Follow certain congressional committees closely and you’ll realize they spend much of their time preparing a budget for the coming fiscal year. In the executive branch at the moment, additions, reductions and resulting policy implications in the president’s proposed budget are getting plenty of coverage throughout the country. The credo of investigative reporters is “follow the money.” As you know, money and budgets are constantly on the minds of communicators and those C-suite executives who determine how much PR and communications should be allocated.
In both of the Arthur W. Page Society New CCO Podcasts she has hosted, Home Depot CCO Stacey Tank asks her guests a version of the unlimited resources question: “If you had an unlimited budget, what would you do?” We decided to turn the tables on Tank, asking her the same question. In addition, we queried Tank and Aflac CCO Catherine Hernandez-Blades, Tank’s guest on the second podcast, about a theme that runs throughout their session: how brands integrate digital and traditional communications.
Page provided a copy of the podcast exclusively to PR News Pro. It is scheduled to be available at the Page website during the second week in April. The dominant subject of the podcast is Aflac’s CSR work for childhood cancer, which listeners will learn was prompted when Aflac chief Dan Amos was approached for a $25K donation; he provided a personal check for far more. As Tank notes during the podcast, sometimes cold calls work. [An excellent look at how Aflac created a framework to better manage its charitable work can be found in a previous PR News Pro article.]
What to do with Unlimited Resources
Aflac
But back to our interview with Tank, whom we asked the unlimited resources question: “We’ve definitely made some asks over the last few years, and the team has earned its way into new resources,” she says. “One year ago, we created a Story Lab to elevate our visual storytelling. If I had even more funding, I would hire two, super innovative videographers to push us even further in the visual storytelling space…I would also put a bigger stake in the ground with paid media to give our earned and owned more wings.”
During the podcast Hernandez-Blades provides what she admits is a “counterintuitive answer” to the unlimited resources query: “I’d hire more people and let them drive the technology. The whole purpose of technology is to make your life easier. We want to meet…all of our stakeholders where they want to be met” with relevant information.
One thing that makes life more complex for Hernandez-Blades and her team is they not only communicate with Aflac employees, customers and potential customers, but also 75,000 independent insurance agents. These agents, as she says during the podcast, “can sell our product or a competitor’s product, so we spend a lot of time communicating with them.” In an interview we did with Blades, we asked about integrating digital PR and traditional communications to reach critical stakeholders. “You have to make sure from the beginning that they complement each other.” Tactically, Aflac now has made all communication with its 75,000 agents mobile. With mobile communications agents can “be in the field with customers,” Hernandez-Blades says. In addition, “we monitor click through, so we know what they’re interested in and we survey them before we do [in-person] meetings, so we know the agenda we’re giving them is the right programming.” Since the agents are busy entrepreneurs, brevity is a must. “A lot of our communications are one to two paragraphs with a link,” she says. Speaking of short communications, Aflac call center employees often have less than one minute between calls, so “anything we put on their portal has to be readable in 45 seconds or fewer.”
Integrating Traditional and Digital PR
Another example of integration she cites is the Aflac-sponsored CureFest 2016, held in Washington, D.C. CureFest’s goal is to make childhood cancer research a national priority. “More than 100,000 people were talking about us” online as members of 250 grassroots groups marched to the White House, where they held a candlelight vigil. “We leveraged the offline activities” with the “social media presence of those groups…during the entire weekend,” she says. The social audience was far larger than the one that attended the event. “Yet if the purpose is to create awareness, then it worked. Know your purpose and build your strategy,” she says.
Realizing it’s a struggle for communicators, we also asked Tank about integration of digital and traditional communication. “As a retailer, we have an amazing natural place to engage face to face with our customers: in our stores. We can’t forget about the fact that millions of folks visit us in person every year,” she says. “We’re always thinking about ways to delight customers in our stores and in their homes or job sites. We can increase that with digital engagement through our earned-owned-paid-social campaign work.”
NOTE: This content appeared originally in PR News Pro, March 27, 2017. For subscription information, please visit: https://www.prnewsonline.com/about/info
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