A post in which I try to write in defence of the Audit Commission

I used to work for the worst performing council in the country. You understand that I went to work for it after it had received this dubious honour and along with a few hundred other colleagues helped to turn it into one of the best performing councils in the country. That’s right a few hundred for this was a teeny tiny district council.

North Shropshire District Council (for such it was) was inspected by the Audit Commission in 2004 under a process called the Comprehensive Performance Assessment which looked at how well run the Council was. They concluded that it was Poor with little prospect of improving.

Now, as you know, I am a remarkably skilled and talented writer but even so I would struggle to express the massive blow to the morale of the organisation as a whole and the staff and councillors individually that this report generated. To be labelled as failing by a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who had probably never worked in a real-live customer-facing environment made people really angry and then really sad and then really fatalistic. And it triggered an incredibly traumatic set of events that seemed to go on and on. The Council was placed into a process called engagement which meant that it was directly supervised by the government. The secretary of state had the power to tell the Council what to do. When you have that power, of course, you don’t need to use it. There was massive churn within the management of the organisation bright young things (like myself) were recruited and through all this the members of staff (who had not been criticised in the report at all) had to carry on delivering services. Everything in the way the organisation was managed and governed changed. And 1301 days later the self same Audit Commission concluded that we were Good, really good (though frustratingly short of Excellent).

So you might think that I’d be joining the Danse Macabre around the deathbed of the Commission. But I am not.

I recognise that the inspection regime has been getting in the way for most local authorities. And I recognise Michael Douglas’ description of the AC as being “staffed by very bright, and very capable people, in an almost academic atmosphere.  But self-awareness was short in supply.” And I have said some harsh things about Commission employees myself in my time. I recognise the argument that the sector should police and support itself and that it is troubling when the will of democratically elected councillors is challenged by unelected state employees.

And yet. I don’t know what is going to happen to really poorly run local authorities in the future. Councils are special and different. They can take money from you whether you want to give it to them or not. We trust them to look after the vulnerable and the homeless, to protect us from poisoning, pestilence and plague and to keep our towns and villages moving.

I’m not arguing that we should keep the Commission and, in any case, the ship has sailed on that. I am arguing that there is a need for special scrutiny of local government. The Leaders and Chief Execs of the many, many really well-run councils may gripe and complain but behind them lurks the spectre of corporate failure and they should accept some chafing to make sure they no-one gets left behind.

Lobbying ban is populist nonsense

Eric Pickles is turning out to be excellent value. He’s just banned local authorities from hiring lobbyists (we PR people call them public affairs consultants). Which sounds perfectly fine for about 10 seconds. After all as he says in the press release announcing this new measure:

“Councillors can campaign for change at a personal or party political level, rather than throwing away other people’s council tax on the corrosive and wasteful practice of government lobbying government.”

Well up to a point Lord Copper.

Local government frequently finds itself trying to influence the decisions of ministers. Maybe the leader of every English council really can pick up the phone and have a quick chat with Eric Pickles, or Vince Cable, or Grant Shapps. Maybe they’ll all take that call. Or maybe they won’t. I’m guessing they won’t.

And of course there is a club for local authorities: the Local Government Association so maybe councils should direct their resources in that direction? And of course they should, and do, but the LGA talks for all councils and not all parts of England are the same.

To pluck an example from the ether. I live in Shropshire. It’s very rural. Access to broadband here is a massively important issue in terms of public service delivery, independent living and economic development. It is a different issue here than it is in, say, the West Midlands conurbation.  The LGA may not prioritise broadband and why shouldn’t Shropshire Council be able to influence the decisions of ministers and regulators in the interests of the communities it serves?

Ah yes I hear you say, but do they need to engage lobbyists? Government lobbying government as Eric says.

I guess all I can say is if lobbying is so bad then the Government should ban lobbying. To deny local authorities the right to access professional support which is freely available to, oh I don’t know BT and BP, is bizarre. It is ill thought out, stupid, and, like I say, populist nonsense.

Where facebook should sit in your emergency plan

There are people sitting in offices near you right now imagining all the worst things that could befall you and your neighbours. They don’t want bad things to happen to you, rather the opposite. On the other hand they recognise that bad things do sometimes happen to good people and they would like to minimise how bad they get. They are called emergency planners, they work in the emergency services, local authorities and some other public bodies and this post is addressed largely to them. You might want to come a long for the ride.

Planning for emergencies

So the job of an emergency planner is to plan for an emergency which is (in case you were wondering) any of these:

• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom
• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom
• war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom

(from the Civil Contingencies Act 2004)

And they will have a series of plans covering situations like flooding, widespread power failure or pandemic influenza. The broad framework of these plans is usually pretty simple (complexity is pretty-much to be avoided when it all goes pear-shaped). There will be a trigger to activate the plan, a standby phase, an activation phase and a recovery phase. Much of the plan will identify what people and resources are needed for each phase, where they normally are and where they should be during this phase. There will be mention in the plan of how to communicate with the general public. I’d like to suggest that emergency plans could keep up more effectively with where modern communications are going.

Triggers

Information is needed to trigger a plan. Sometimes this information is reliable and from an extremely reputable source. If the Environment Agency say that the River Severn has broken its banks, you probably don’t need independent verification. If the police receive a phone call saying there’s being a massive explosion then they are probably going get some more information before triggering a mass evacuation.

Could social media play a role in triggering an emergency response? If there is a massive explosion in a town centre you can bet that within minutes pictures will be whirling around the twitterverse. This should carry at least as much weight as someone dialling 999. Should 999-responders and local authorities be monitoring social media sites for emergency triggers? I’m inclined to think they should and, short of that, they should certainly monitor this space for additional information once they’ve received a trigger.

Standby

Good organisations go to standby an awful lot. It’s good practice for one thing. If in doubt go to standby because you can always stand down in half an hour.They don’t usually make a big song and dance because they don’t want to worry anyone. The emergency plan will have a check-list of things to be done on standby. Wake up the chief executive, open the emergency control centre, contact a series of staff and ask them to get ready to stop whatever they are doing and do this instead.

I think that the checklist should include the following items:

• designate a #tag for this incident
• announce on appropriate social media platforms that the organisation is aware of the incident and is standing by, ask people to use the designated #tag
• listen out on social media for information about the incident and respond to questions and concerns in real time
• collate all social media feeds in the opps centre

Activation

At this point, something quite bad will have happened and the public bodies (Cat 1 Responders as they call themselves) will be working hard to try to make sure it doesn’t get worse. If it is going to get worse, they will be trying to minimise the impact on people and the environment.

Once the emergency plan kicks in, it will no doubt include an item triggering an emergency communications plan. Emergency Planners, in my experience, like to see their in-house comms staff as a nice safe buffer between the people managing the emergency and the media. I’m not sure this was ever a sensible way to behave but I’m convinced that in the 2st century it is unsustainable.

Social media has several roles to play

• it can be a very useful way of getting information out in a timely fashion
  People who use social media really use it. That’s where they are, if you want to tell them to stay in doors and close the windows you have to do it there. Not to the exclusion of other media of course but as part of the mix.
• it will still have an important role to play in getting reports in about the emergency
  Rumour, odd reports, speculation all fly around emergencies. Emergency planning training in the UK focuses pretty heavily on ways to process this data and turn it in to useful intelligence upon which some decisions can be made. Social media adds to the volume of that mix but also to its richness with audio, video and photographs all available in an easily accessible form.
• it can be used to mobilise resources not simply the “We need 4×4s and drivers” but also “please check on your neighbours”
  Barrack Obama used facebook to get his supporters to get out his vote. We could do the same. If we needed to.
• it can also provide data and even information that is not easily available any other way
  There is something beautiful about the uksnow map.  This examines twitter for the #tag #uksnow and then extracts simple information to map the movement of snow across the UK. It’s a proof of concept you would probably not use it to plan a military operation. You could set up a map of your county ready to pull information out of the twitterverse. You could display reports of road closures due to surface water flooding (data that is very hard to get in any other way). People could spoof the system but would they? And in reverse you could use the same system to map information only from your own twitter feed. So if you open rest centres they could be automatically mapped for everyone to see.

Recovery Phase

This is the phase of most interest to local authorities who, in the way of these things, have the responsibility for looking after people and cleaning up. That can take a long time, I mean years. Emergency plans already cover issues such as how to provide practical and emotional support to large numbers of people affected by a serious emergency.

It is already common for facebook groups to spring up after emergencies to rally support for public appeals or (in the case of Raoul Moat) for less pleasant reasons. The emergency plan should anticipate this and indicate how the organisations involved should begin to respond. This is not about publishing the location of the Humanitarian Assistance Centre on your council facebook page (though clearly you should do that) it is about using the technology to understand people’s wants and needs.

And finally

Emergency Plans are plans for organisations that help them to manage their response. The wider public will be doing all sorts of things while this is going on and they will be doing it, increasingly, on social media platforms. The flow of comment and opinion and information there can’t be controlled by anyone. Public bodies can make sure that their accounts are authoritative and trusted but that can’t be done on the fly. If you want your facebook account to be trusted in an emergency that happens in 18 months time you need to start building that trust right now.

Social media opens up organisations, they become more porous, information slips out and moves around speedily. Lots of people get involved in managing emergencies and all of them will have mobile phones and (on current figures) half of them will have social media accounts. You cannot stop this back-channel and it’s not sustainable to ignore it. Emergencies will have to be managed much more transparently than we are used to.

I know that proper emergency planners are shaking their heads silently. They worry a lot about the resilience of communications (they like pen and paper, land-line and satellite telephones and big generators). Social media is remarkably susceptible to failure. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the plan but it does mean we should not rely on it. But actually that’s the case for all media.

Photo used under a Creative Commons Licence the original is here

Do the right thing

PR people should be the moral heart of their organisations.

Now I know that placing the word moral in the same sentence as PR is likely to generate, well, at least some cynicism. It may sound rather wide-eyed and idealistic. Not many people call me wide-eyed and idealistic. Not if they’ve met me. My submission is that it is both pragmatic and prudent.

Let’s take, oh just at random, the hypothetical example of a global oil giant losing an oil-rig, killing several employees and pumping loads of unpleasant thick black oil into a small and beautiful sea. I know it seems unlikely but bear with me. What’s the role of the PR team in all this? Damage control? Mopping up the fall out as fishermen go around mopping up the oil slick? Making sure the company gets its side of the story out there? This is the “in case of emergency break glass” model of public relations. It’s not right and it’s not sensible.

PR Practitioners are often culpable in maintaining this model. We all like to think that we’re important, the go-to guy in the crisis, the safe pair of hands. Who am I to criticise? I’m an Associate Member of the Emergency Planning Society.

And actually, within the profession (PR that is not emergency planning), we know how to handle crisis comms. It’s pretty simple. React swiftly, do everything you need to do to make people safe and to put right what went wrong, say sorry, and listen with respect to and act upon the criticisms of your organisation.

In short: do the right thing.

I’ve got to float the idea that do the right thing might actually be a sensible way to run an organisation. It seems mad but possibly, just possibly, it might be possible to run an organisation that listens to others, that does everything it can to make people safe and not to screw up the planet and that reacts to problems swiftly.

Now there are lots of reasons that drive organisations to do the wrong thing. What they really need is someone trusted at the heart of the organisation to stop them.

Now I’m not arguing that this role is the exclusive preserve of the shiny-suited ones. Clearly the more people who behave in an moral way within organisations the better.

PR people have less excuse than others though. They are trained to be objective and detached from the groupthink. They are trained to see the organisation as others see it. They have (or should have) the interpersonal and communication skills to help others understand why some decisions are just plain wrong.

So there you are, PR people the moral guardians. That’s either an exciting vision of the future or a sad indictment on where we are as a society.

Krazy kippers batman it’s a facebook emergency!

In my quiet moments lately I have been musing about how the changes in online communication alter things for emergency planners. Others, I admit, play tennis or watch the footy to relax. Each to their own I say.

First, let’s establish what I think is happening in online communications. Broadly, I think that communication has flattened and speeded up. The barriers to publishing finally went when decent blogging platforms were developed. The barriers to distribution have also crumbled with the widespread use of social media tools. Only a few years ago, emergency planners scared each other with stories about how quickly Sky could get a film crew on site. Now anyone with a phone can beam live images, audio, video, commentary, whatever you want around the globe before the incident officer has been woken from their gentle slumber.

There is some good news. Social media platforms are being used, right now, to disseminate information that the general public needs to know about emergencies. Visit the website of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command and you’ll see facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, del.icio.us, digg, rss and even e-mail icons ranged in serried ranks. With 1/3 -1/2 of the UK population on facebook it would be madness not to try to give them important messages via that platform. You can’t invent this stuff on the fly. Or rather, of course, you can but you don’t need to and you shouldn’t. It would be more effective to gather followers and likers in advance of an event. This will help to establish authenticity and have a whole army of distributors of your message. This is important. It is a strange and lawless world out there my friend. Some people seem to have taken bpglobalpr at face value. Well BP encouraged them to be explicit about the fact that it is a visceral, angry and penetrating satire.

This subject was explored a bit at localgovcampy&h (in a session I helped out with). There are a few (a very few) examples of local authorities using twitter effectively to communicate school closures (for example). The best examples (such as Newcastle City Council) already had an established and popular twitter feed. People use social media differently too. They talk to it. Not like people shout at John Humphreys on the radio but actually interact with it. Your carefully crafted public message will be challenged, added to, and argued with. Do you need to respond? Yes, yes you do.

We could go further. You could have a map ready to read your twitter stream and map whatever you push into the world. I can see this being really useful for a rising tide incident (literally or metaphorically) closing roads all over the place. That would be of interest to your partner agencies and the public and, well, all of us.

We could go further. You could have a map that reads twitter generally and maps reports with a specific hashtag. You could use that to map flood reports. People could game the map but probably most people wouldn’t and you could keep an eye on that. Imagine that, moderate quality information and no-one needs to answer the phone.

In any case monitoring social media seems to be a must, not just for lonely journalists and PR merchants but for anyone with a professional interest in knowing what’s kicking off.

In a future post I’ll look at the sort of things that I’d like to see put into an emergency plan with regards to online tools. If that would interest your good selves.

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