Communications Primer for Public Entity Risk Pools
Overview
This communications primer is intended to help public entity risk pool professionals prepare for and successfully conduct any amicable or adversarial interaction with those less familiar to pooling (member or prospect, elected official, government regulator, or journalist, for example).
Naturally pools should make it a top priority at all times to develop the best possible relationships with the all key stakeholders by proactively sharing information about the pool on an ongoing basis. This effort should be the foundation of all communications.
This primer suggests 10 steps in three categories:
Prepare in advance.
1. Establish the pool's communications protocols for interactions with key stakeholders, and create standing messaging for all such interactions.
2. Anticipate and prepare for challenging interactions as much as practical.
Plan and execute the communication.
3. Learn as much as possible about concerns before any difficult conversation happens.
4. Review standing messaging and communications protocols.
5. Prepare any needed documents, such as a standby statement, event-specific messaging, and messaging-based documents.
6. Identify and prepare messengers.
7. Identify all message targets and message-delivery methods.
8. Deliver the message.
Conduct follow-up research and evaluation.
9. Establish mechanisms for monitoring stakeholders' responses to the messages.
10. Review all outcomes, and plan follow-up communications as challenges and opportunities dictate.
Prepare in advance.
1. Establish the pool's communications protocols for all interactions with key stakeholders, and create standing messaging for all such interactions.
Pools should have in place evergreen messaging on the pool, its mission, and its record of success. In addition, pool executives and managers should also be able to explain the basics of pooling. Pools also need rules about who communicates what and how in different events.
Ideally, the pool's standing messaging about itself should include three core messages that are high-level, values-oriented assertions about what the pool does, why it does those things, and how well the pool functions. Each of these messages, in turn, should be supported by three or more proof points. Proof points are facts, statistics, examples, and anecdotes.
Ideally, messaging that follows this approach – three messages, each supported by three or more proof points – should fit neatly onto a page or two. Messages should be drafted in language that any high school student could understand, with no jargon whatsoever from either the insurance industry or the pooling movement. (Such jargon can be used in proof points – if it is accompanied by a plain-language explanation that the same high school student would understand.)
Appropriate advance preparation also includes the creation of clear and strict communications protocols. These rules and procedures will address such matters as:
· Who initiates and receives contact with key stakeholders, including: members considering leaving the pool; prospective members; legislators and regulators; and journalists.
· What pool officials and/or board members must be notified when a potentially difficult interaction with one of these key stakeholders is pending.
· Who is expected and authorized to prepare responses to questions from the stakeholders, and who must review and approve those drafts before they can be delivered.
· Who is authorized to speak to what stakeholders and to decide whether to respond voice-to-voice or via email. This question is especially important in a pool's policies and procedures on media relations.
· When a communications challenge is sufficiently difficult or dangerous to require the involvement of outside counsel including attorneys, communications counselors, or lobbyists.
2. Anticipate and prepare for challenging interactions as much as practical.
Many challenges and difficult questions that a pool will face are predictable – questions about reserves and extra financial cushions, failures of other pools, difficult claim interactions, and so on. Ideally, pools will make a list of those topics on which they both expect and fear difficult questions – and then prepare, at least preliminarily, some draft messaging on that topic. When there is reason to believe a specific difficult issue for your pool will be raised by any key stakeholder, this preparation can include drafting tentative messaging and documents based on that draft messaging. In the case of an issue that may attract public attention, pools may also wish to prepare "dark" websites providing this issue-specific information. A dark website is one that is invisible to the world but nearly ready to be posted and made available on the Internet on a turnkey basis.
Any public entity risk pool should consider developing a list of things that can go wrong, and then develop backgrounders or fact sheets to describe in detail the steps the pool needs to take to prevent those occurrences.
Plan and execute the communication.
3. Learn as much as possible about concerns before any difficult conversation happens.
When you first receive a query from any key stakeholder, such as a concerned member or a journalist, ask as many questions as you can to learn as much as you can about the stakeholder's questions or concerns. For example, most journalists will respond forthrightly to questions about deadlines, angles, other sources being consulted, and so on. Answers to these questions may give you an opportunity to offer insights or assistance above and beyond what the journalist requested. These offers from an appropriate pool official may create or improve opportunities to give information that more directly reflects the pool's core values and messaging.
4. Review standing messaging and communications protocols.
Any event-specific messaging should reflect – or, ideally, echo – core messaging that your pool has in place. Any difficult interaction with any key stakeholder should provide opportunities to reinforce core messaging about your pool.
In drafting your event-specific messaging, start the document by opening your standing messaging document, saving a version of that for your new messaging, and rewriting from that foundation. This reduces the likelihood that event-specific messaging will ignore, contradict, or deviate from the organization's standing messaging.
Review your communications protocols to ensure that everyone involved understands how the pool will respond to this particular interaction. If there are reasons why protocols cannot be followed in this case – for example, a key official is unavailable – the team must quickly decide upon new protocols and ensure that everyone knows what the new protocols are for this case.
5. Prepare any needed documents, such as a standby statement, event-specific messaging, and messaging-based documents.
As early as possible in the process, someone should put fingers on a keyboard and draft as many as three documents: a standby statement, event-specific messaging, and supplemental messaging-based documents. Like the pool’s standing messaging, all of these documents should be plain and clear to a high school student. That means no jargon. It also means focusing more on what you do, why you do it, and whom you serve – and much less on how you do it.
Standby statement: It may be necessary to create a “standby” statement (also known as a "holding" statement) to offer an immediate response to some queries, especially those from journalists. A standby statement gives the pool an opportunity to address an initial inquiry with a safe restatement of core values, coupled with an indication that more information may be provided later. A standby statement is generally offered nearly immediately to avoid any hint that the pool is in some way ducking the stakeholder's question.
Event-specific messaging: Before any more detailed responses, statements, or other supporting documents can be created, the pool must draft and then finalize messaging for this specific request. Messaging for this event should follow the same formula as your standing messaging: three high-level, values-based assertions as messages, each of which is supported by three or more proof points.
The more difficult the interaction might be, the more important it is that this messaging be drafted, then improved, then approved, and then learned as quickly as possible. Haste is unwise, but speed is essential. In preparing under time pressure for a difficult interaction with, for example, a member or prospect, pool executives must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Supplemental messaging-based documents: Ideally, professionals will start writing supporting materials (such as letters to members or media statements) only after the event-specific messaging has been drafted and approved. Under time pressure, it may be necessary to start drafting these documents even before final approval on the messaging is obtained. However, in no cases should any supporting documents be drafted or sent before there is a serious discussion of messaging. This is important because pools' communications should emphasize the message they want to deliver no matter what question prompted the response.
Pool executives must also understand the importance of deciding how to respond. In some instances, the best response to a stakeholder question is a plain, direct answer; in other cases, especially interactions with journalists, pool executives can respond helpfully to questions with information that is driven by more pool priorities and the messaging that summarizes them than it is by the journalist's story idea.
All documents prepared for any key stakeholder should mirror and reinforce key messaging. Depending on the intensity of the interaction, documents that may be needed include: follow-up letters to members or prospects; media materials; an FAQ document; a "myths and facts" document; a fact sheet; a letter to the editor or op-ed; talking points for phone calls or meetings with key constituents; or a newsletter article for the pool's website and/or member newsletter.
In preparing all of these documents, it is important to honor at all times a couple of core values:
· Avoid jargon. "Talk human" at all times.
· Messaging must be consistent with anything the organization is actually doing to address whatever issue or situation prompted the call. This means the professionals preparing communications materials for key stakeholders must coordinate closely with whatever professionals are working on the underlying issue.
· Draft messaging with the assumption that the same core messages should be used for all stakeholders. There may be some slight variations in the wording; it is even more likely that different points will be used for different stakeholders. But there should be no major differences in what the pool says to any individual or group of stakeholders.
· Messaging should be thoroughly vetted to ensure it says what it should say and says it effectively to stakeholders. That may mean review by lobbyists or legal counsel to ensure that messaging does not inadvertently create problems down the road. (However, in the same way that PR professionals should not lobby or give legal counsel, it is usually unwise to let lawyers or lobbyists drive communications campaigns.) It should also mean review by someone close to the pool but generally unfamiliar with its programs, issues, and methods. For this kind of evaluation, the best choice can be a spouse.
6. Identify and prepare messengers.
Taking guidance from standing communications protocols, choose messengers based on their experience with communications training, their skills, their availability, and any situation-specific needs. Make sure that these individuals understand that they will be the communicators, and make sure others understand whatever limited role, if any, they will have in the process.
The individual selected to deliver the messages may want and or need help preparing for their role. Pool executives and professionals who oversee communications should offer the messengers whatever help is practical to prepare for the interaction. If the messenger will make a public presentation and/or give a one-on-one interview to a journalist, she or he may need emergency media training, locations coaching, and dress-rehearsing.
7. Identify all message targets and message-delivery methods.
As you are identifying and preparing messengers, you will need to both specify as precisely as possible your message targets and choose message-delivery tactics that are tailored for those targets.
In any difficult interaction, and especially in certain media interviews, it is important that a pool understand precisely to whom it wishes to deliver messages – and that the target may be someone other than the journalist herself. The communication may be triggered by a journalist's request for an interview, but the target is more likely an elected official, regulator, member, or prospect. In some cases, the ideal target may be a single individual that the pool can identify by name or by job title – a certain columnist at an insurance trade magazine, or a specific government regulator.
Note also that your message targets should include all parties that may be affected, even if they are not audiences with whom you regularly communicate. It is also important to remember that your targeted stakeholders in most or all cases should include some or all of your employees and other internal constituents. For example, whenever a major message you shared with the news media, as a rule it should be given at the same time to employees and members.
The more precisely a pool understands whom it wishes to reach, the more precisely it can fine-tune its eventual communications vehicles and message-delivery tactics. These tactics can include one or more of the following:
· Written responses to a stakeholder's questions.
· A blast email or letters to stakeholders identified as message targets.
· Phone calls to specific message targets.
· Messaging-based posts to carefully selected social media, such as LinkedIn.
· Messaging-based prose used for the pool’s website and or newsletter.
· A statement for the news media.
The more challenging the issue, the more likely the pool is to deploy more than one tactic. Repetition of messaging, especially in challenging circumstances, is a desireable feature, not a bug.
8. Deliver the message.
Go. Conduct the interaction with the stakeholder. Hit send. Lick the envelopes. Post. Roll the calls.
Conduct follow-up research and evaluation.
9. Establish mechanisms for monitoring stakeholders' responses to the messages.
When a pool faces a difficult interaction with the stakeholder, its communication work is only beginning when first communicates. Pools must monitor how well their messages are delivered and how stakeholders react to them. What pools learn from this monitoring process can highlight the need or opportunity to refine messages, and develop new or supplemental messages, or take new actions to address whatever incident or question prompted the initial query.