Healthcare public relations professionals may spend unnecessary time worrying about what tools should be used to communicate key corporate messages to internal audiences.
Some frequent questions:
- What do our clients want to say to employees?
- How should they say it?
- How can they get people to notice?
- Do they need a newsletter?
- A company-wide email?
- Should there be a corporate video?
- What about a mousepad?
- A town hall meeting video-conferenced to satellite offices?
Yet, focusing on "the tools" can often lead our clients astray - we may end up concentrating more on the deliverables for internal communications, rather than the intended
results.
News releases, promotional events and newsletters should not become rote answers when we're not sure what the question is. Our role is to ask what the bigger corporate goals
are, and in the end, whom our clients are trying to influence.
Our value as PR professionals is in providing management with the right corporate communications counsel based on experience and facts that will help optimize their decision-
making. Our role as communicators is not merely to serve as messengers. Nor is it to merely create messages. It is to nurture relationships and influence perceptions.
More than an Afterthought
Senior management at pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare providers recognizes that internal communications is not effective as an afterthought - a process that begins
after all the decisions are made. They are turning to PR professionals for analysis and consideration of communications issues that need to be part of the decision-making process
itself, not a by-product of it. And it's our responsibility as communicators to help management ensure that communications is at the forefront of the decision-making process.
Gearing up to pull together a major campaign, replete with newsletters, media kits and special events, is exciting and can really get the adrenaline and creative juices
flowing. It provides goals and tangible results for the fruits of everyone's labor.
But all that activity may not do anything to build relationships with your client's target audiences. After we've produced all the analyst tours, four-color brochures and CNBC
interviews, what have we really accomplished? We need to ask ourselves:
- Did we accomplish the goals or just the communications program?
- What are we trying to accomplish as an organization, and did that get us there?
- Did all of this work even get us closer to "there?"
All of this strategy setting starts with the business priorities. What does a company want to achieve? What do clients want their employees to understand/do? What about
suppliers and vendors? Shareholders?
We need to focus on how all the various constituencies that surround the company are going to be affected by the decisions that are being made.
A Changing World
Markets are more competitive and changing faster than ever. As Sergio Zyman, former marketing chief at Coca-Cola, says, "Without strategies, you aren't going anywhere." Once
the strategy is in place, then communications planning can happen. As the nervous system of an organization, communications can be the conduit, through which information is
carried, disseminated, discussed, debated and ultimately incorporated into constructive action and long-term knowledge for an organization.
Calls to action, goal setting, unifying behind a common mission - none of these things can be carried out without an effective communications plan.
Playing a Strategic Role
In the final analysis, public relations professionals can use their knowledge, insight and ability to help formulate the right decisions that will attain the goals of their
client's organization.
For managers, they can provide the business case for the direction taken so that communications can be strategically developed and implemented.
This is one of the future paths for our profession.
Ilyssa Levins is chairman and chief creative officer of GCI Healthcare in New York. She can be reached at 212/886-8500. Her co-author for this column is Gary
Grates, GCI's president.