'Every proposal we write states that our whole team are CIPR members'

Lisa Egan-Woodhouse is the director of Viva, a PR agency based in Rossendale, Lancashire. Lisa moved into public relations 10 years ago after spending more than a decade working in newsrooms as a journalist. In this spotlight interview, she explains how everyone on the team at Viva benefits from CIPR Corporate Affiliate membership and what the business gains from new recruits becoming CIPR members within the first week of joining. She also offers tips on making the most of your CPD journey and explains why other organisations should consider becoming a Corporate Affiliate.

Hi Lisa, what do you love most about working in public relations?

The problems. I came into PR from journalism and quickly realised that much of PR is untangling something before you can communicate it at all.

What initially motivated Viva to become a CIPR Corporate Affiliate?

In the 10 years I have been at Viva the team has flexed up and down in size, but one thing has remained constant – we always need to keep upskilling our people.

Smaller agencies rarely have a dedicated learning and development function. If development and professional standards are not built into how you work, it falls off the radar.

Affiliation gave us three things we could not have built ourselves. A structured CPD programme with an external standard behind it. Access to essential training for everybody. And membership of something bigger than a single independent agency.

How does being a Corporate Affiliate support your team's professional development?

The CPD programme is the backbone of it, and we champion it in the office. Everybody takes part, from the managing director through to our newest graduate.

The requirement is 60 points a year. A couple of us, myself included, regularly log over 270. That is what happens when logging becomes a habit rather than an annual chore.

All our team are CIPR members, and new recruits are signed up in their first week. It is part of induction rather than something we get round to eventually. It tells somebody on day one what we expect of them and what we are prepared to invest in them.

Alongside the CPD cycle the team uses the training courses, the events and the online resources. The certificates go up in our entrance hall, which sounds like a small thing, but it is a daily reminder of what people have done and what is still available to them.

What value have you seen from your affiliation so far?

The CPD structure has delivered the most, because it turns good intentions into something that actually happens throughout the year.

After that, the training itself, such as the ethics modules. It is the sort of thing everybody agrees matters and not everybody formally trains on, and having it available to the whole team rather than just the senior team means everyone is playing by the same professional rules.

Then credibility. Every proposal we write states that our whole team are CIPR members. Our key sectors are defence, advanced manufacturing and public sector, where procurement is rigorous and asks direct questions about professional standards and staff development.

And finally, the community. Being part of a wider professional group. There is a lot of very good work happening up here in the north of England and it is not always seen.

That is less a complaint than a reason to do something about it. It is why I sit on a regional professional membership committee. It is why we enter awards – to put the north on the map. And it is why we contribute to articles like this one.

Can you share an example of how CIPR membership has positively impacted your communications strategy or team culture?

We run red dot sessions in-house. The name comes from the red dot above our logo, and the idea behind it is closing the loop. If someone has been on a course or to an event and there is something in it for the wider team, they deliver it back to everybody in person, usually within a few days of getting back. Fifteen minutes maximum. The key takeaways, and specifically how we could use them. 

It sits directly on top of our values. Endless curiosity, because it rewards people for going off and finding things out. Make it simple, because taking four hours of training and turning it into fifteen genuinely useful minutes is precisely that. And Viva together, because one person learns and everybody benefits.

What would you say to other organisations considering becoming a Corporate Affiliate?

Be clear about what you want from it first, because the membership will not do the work for you.

If you join because you want an external standard to measure yourselves against, and you are prepared to act on what it shows you, it’s worth every penny.

The smaller you are, the more true that is. Larger in-house teams often have their own training budgets and internal development structures behind them. Smaller agencies frequently do not, and affiliation gives you access to professional infrastructure that is hard to build from a standing start.

What are your top tips for making the most of the membership?

Log as you go. Treating CPD as a March problem is how you end up with a thin year and nothing to show for it.

Use it across the whole team. From MD to graduate. If it is only the senior people, you are getting a fraction of the value and sending an unhelpful signal to everyone else.

Feed it back. This is the big one for us. Sending somebody on a course and never discussing it afterwards is money spent rather than money invested. Fifteen minutes on their return multiplies the return by however many people are in the room.

Make it visible. Certificates on the wall, membership in your proposals, involvement in regional events. Not as a badge, but because it keeps the whole thing present rather than something you remember once a year.

What do you think is the biggest challenge public relations faces in the future?

The pace of change, and the sheer breadth it now demands. We are expected to be the master of all and stay a step ahead for our clients.

No individual can do all that. I don’t think the answer is finding people who know everything, the answer is building an agency that learns quickly and shares what it learns properly, so knowledge belongs to the team rather than to whoever happened to be on the course.
 

Find out more about a CIPR corporate affiliate membership

Strengthen your reputation and invest in your team’s success. Join as a CIPR Corporate Affiliate member - open to groups of five or more. 

Don't forget that CIPR members can log one CPD point for reading many of our member-exclusive long read stories. Look out for a CPD star on the top right hand corner of the main image of those pages.