The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their 27 Club from the Curse of the Ninth.
This week we ask, in our Engagement Hub, about the topic of reputation management. In light of a blog which blames a defensive culture among some public organisations on the practice of reputation management, we ask what community engagement can learn from its successes and failures.
And of course, there is the hall of fame and shame that is Charlie‘s Attic – this week including a video about the birth of Ceefax.
One of the most interesting things we read last week was this long read by comms expert Dan Slee, about the potential harm caused by ‘reputation management’. This discipline was conceived, Slee writes, as a way to avoid getting unfairly dragged through the mud in an increasingly fast-paced media environment. But he argues that it now often stops organisations from being able to learn from mistakes.
In particular, Slee picks out key passages from Reading the Signals, a recent report into failings at an NHS Trust by Dr Bill Kirkup CBE. “The default response of almost every organisation subject to public scrutiny or criticism is to think first of managing its reputation,” the report says. “The balance of incentives for organisations needs to be changed. The need for openness, honesty, disclosure and learning must outweigh any perceived benefit of denial, deflection and concealment.”
The implications of this for engagement are clear. In our LGA guide on this topic, New Conversations, we argued that engagement must be the bridge between consultation and communication; between the listening and speaking functions. If organisations are not seeking to genuinely understand residents then they are not seeking to genuinely communicate. Risk aversion and the perennial holding of a comms ‘line’ ultimately damage the resident relationship.
The flip-side of this is that local councils, health organisations, government agencies, charities and just about every other large organisation are working in a climate of unprecedented reputational risk. This has been increasingly true since the early 1990s – when, according to Slee, reputation management became commonplace – and its trajectory has been exponential. From the rise of 24 hour news to the ascent of Twitter, there are now many more reputational pitfalls. Any council or NHS Trust which owns up to a mistake, fears that it will become a byword for failure for decades to come.
The downside of this for public institutions is that reputation management brings diminishing returns. Large sections of the public now distrust organisations not because they are unfit for purpose but because they appear slick, bland and unresponsive. Politics is a good example. New Labour’s much-maligned ‘spin’ sought to adapt to a goldfish-bowl politics where a careless word could lose you an election. But the perception of inauthenticity is now one of the biggest reasons why so many people don’t trust politicians.
Perhaps the way out of the reputation management cul-se-sac is two-fold: a listening culture within public institutions, but an understanding or even a forgiving culture within the public discourse.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the tarnished brand whose reputation goes before it:
Give yourself food for thought with this interesting chart on asylum seeker applications in the UK and across Europe.
Enjoy the singing sea shanty family’s sequel “Suella Braverman’s Back” following their recent viral hit “Suella Braverman’s Gone”. What are the odds that this will be a trilogy before Christmas?
Hear what Matt Hancock’s constituents think about him going onto ‘I’m a Celebrity’. And what the internet at large had to say about it!
