Your comms strategy is affecting my policy karma
This is a bit of a crossover post. I’ve taken an excerpt from a post from Advertising for Peanuts, and substituted the word “policy” for “ads.”
“The process of policy is about making great ideas and then watching them die. And then coming up with new ideas, making better policies, and watching those die and then doing it all over again.
If you’re in this game because you really love policy, the process will probably just make you one sad, bitter, pissed off dude. But if you’re in this business because you love the challenge of starting from scratch for the seventh time, even after you feel like the well has gone dry, and working late on something that will most likely die, then you’re probably going to end up making policies that a lot of other people really love.”
As a government communicator, you must always remember that you are toying with the life’s work (okay, maybe the week’s or month’s work) of a dedicated civil servant.
Your decisions about strategy, minimizing or maximizing the resources that you will put behind an announcement or marketing campaign, even how you handle media calls about an initiative, must always be informed by the passion and effort your clients have invested in it.
That is one of the principal challenges for a communicator in a knowledge organization: how to implement effective strategy without slighting the work of others - or negatively affecting morale.
