Posted on By Mandy Pearse, FCIPR, Chart PR It is high time that government looked, listened and learnt from the innovative PR practice in local government instead of telling Councils how to communicate with their citizens. Taking Hackney Council through the courts to stop it producing a fortnightly council newspaper is a clear example of dogma versus evidence. …
Posted on Why isn’t the PR industry able to get a grip on and deal with ethical breaches? Don’t fall asleep. Please don’t. What I’m going to say matters to our industry and profession. Over the past week there have been a number of big reads about ethical issues. First there was Fleishman and accusations of astroturfing …
Posted on This week you may have come across the Twitter rant unleashed by the employee of an MP. Gareth Arnold took the unusual step of handing his notice in by posting thread of tweets from the account of Jared O’Mara MP he had access to. It was oddly polarising. It was greeted as a glorious ‘f*** …
Posted on By Jason MacKenzie, To set the scene: it’s 18th February 2019. A new political movement is born. Seven Labour MPs announce they’ve come to the end of their tether. After months of rumours and rumblings of a ‘split’, their emergence as a new group more closely resembles a splinter. Their promise is to become a …
Posted on In 101 Ways To Win An Election, Ed Maxfield and I wrote that: “Data is your organisational lifeblood … You need to love and cherish data, and keep a close eye on both quality and quantity. Far too often, campaigners fail to keep an eye on either, resulting in lost opportunities and mistakes made.” How …
Posted on It can be very easy to get bogged down in day-to-day activity but we all need to take the time to raise our eyes and look at the longer term. It can prove useful. It is a commonly held belief that politicians have difficulty taking longer term decisions. Anything that may deliver results outside of …
Posted on Far from being used as an excuse to help explain Boris Johnson’s retort of ‘f**k business’, public affairs is a valuable organisational tool especially at a time where reputation is everything. Writing in The Times, ‘Cavalier Johnson must curb his wild side’, Daniel Finkelstein, suggested that Johnson’s comment: “is really not about business. It’s not …
Posted on By Lisa Townsend, You could be forgiven for thinking that the Tory leadership race has been going on for months, if not years in the case of some contenders. Arguably, Boris Johnson never stopped running following his failed bid in 2016 and it comes as no surprise to see Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt or Andrea Leadsom …
Posted on A public affairs programme will always cover who the key decision-makers are. But ‘who does what’ among the team is not always considered in so much detail. So think about establishing Personal Engagement Plans. The overall programme will, of course, set some strategic priorities for engagement, list top targets and outline what the ‘asks’ for …
Posted on Not everyone has a huge budget to put at the disposal of their public affairs campaign. So what should those with more limited resources do? I thank Jon Gerlis at the CIPR for getting me to think about this issue. We had a chat in preparation for a talk that he is to do shortly. …