Interview Summary

In this interview, Alan Anstead, a public relations expert, provided a comprehensive overview of modern PR. He defined PR as a strategic communication function designed to help an organisation achieve its goals by engaging with its various internal and external stakeholders. Anstead differentiated PR from marketing, explaining that while complementary, PR has a broader scope covering all organisational communications. He outlined a three-step process for effective communication: defining the objective, identifying the audience, and selecting the appropriate platform, using a Network Rail crisis communication example to illustrate this. He also discussed the complexity of managing communications for organisations with diverse stakeholders, like the NHS. A significant portion of the conversation focused on the evolution of measuring PR effectiveness, moving away from outdated metrics like column inches towards sophisticated frameworks that assess the impact on audience behaviour and contribution to organisational objectives.

Interviewee Background

Alan Anstead was presented as the course director and tutor for public relations qualifications at Cambridge Marketing College. His role and the depth of his answers established him as an expert in the field of public relations and communications.

 

Key Points

  • PR was defined as a strategic function that helps an organization achieve its goals through communication with all its stakeholders.
  • Effective communication followed a three-step process: first, determine the desired effect on stakeholders; second, identify the specific audiences; and third, choose the best communication platform.
  • PR was described as a two-way process, involving not just broadcasting messages but also listening to stakeholder feedback and relaying it back into the organization to inform decision-making.
  • The measurement of PR has evolved significantly. The focus has shifted from measuring communication activity (e.g., column inches of press coverage) to evaluating the actual outcomes, such as changes in audience opinion or behavior and the overall impact on organizational goals.
  • The term "Public Relations" is often misunderstood as solely media publicity, leading many organizations to use titles like "Communications" or "Corporate Communications" instead.

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hello, I'm Kiran Kapur, and this time around we're looking at PR. We'll look at what is PR.

Alan Anstead (00:19):
I see public relations and communications as helping an organisation achieve its goals. So it is a strategic function.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:28):
And some of the difficulties around it.

Alan Anstead (00:30):
It's very difficult to put a financial figure on what public relations and communications has done because it's often helping an organisation achieve some goals.

Announcer (00:42):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:46):
I'm joined by Alan Anstead, who is course director and tutor for public relations qualifications. Alan, welcome. Could we start with what PR actually is?

Alan Anstead (00:56):
Yes. Public relations, what it is? Well, that's almost a million dollar question because there are so many different definitions of public relations. To me, it's quite simply the communication between an organisation and people outside of the organisation and inside of it. Quite simply that. I see public relations and communications as helping an organisation achieve its goals. So it is a strategic function. I see public relations as being something that compliments other disciplines like marketing, but is in a sense distinct from those.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:41):
Let's unpack that a bit. So you talked about helping strategic goals and then you talked about being separate from marketing. So let's have a look at those two. So helping strategic goals, what sort of things did you have in mind?

Alan Anstead (01:52):
Yeah. Well, I think where you start with public relations communications is by looking at what does the organisation need to achieve and then how can communications, public relations help to achieve that in the same way that marketing will look at how it can help the organisation achieve its goals. So it's around that strategic site and seeing how communication with different groups of people, stakeholders can help that organisation do what it does. And of course, I'm using the word organisation quite widely. By that I mean a company, could be a government department, central or local government. It could be the NHS, police service, could be a charity, housing association. All of those are organisations, all will have very different goals. But regardless of that, public relations communications can help the organisation achieve those goals.

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:59):
So you use the word stakeholders, and I have to say it's one of those words that I think I use all the time, and I'm never quite certain exactly what a stakeholder is.

Alan Anstead (03:08):
Yeah, it is a jargon word. I remember I once spoke to a group of first year undergraduates at university and I was starting talking and one put their hand up and said, "Please, sir." And I looked around to see who the Sir was and they were referring to me first year undergraduates and they said, "What is a stakeholder?" It hit me on the head like a stake perhaps would 'Bam!'. I'm starting to use jargon without explaining what it means. And quite rightly, the student asked me, "What are you talking about? " A stakeholder to me is a group of people with a certain identity or certain things in common that have an interest in the organisation, your organisation. Those stakeholders could be employees. That's one stakeholder group. They could be shareholders of the company, a different stakeholder group. They could be retailers of the products that the company makes, another stakeholder group.

(04:17):
They could be regulatory bodies, HMRC. Yes, another stakeholder group. So lots and lots of groups who one way or another would have an interest in your organisation, their stakeholders.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:32):
Great. So does that mean for helping my strategic goals, I need to think about how to communicate with those different goals to those different stakeholders?

Alan Anstead (04:42):
Yes. I think the tip, if you like, from me would be first you need to think, what do you want to achieve? What effect do you want in those stakeholders? Once you've decided what that is, and of course that is something strategic would fit in with the organisation's goals, objectives. Then you can think, well, who are the audiences for my communication? The stakeholders that one needs to talk with, engage. And after that, third stage is, what is the best way of doing that? The platform. Is it social media? Is it a newspaper article or is it an event? And that process, I think, makes for effective communication.

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:33):
Could you give me an example?

Alan Anstead (05:35):
I have got a good example actually, which may be relevant in today's times. So an example of thinking that through for effective communication was Network Rail December last year had a problem on their main South of London track, all the signals went to red for an hour. So people were stuck on trains on the way to Gatwick Airport or on their journeys home or to London. So they have a problem. They had to deal with it. They had to tell people what was going on. It was, in a sense, it was a crisis. A small one, it wouldn't damage Network Rail, but it was still a crisis. People were getting upset on Twitter saying, "Well, that's going on. " Network Rail thought about this, thought, "Well, we have to give information about what is going on. " We can't just say, "We apologise for any inconvenience calls to your journey.

(06:41):
That just won't wear when people are stuck on trains not knowing when things will move again." So they were thinking around what effect they want to inform people what was going on and what they, the organisation, Network Rail, was doing about it to put it right again. The stakeholders, primarily people stuck on trains. They were the ones who were in that situation wanting to know when their train was going to move again. Were they going to make their flight or whatever else it may be? So that was a stakeholder group. Channel they used was Twitter because it's immediate, because that's what people often do when they're stuck on trains, they turn to Twitter. I know I've done it as well.

(07:31):
But what they did that really made a difference was they explained what was wrong and they explained what they were doing about it, in a sense technical, but explaining it in a whole series of tweets with little diagrams and other things there that told people exactly what was wrong and what they were doing to put it right. The effect that had was actually quite amazing. People stuck on trains, probably a bit angry, annoyed, were actually writing tweets like, "As one of the thousands of passengers stuck, thank you. All communications should be frank and honest like this. " Another one wrote, "Beyond the technical detail, the honest empathy shown is far better than we apologise for any inconvenience calls to your journey. Thank you. " And this is from people who were stuck on trains for over an hour. So that communication really did have the effect informing, saying what was being done to put the problem right.

(08:39):
After an hour, the signals were working again and people continued their journeys. But without that, the simple messaging of, "We're sorry for any inconvenience calls would not have worked." It would have left the travellers and a wider audience that heard about it thinking, "Ah, Network Rail, they can't do the job. They're not making the RAIL network work." But everyone has problems, every organisation does, and they communicated that effectively what they were doing.

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:11):
I mean, there you had one really sort of one set of stakeholders because it was everybody that was fed up, so the passengers. What about an organisation where you might have multiple stakeholders? So you use the NHS, so they would obviously have medical stakeholders, but also patients and presumably also government and regulators.

Alan Anstead (09:32):
And NHS trust, because NHS is a massive family of different organisations there. We'll have stakeholders, everyone from the trust is employees, it's board who make the decisions about the trust. It will have the volunteers who work there. It will have other organisations which are connected to the trust like a local hospice or some charities that do work in the health sector that have a connection to the trust. Then of course, above that, it has the regulatory bodies like CQC, who the offstead of the health world who will come and look at what the trust is doing to check it is doing the right thing in the right way. Then it has its own internal operators of funding, GP practises, for example, who will be perhaps sending patients to that trust. And you will have then government above that that are funding the NHS so that there's money allocated for the trust to operate, for operations to happen, for health procedures to take place.

(10:56):
And then you have above all of that, the media who will be interested in what the NHS is doing, as well as for that trust area, all of the residents that live there, or it could of course be someone passing through that trust area that needs hospital treatment, so a wide, wide range of stakeholders. And each of those stakeholders would have different communication needs. The needs of the residents in an NHS trust would be very different to the needs of government who would want to know what's that trust doing, how it's performing, what its waiting times are for certain operations, or accident and emergency entrances, and other things. Very different to health needs and the information that someone who's feeling ill would have. Well, what have I got? What do I do now? Who's resident in that particular NHS area?

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:05):
So from a PR perspective, what would you do? Because you talked about goals, but we're also talking about what stakeholders want to know. So is there a tension between those of what the organisation's strategic goals might be and what the stakeholders want to know, or does PR try and pull those together?

Alan Anstead (12:25):
Yeah, I think public relations communications is a good way of pulling those together. To me, public relations communications isn't just broadcasting what the organisation wants its stakeholders to hear, maybe what it's doing. It's giving information. It's perhaps persuading stakeholders of something, perhaps to change their opinion or to make them aware of something, even to change their behaviour or take action. But it's also listening to what the stakeholder groups are saying and relaying that back into the organisation and its decision making so that the views as stakeholders are known within the organisation itself.

Kiran Kapur, Host (13:13):
How does someone in PR work out what those communications requirements might be from the stakeholders? It sounds like a big mapping exercise. Have I got that right?

Alan Anstead (13:25):
Yeah, I think it's a listening exercise as well, because one person's rant on social media doesn't necessarily mean that that is the same for every person in that particular stakeholder group. So it's listening and analysing what people are saying. And I think that's far easier nowadays than it was say 20 years ago when probably it had to be done through some form of research, like a focus group or a survey. Now one can use and look at social media and monitor what's being said there to find out some common traits that people see about that organisation, good and bad.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:17):
Okay, that's really helpful. Can we come back to the other thing that I've said I wanted to look at, which was how you separated PR from marketing because I'm a marketer through and through, and I would say that communications was the heart of marketing, but I think you're going to tell me that PR is quite separate from that.

Alan Anstead (14:37):
As a pure communicator, of course I would say this, but no, I do see it as complimentary to marketing. I see it as a specialist area because it's just about communications, but that communications is much wider than perhaps the marketing function around a company's products, services, and where they're offered and the price they're offered at. It's about all different things about the organisation and communicating them and listening and bringing that back into the organisation. For me as well, the term public relations is a little difficult and the same with many organisations because many people think of public relations almost purely as generating publicity through media, whereas it's not that's perhaps for many organisations one part of many parts, but it's not the whole. It's more about a communication between the organisation and all of those stakeholder groups that we just described. And therefore, many organisations do not use the term public relations.

(15:54):
It's not in a job title. It's not in the team's name. It's more communications or corporate communications or even strategic communications because of the misunderstanding generally about what public relations actually is.

Kiran Kapur, Host (16:13):
Yes. I think there's still a view that in order to be in PR, you go and wine and dine journalists, which I suspect is quite an old-fashioned view. How do you know if it's working? Because it's obviously going to spend quite a lot of time spending time on communications. How do you know it's actually working?

Alan Anstead (16:30):
Yeah. And I think this is where public relations has evolved, perhaps slowly, but definitely quicker over the last 10 years, is around measuring the value, the benefit that communications, public relations brings to an organisation. It used to be around the communications activities themselves, how many people read this or saw this, all about almost the amount of work that the communicator was doing. Whereas now, many organisations look at, well, what effect did that have on the audiences? The stakeholder groups we were just talking about. Did it change people's opinion? Did it change their behaviour or give them the impetus to do something, take some kind of action? And I think that's the big change, the change in evaluating the effect, the benefit that public relations and communications brings to an organisation. It's all about the audience, the stakeholders, rather than how much activity was done, the communications.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:47):
Because we used to actually measure PR in column inches, didn't we? The number of inches written about you.

Alan Anstead (17:54):
Absolutely. And you have to be old enough to understand that, but years and years ago, I'm probably fit in that. Newspapers literally used to be printed because they're printed, no internet, in columns, and therefore it was very easy to get the ruler out and this was before metric and take the ruler out 12 inches on that ruler and literally measure how much was written. But again, what does that really tell you? It just tells you that perhaps there was a lot written, but what was written may have been quite negative about the organisations. It doesn't tell you the sentiment. It's the start, counting numbers. And even if we take this in today, today's term, and here's another bit of jargon for you, reach. And what is reach? Reach is a total number of people who see your content, whatever form that contents in your communication.

(18:59):
And that's a start, but it doesn't tell you anything more than the number of people who saw it. That content may not have been so positive. It may have been negative. And so you need to look further into that. And it means that evaluation of communications and public relations has got more complex. It's no longer about column inches, opportunities to see or average value equivalent, advertising value equivalent, which is taking a quarter page, say, of a newspaper. A cost of that as an advert is, let's say, 10,000 pounds and then saying, "Well, the article filled a quarter of a page on that particular page. Therefore, its value is the same amount of money, but it's not comparing like with like. " So measurement and evaluation of communications has had to get much more sophisticated. And it's a good thing because it's actually brought it much closer in line with the strategic goals of an organisation where we started our conversation because that's what ultimately one is looking at what difference has it made, the communications made to the organisation and not just what great things did you do or how funny or happy was this or that, or was there some cats on the social media post?

(20:28):
It's about, did it change people's behaviour? Did it do something for the organisation in terms of advancing that organisation's goals?

Kiran Kapur, Host (20:38):
That's brilliant. I've never heard of advertising value equivalent, but I can see how that would relate directly trying to make your communications into a sort of monetary value.

Alan Anstead (20:48):
Many boards of organisations, they like that because they understand the financial figures and that's understandable to an extent because it's very difficult to put a financial figure on what public relations and communications has done because it's often helping an organisation achieve some goals. It probably didn't do it all on its own, but it's a vital part. So looking at the benefits it's brought to the organisation in this campaign or on that business plan is a better way of doing it, but it's a more complex way. But organisations are starting to see the new tools that are there. There's something called the AMEC integrated framework, which is a free online tool, which asks you the questions that set out then strategically for our campaign, a communications of PR campaign, what it's achieved. And I've seen that for a company who we work with their communications team and a board member said, "Wow, for four years I've been struggling on the board to explain what benefit the communications function brings." And this is a very large 6,000 people techie company in the UK and they said, "Now I got it".

Announcer (22:17):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.

Kiran Kapur, Host (22:25):
Thanks for listening. There are 12 previous episodes that you can find covering aspects of marketing such as international, digital marketing, B2B, and data protection legislation. So please listen wherever you normally find your podcasts and I'll be back again next week.