in the form of a press release, with a headline, a lead paragraph, then more detail and some supporting quotes, and finally there’ll be some boilerplate.

Structure is often likened to a pyramid; the further down the page you go, the more information you get. It is designed to grab attention and, once that’s been achieved, it throws in additional information. It is a sensible and solid format.

But does this format work for a tweet? Or a video? Or a GIF?

The short answer is, “No.”

So if the pyramid doesn’t work, what does?

Enter narrative arcs

This is where thinking about a narrative arc helps. A technique that I was first introduced to by TV writers, it is a device they use to think about changes in their stories. We all know the classic story of the underdog who succeeds. Here the narrative arc starts low and ends high. In a tragedy, the play Macbeth for example, the arc starts on a high and ends very low indeed. Arcs can go up and down. They don’t have to start at one point and end at an opposite.

They are useful because they help writers think about the audience. Do we need to make them feel sad or happy? And if we want them to feel really happy, perhaps we need them to feel sad first so the shift in emotion is more dramatic?

Practical application

If you’re writing copy the purpose of which is to sell, you might want to build up to a high so your call to action is powerful. If you’re trying to pull together a quick six second animation, you might want to start on an eye-catching high so it grabs attention straightaway.

The trick is to recognise two things, one is that stories need to move down as well as up. You can’t keep an audience consistently in a good mood or it gets boring. The second is that you need to identify the sources of tension in your story. What’s the key the bit of information that causes change?

For PRs, this way of thinking about copy is useful because it offers flexibility and it lets us draw upon the experience of master storytellers from film, TV and other creative sectors. Above all though, it helps us focus on how the reader or viewer feels, and ultimately if we can make them feel strongly enough we might even elicit action.

How to deliver your Purpose: a practical framework

Businesses of all sizes have latched onto the idea of having a Purpose. The concept of working towards something that takes you beyond profits to a wider benefit for society fits nicely with current trends among the chattering classes and, if we’re honest, nicely feeds executives’ egos.

There is no shortage of advice about why you should have a Purpose. However, there is also no shortage of critics waiting in the wings to decry your efforts if you fall short. Conscious of this, I’ve been working on a framework that helps plan chart a path from Purpose to practical day-to-day activities.

POST

This framework is simple. Its success, however, depends on the clarity with which you define each phase of it.

Purpose
Objective
Strategy
Tactics

Based on the OST framework popularised by Alastair Campbell. POST places Purpose at the start. It assumes that Purpose is defined for an organisation by those who run it. This framework falls apart if different departments and teams are working towards different ends.

We then step down to your team’s Objective. This tends to be something agreed with or approved by senior executives. Your Objective should align with your Purpose, but it should not be abstract; it must be practical.

Then we move down to Strategy. Now, here it gets tricky. At this point in planning, particularly in large organisations, it’s not uncommon to find multiple strategies within teams. It’s a recipe for disaster. A team should have a single Strategy. For comms teams, that means a single communications strategy. You don’t need different strategies for media relations, digital, etc. Where this happens, it’s normally a sign of silos or teams not really understanding their Objective. The only caveat to this is internal communications which can make a pretty strong case for having its own strategy, probably one that aligns closely with HR’s.

Now we get to Tactics. This really should be the easy bit. What are you going to do? It needs to deliver your Strategy, which delivers your Objective, all of which needs to be aligned with your Purpose.

The key to successful delivery is getting this framework, or similar thinking, widely adopted within your organisation. If there isn’t a clear, simple way to link what you do everyday to your organisation’s Purpose, you will never deliver it.

Meme of mindfulness

Ten words or fewer,
Frictionless formats,
For unengaged brains.

Attributed to ancient mystics,
Scriptwriters’ creations,
And TED talk orations.

Designed to make you pause,
Admire the sharers’ virtue,
Signaling the fathoms of their minds,

As deep as the children’s end of the pool,
No. As a puddle, a droplet, a globule,
But nothing approaching a tear.

Mindless mindfulness,
Churned out daily,
Curdling the intellectual pantheon,

These 10 words will never be uttered:
My life changed course,
All thanks to a mindfulness meme.

Initial observations from three weeks of living with Alexa

It seemed that last year was the year of the voice assistant. The marketing was everywhere, the discounting was heavy and early adopters were talking about them at every opportunity.

Like many households, we received an Alexa for Christmas. These are my observations of note from our first few weeks with her.

Losing the phone

Until Alexa arrived in our home, in order to listen to music a phone needed to be present. This is no longer the case. It makes little difference in terms of the process of playing music, but when you don’t need your phone on hand to control the music, you slip into using it less as you sit there. I’ve noticed that I use my phone a little less at home. That’s probably a good thing.

Parental controls

Losing the phone has also meant the children don’t need our phones to play music. Our kids are quite young and we’d like to filter out some of the stronger swearing in some songs. It turns out neither Alexa nor Spotify let you do this.

This raises a question: do we switch to Apple Music, which does have parental filters? At the moment, we’ve decided against the move, instead taking the view that swearing happens everywhere and that it’s our responsibility to monitor our children’s use of Alexa. We might rapidly change our minds though. It’s only been a few weeks. This is not a settled position.

Mood music

How do you choose what music to listen to? I tend to ask for specific albums or artists. Occasionally, I ask for a playlist I know. My son, however, just says “Alexa, play bmx music please.” Music then begins. Is this how people generally choose music? To me, at least, this is a new and interesting option. It goes beyond the compilation to something more random.

Fragmented media

Another thing I’ve noticed is how fragmented media is. The kids want to hear the songs from Horrible Histories as much as they do pop songs. Alexa has real trouble sourcing songs from the former much to the annoyance of the children.

Manners

Lots of parents I’ve spoken to have concerns about children demanding things from Alexa and whether that’s a good thing. More by luck than skill, we’ve got our kids saying “please” to Alexa (a mumbled request by me was not heard by Alexa, the kids are now convinced it’s because I didn’t say please, they believe you have to say please for it to work).

Is there any point in saying please to a machine that will never say no? Is it just nice manners disguising the development of a habit of making random demands and expecting then to be fulfilled immediately? Am I overthinking it all? I don’t know.

Volume

Alexa had a volume range of 1 – 10. We rarely need to go above level three. So, really we have a range from 1 – 3. It’s not a decent level of control. I’m not harking back to the infinite control of analogue dials, but give me more than three choices please.

What the future holds

A lot of uses for Alexa seem pointless (whale facts, fart noises, knock knock jokes). However, there are some that I think have potential.

I’ve discovered that in the US, owners of a WiFi enabled Roomba (a robot vacuum cleaner) can ask Alexa to clean their home and the Roomba duly obliges. This is the type of smart home integration, which goes beyond switching off lights, that is genuinely useful. But it’s mainly useful because a robot vacuum saves a task. Alexa only adds small amount of convenience on top.

Routines, where a series of tasks are bundled into a single command could make a real difference. With the right purchases, and a bit of time setting it all up, it’s possible for Alexa to wake you up with a news bulletin and turn on your coffee machine. The bundling of several small tasks into a single command is useful and materially time saving.