Pricing our work properly
We don’t price our work - or our value as government communicators - properly. And this is why the vast majority of government communications follow a leaden and title-heavy format that bludgeons readers and reporters into a stupor.
As I’ve been driving back and forth on Ontario’s highways (100s of kilometres at a time), I’ve had the opportunity to notice the market established in highway service centres.
By market, I mean the exaggerated pricing imposed on most necessities and consumer goods by the operators of these highway service centres. Need diapers? 20% more than the drugstore. Bottle of Coke? Add 50 cents. Ran out of oil? 30% more than at Canadian Tire.
The only competitive pricing exists at the chain restaurants and donut shops found at the service centres - and I suspect only because these companies fear their brand would be damaged if they were revealed to be opportunistic market manipulators - like the gas station operator just in front.
Our work suffers for a very similar reason: as government communicators, our work benefits from something of a captive audience. Reporters, lobbyists and stakeholders have a vested interest in paying attention to and responding to many of our government’s pronouncements. These people are comparable to the vacationing family who don’t have time to drive off the highway in search of a WalMart or a Shoppers Drug Mart.
They won’t question the quality of the product - or the pricing - to your face, because they depend upon an effective relationship with government appartachiks.
So, in governments around the world, we continue to open our news releases with a litany of names, titles and affiliations. We bury the lede. We prepare backgrounders and FAQs that answer self-serving propositions and gloss over difficulties. And we set up news conferences that bear more resemblance to a Punch & Judy show than to an honest discussion with the media.
We aren’t challenged, as professionals and as organizations, to change this behaviour because our audience is stuck on that interminable highway.
And we don’t change our behaviour because we are used to driving fast, straight and along with the traffic. We don’t want to drive off the comfortable and beaten path for fear of getting lost, slowing down or simply remembering how to handle a hairpin turn.
So government communicators end up overvaluing our work and underestimating its relative worth - because it’s hard to directly compare government communications work with other segments of the profession.
Unless you’re in a newsroom, where the failures are evident.
