Showrunner focuses on building reputations, relationships and influence as we think that they are essential outcomes that good strat comms should be seeking to achieve. Organisations with bad reputations, poor relationships with stakeholders and little influence over their market or working environment have limited success – particularly if they are operating in highly-regulated or politically sensitive contexts. In some cases the lack of reputation, relationships and influence can be critical – organisations offering education services or local facilities can lose their license to operate if strat comms isn’t firing on all cylinders when a crisis hits.
Despite this, strategic communications work is often undervalued. Too many exec teams and boards still like to bathe in the glow of ‘positive PR’ without fully appreciating the amount of resource and effort that’s needed to generate it. Similarly, the strategic integration needed to deliver an impact often goes unrecognized, with ‘lobbying’ (for example) seen as a wholly separate activity to things like media relations and social media.
In part, this is down the difficulty in showing what good really looks like. Proxy measures of success, like the volume of press coverage or the number of meetings held with the great and the good, are useful indicators but stop short of demonstrating the full value of effective strategic communications. What’s needed to generate real and sustained support from exec teams is a reporting framework that shows how comms work is aligned with business objectives; the specific issues it is addressing; how multiple workstreams overlap with one another; and, quantifiable progress over time.
Showrunner’s commitment to purpose-driven comms has led us to design a process that we work through with clients to develop strategic comms evaluation frameworks and benchmarking tools. We combine third party auditing of current results with horizon scanning research and perceptions audit interviews to help clients set:
- Clear and concise sets of bespoke strategic communications outcome objectives;
- Baseline indicators of how those objectives are currently being met;
- Quant and qual success indicators to evaluate and report on over time.
More than a simple reporting tool, effective comms evaluation provides insight to direct activity and resources to have the most impact, so our process also gives clients:
- An account of significant opportunities to build reputation and relationships around and areas of risk that need to be addressed;
- Prioritised stakeholder maps and engagement recommendations.
Strategic communications is not an add on or a ‘nice to have’ luxury, It’s an essential requirement for organisations that help people and places to succeed. More than the sum of its parts, good strat comms aligns PR with public affairs – and much else besides – to build reputations, relationships and influence. That’s what Showrunner believes, and we’re very happy to help our clients put these ideals into practice.
Get in touch to find out more about how Showrunner helps clients to develop strategic communications benchmarks and evaluation frameworks.