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From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Recently, I was asked to describe the purpose of a communication toolkit and thought it would be helpful to provide some details on what they are and how people use them.
The communication toolkit typically includes ready-made materials or template materials that can be customized by others to aid them in achieving a particular goal. The goal might be education, crisis communication, providing talking points to partners or helping employees be better brand ambassadors.
Consider the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) creation of a COVID-19 Vaccination Communication Toolkit. In this case, the CDC has created materials that can be used by healthcare teams to build confidence about COVID-19 vaccinations. These materials are for medical centers, clinics and clinicians, but are also accessible to the general public on the CDC website.
When we inspect their toolkit, we find an impressive array of materials, including:
- Tips on Getting Started. An introduction to six strategies that healthcare professionals can use to build vaccine confidence within the health system or clinic, along with companion tools such as a communication readiness checklist and tips on how to start the conversation. The six strategies include:
- Encouraging senior leaders to be vaccine champions.
- Hosting discussions where personnel can ask questions.
- Sharing key messages with staff through emails, breakroom posters, and other channels.
- Educating teams about the vaccines and how they were developed.
- Educating non-medical staff about the importance of getting vaccinated. And,
- Making the decision to get vaccinated visible, and celebrating it.
- Fact sheets and FAQs. These downloadable materials help educate healthcare teams and other staff working in your facilities to help them communicate effectively and accurately.
- Posters. These can be downloaded, printed and hung in breakrooms and other places to foster discussions and remind people about the importance of vaccinations.
- Stickers. The CDC has created printable stickers for staff to wear to show they’ve gotten their vaccine.
- Presentation Slides. There are three prepared slide decks with associated scripts that people can use for educational purposes. They’re titled:
- “Building Vaccine Confidence in Health Systems and Clinics: Tips for Immunization/Vaccine Coordinators,”
- “COVID-19 Vaccine Basics: What Healthcare Personnel Need to Know,” and
- “Building Confidence in COVID-19 Vaccines Among Your Patients: Tips for the Healthcare Team.”
- Social Media. The toolkit includes sample messages for use on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
- Video. There is also a CDC video, “How CDC is Making COVID-19 Vaccine Recommendations.”
Another reason to use a communication toolkit is when a company has third parties that need to communicate on their behalf and they want to arm them with accurate information. For instance, many years ago I worked on a campaign for MasterCard in which we developed a toolkit for banks that were issuing MasterCard credit and debit cards and needed to know how they differed from other payment solutions.
In other instances, a company may want its employees to be able to communicate effectively on a topic. If the organization is large, the company may want to create a toolkit that employees can use in their communications, especially if the organization has a small marketing or communications staff and is looking for its employees to be ambassadors on a particular topic.
Over the years, we have provided a wide range of toolkits to help organizations and their partners and stakeholders communicate more effectively and efficiently. If you’re interested in how we can help you develop these materials or understand how they might be employed to help you educate key audiences, build thought leadership, or simply get the word out about a particular issue or event, please reach out.
Passive voice is a sentence construction in the English language that people can use without thinking but is also a tool that writers can use maliciously. Listed among George Orwell’s “swindles and perversions” of writing, it’s important to recognize when you use passive voice and consider if it’s the best choice for your sentence.
What Is Passive Voice?
English sentences usually follow a pattern, subject–verb–object, reflected in “Lauren ate the cookies.” Passive voice follows a different pattern, object–verb–subject, resulting in a sentence like “The cookies were eaten by Lauren.” This grammatical construction also allows for the subject, the one doing the action, to be dropped from the author’s sentence completely, becoming “The cookies were eaten.”
In English, the first words of a sentence carry more weight. In a passive construction, this means there’s more emphasis on the object of the sentence and a de-emphasis of the subject doing the action. The difference between the active and the passive sentences is stark, as the passive voice obscures or removes the connection between me, the subject, and my actions, eating the cookies.
One way to identify if a sentence uses passive voice is to look for forms of “to be” followed by a past participle. This can be “was used,” “is given,” “have been chosen,” “being named,” or many other similar combinations.
Please note that not every sentence that contains a form of “have” or “be” is passive; the sentences “Jennifer has a dog,” or “Colleen is an American,” are both active constructions. Additionally, there are grammatically active constructions that avoid using the subject in the sentence. For example, compared to “Lauren burnt the cookies,” “The cookies burned” uses an active voice while evading pointing to who caused this to happen.
What Issues Can Passive Voice Cause?
Back in May, the New York Times tweeted about an article they published covering the protests with these three sentences:
The internet erupted upon noticing that the protesters’ actions were described with an active voice while the police’s actions were passive. The tweet seems to avoid placing the onus of the journalists’ injuries on the police in the first and third sentences while placing the protesters in an active role in the second sentence.
Upon reading the article linked in the tweet, the sentences seem to be pulled directly from the article. The tweet was likely not intentionally disconnecting police from the violence they caused but highlights the importance of critically considering the use of passive voice.
However, I would recommend you don’t write off all uses of the passive voice as mistakes or unconscious choices. The ability to hide or even remove mention of the subject of a sentence is a powerful tool.
For example, “Management furloughed more women than men,” recognizes management as responsible for their decision. “More women were furloughed than men,” seemingly absolves individuals in management of their accountability, puts the focus on who the action is being done to and, especially in this case, makes the problem seem nebulous and unapproachable.
Active voice offers the subject the agency and responsibility for their actions. It’s often more truthful, better describes cause-and-effect situations and demonstrates a better understanding of the context.
When Can I Use Passive Voice?
There are still perfectly good times to use passive voice:
- When the action is done by an unknown subject (“The toys were donated.”)
- When the subject cannot or should not be disclosed (“The cookies and milk were consumed.”)
- When the focus is on the object of the sentence (“The package was delivered.”)
In this blog I used passive voice in a non-problematic way: “… the protesters’ actions were described with an active voice…” I used passive voice because I didn’t know who crafted that tweet and didn’t want to pretend that I did.
To improve your writing and your critical media consumption skills, learn to recognize and consider the use of passive voice. Be aware of the issues that passive voice can cause. When you’re writing, ask yourself why you’re using this style and if passive voice is interfering with your sentence’s ability to be clear and truthful. When in doubt, rewrite your sentence so no one must ask, “Who did this?”
We’re excited to share results from our work with one of our newest clients, ABC Legal Services. ABC Legal is the nation’s leading provider of process and court filing services and is the official process server to the U.S. Department of Justice. The company also owns Docketly, an appearance counsel provider that has created an efficient, cloud-based platform to connect attorneys and high-volume law firms.
Like many businesses in 2020, ABC Legal had to pivot operations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the company halted its process serving and partnered with its employees to assemble thousands of protective equipment kits that were distributed to its team nationwide. These kits helped the company resume process serving options safely and provide individuals with the legal services they need.
Prior to COVID, the legal industry has been historically resistant to adopt emerging technologies and change its traditional processes. ABC Legal has helped educate the industry and increase the availability of tools that allow everyone to have “their day in court.” As courts modernize and regulations evolve, ABC Legal continues to advance its technology and business processes to provide faster, easier and more reliable solutions to legal professionals and legal support to those who need it.
Since February, ABC Legal has created nearly 500 new roles to support the resurgence of the economy during the pandemic, and to continue increasing the availability of legal services. This impressive growth is a result of the company’s agility as a cloud-based solution and through its established use of legal technology and proprietary AI.
We kicked off our engagement with the company in July to begin its public relations program and create a media presence. In the last several months, we’ve focused on executive announcements and proactive media outreach to raise awareness of the company within the legal industry.
Below is a snapshot of some of the coverage we’ve secured on behalf of ABC Legal thus far.
- LexBlog: CCPA to CPRA – A Landmark Achievement For Consumer Privacy – 12/2/20
- The Bar Council’s e-newsletter, BarTalk: Q&A: How the pandemic has made law tech a priority – 11/26/20
- The FinTech Times: Technological Innovation in Law: The Recent Trends in Legal Firm Adoption – 11/25/20
- Legal Reader: Evolving Impacts of Technology in the Legal System – 11/16/20
- Legal Management Extras: Weighing in on Covid-19 Liability Waivers – 11/03/20
- Legal Reader: Webinar Q&A with Sascha Mehlhase, VP of Products at ABC Legal, Brandon Fuller, Founder of Docketly and CTO of ABC Legal, as well as ABC Legal’s own Radley Angelo, Head of Customer Success – 10/23/20
- JURIST: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Seasoned Qualified Mortgage Proposal and GSE Patch – 10/22/20
- Law.com – Texas Lawyer: Social Media for Due Process – 10/12/20
- ABA’s Law Technology Today: Making the Most of the Gig Economy – 9/24/20
- GeekWire: Tech Moves: Lighter Capital names new CEO; Amazon exec joins Uber as CTO; and more – 9/21/20
- Legal Reader: Bringing the Gig Economy to Legal Practices – 9/17/20
- Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce: ABC Legal, Brandon Fuller – 9/16/20
- ALA’s Legal Management: 6 Ways that Law Firms Can Keep Remote Employees Engaged – 9/8/20
- IT Business CA: More Lawyers are Embracing the Gig Economy While Working Remotely, Experts Say – 9/2/20
- JURIST: The Intersection of Legal Tech Advancements and the Gig Economy: An Interview with Sascha Mehlhase – 8/28/20
We’re excited to continue working with the team and help increase awareness of the innovation they are driving to provide more individuals with access to the justice system.
The social and emotional impact is not insignificant.
Our team has been working remotely since March 4. We are fortunate that we all transitioned to working from home without much disruption. Our IT infrastructure was already cloud-based, making the functional aspects of the transition seamless. And we have a highly functional team, made up of individuals who take pride in their work. They have proven their ability to maintain productivity and quality while working from remote locations.
However, as many teams have discovered during the past year, the more challenging aspects of working remotely have been the social and emotional isolation. The inadvertent connections, conversations and sharing of information (personal and professional) that happen naturally in the office, are harder to orchestrate when everyone is dispersed.
Here are a few of the things we’ve done to help navigate these remote pandemic times:
- Morning Stand-up Meetings: Each morning we connect as a team via MS Teams. Pre-COVID, this was a 15-minute quick-to-the-point meeting. Each person would share his or her projects and deadlines for the day. Sometimes we would use extra time to brainstorm or discuss a particular challenge or campaign. Since working remotely, this meeting has evolved. While we all still talk through our project lists, we have extended the meeting and use the morning call to chat and catch up regarding topics beyond work. Discussion topics range from sharing weekend plans, TV/movie recommendations, current news/events, recipes, gift ideas, hiking suggestions, day-trip ideas, and much more. The meeting has helped fill a need to connect with each other.
- Happy Hours: At the start of the pandemic there was a wave of Zoom Happy Hours. But after a day filled with Zoom calls, I was not compelled to jump on another video call, even if I had cocktail in hand. Yet I missed those “down time” gatherings with my colleagues. We tried unstructured happy hour Zoom calls with varying success. Then we learned about playing Codenames online. As a competitive, close-knit group, this was a great find. Our happy-hour gatherings took on new energy. We rotate the code spymaster and change up the teams from call to call. We conduct on average one Codenames/Happy Hour per month.
- Holiday Challenges: We created a Spooktacular Halloween Challenge after learning about a Halloween Bingo game one of our clients created for its team. Lauren created a challenge list of activities. We would send in/share photos as we accomplished the task or activity. Each task had a point value. At the end of the challenge, Lauren tallied up the points. The winners – Megan, Christie and AnnMarie received prizes (e.g., Fran’s Halloween Gift Basket, Glassy Baby, etc.) shipped to their homes – and bragging rights! The shared photos generated lots of discussion and engagement across the team – and helped us all get in the Halloween/Fall spirit. The Holiday-themed Challenge is underway now!
Below are a few additional tips for creating social connection and mitigating some of the challenges of remote working:
- Be gentle and patient with yourself and others. It is a time of increased anxiety and tension for most of us.
- Take time to step away. Give yourself permission to take a walk or get a break. It is particularly challenging to maintain work/life balance when we are all working from home and our work is always present.
- As we are not visible to our colleagues, it can be helpful to communicate more often than we might if we were all in the space place.
What are some of the ways you are maintaining engagement with your colleagues?
We have written often in this blog about the value of earned media, but I’d like to dig a little deeper into how it can help better build your brand. How can you reinforce positive perceptions of a company, support media pitching efforts, and ultimately strengthen the value of media placements? Social media might be the answer, albeit not a quick fix. With time and consistency, effective use of social media in three ways can bolster your brand credibility and land you even more impactful media coverage.
First, according to Muck Rack’s most recent State of Journalism Study, more than half (59%) of journalists say they “usually” or “always” consult branded social media profiles when reporting on an organization, and 29% will “sometimes” check these profiles. Twitter remains the leading social media network among journalists at 85%, with LinkedIn being the platform they plan to spend the most time on after Twitter in the coming year. Therefore, an investment in content marketing and expanding your company’s social media presence may not only improve your ability to reach customers, partners and other stakeholders, it also could pay dividends in your pursuit of earned media.
Next, as PR professionals, we know the importance of relationship-building in the media-pitching process. However, interacting with journalists and media outlets on social media can also extend your reach. Social media is an ideal vehicle for nurturing authentic and mutually beneficial connections with media covering your industry. Following, sharing and commenting on a journalist’s content on Twitter and LinkedIn in an altruistic way could make yours a name they recognize in their crowded email inbox and thus make them more likely to open and consider your pitch.
Finally, the easiest tip to deploy: Utilizing some simple social media tools in your daily work can go a long way to expanding your visibility. By incorporating social sharing links and buttons in press releases and on blog posts you give your followers a quick and easy way to share your news with an audience you might otherwise never touch. Using hashtags is another way to spread your message and monitor your reach and success.
So, as you lay out your strategies for 2021, remember to include the many facets of social media in your media relations plan to grow your brand credibility, reinforce your pitching efforts and position your company as a thought leader.
Key messages are the bread and butter of public relations. They offer anyone representing a brand a collection of approved messages that can be confidently shared through any form of communication. Whether you’re preparing a spokesperson for an interview or developing a pitch, clearly reflecting key messages into all campaigns and written materials will ensure that your client’s brand stays consistent and on topic.
While it may not be the most glamorous project, creating key messages is an essential component to properly reach a target audience with a strong, unified message. A good set of key messages will be similar to an elevator pitch, concisely communicating what sets the brand apart in under a minute. Whether you are looking to create key messages for a new client or refresh a collection that may be outdated, below are three key takeaways I learned from an episode of The PR Pod, an essential PR podcast for budding public relations professionals, that you should always keep in mind when creating this foundational material.
Put in the time for preliminary research
Research and think about the key messages that audiences need to hear and understand. Having a firm grasp of your client’s industry is helpful and you’ll want to understand the narrative the company wants to share. One good way to do this is to develop a Q&A. This helps get all the basic information a journalist would inquire about in one location. You should also identify communication goals and target audience with the client. Finally, it’s a good idea to look at the competitor landscape to pinpoint the differentiating components the brand possesses.
Aim for three to four concise key messages
Once the preliminary research and discussions take place, devote one to three hours to crafting these messages. This can be tough and often will require more than one pass through to get the result you desire. Take time to ensure each word is impactful, supports the company’s mission, and aligns with the established expectations. Typically, public relations professionals aim to have a collection of three to four concise messages supported with proof points. The first one should be a summarizing statement describing the business that shares the most important information. Then, after you flush it out, you can go into more description illustrating what, how and why the company is different and its unique offerings. To ensure your messages are credible, you will need proof points. Proof points are concrete examples or data that support the claims that you’re making in your key messages.
Buffer in extra time for the review process
When the first draft is complete, it can still take hours to create the end product a client may desire. Buffer in extra time for the approval process both internally and externally. Before sending it off to clients, it can take several rounds of internal edits from a variety of coworkers to get it in a good place. Once it’s in your client’s hands, set aside time to address feedback and make additional edits before the key messages are finalized. This whole process can take anywhere from a week to several weeks and is crucial to avoid disparity across all written and spoken communications.
After refining, solidifying and testing the messages to ensure they resonate with the target audiences you can begin to use them for all of the company’s communications. No matter where you are in your professional career, as a public relations professional, it is crucial to create, or learn if already developed, a client’s top key messages and routinely reassess them to ensure they still meet the company’s needs and those of the target audience.