Blimey. 2024 marks my 28th year working in comms. What an old fart, I hear you cry. There are a tonne of blog posts I could write from my experiences in those 28 years. But here’s one I thought might be useful to some of you.
by Darren Caveney
Sometimes I believe we need to look back at where we have come from to really understand why and how we are where we are now.
The public sector comms landscape very much falls into this category.
28 years, man and boy…
I first began working in the public sector back in 2001 as a marketing manager in local government. A role I loved. The landscape was very different then. Leading on and investing in an exciting new corporate identity back then was not only important but possible. Fast forward to now and this will be seen as a luxury exercise by many an organisation.
Comms over the years
I began pondering on all that has changed – for better and for worse – and I realised that you could split the timeline into very specific phases. For example for the couple of years from 2001 onwards I describe as the ‘fat years’. As the economic, political and social situations changed so did our landscape and the challenges we communicators have had to rise to. We have had the ‘austerity years’ and the covid years’. What comes next? The Labour years? The AI years?
Other pressures and opportunities entered the fray during these earlier phases – multiple rounds of transformation, centralisation, restructures, cultural changes. Income generation opportunities emerged too, from online ads to selling our services. My senior in-house time was spent in local government and national NHS and which saw me tackling these first hand. And as a consultant for the past almost nine years I still work with teams grappling with this never ending comms side-wash.
So when I hear people say ‘our comms team isn’t strategic enough’ it does grate a little. There is no way on earth we could have traversed this landscape without us being as strategic as we could be.
Now, I may well have missed things off the visual because they haven’t been a part of my experiences or knowledge. But that is partly why I wanted to visualise all of this - you know, a picture speaking a 1,000 words and all that.
I’m no designer but I definitely know what I like and how I want something to look. So the lovely people at Alive with Ideas took my unslightly attempt and turned it into a little boster of a visual.
You won’t all have been around for as long as me of course but a great many of you will recognise some of the stages illustrated above and will have your own lessons, scars and experiences of the landscape from your corner of the world. It’s a great reminder and it’s also a storytelling spark. It’s easy to forget what we have done and where we have come from.
A resource to help us
I’m hoping this visual might be a practical resource to help us when we’re talking to our leadership teams, colleagues and customers. Especially around budgets and expectations. And for when the next time someone says “ooh, you should do XYZ”, you can politely point out that you have tried that before, when you did, what happened and in the process explain to them the wider context of the landscape in which we all operate.
Download it if it’s useful
I have added it to the ‘Toolbox’ section of comms2point0.co.uk as a free download.
Comms people are always up for a challenge, keen to learn, happy to change and still manage to deliver large sprinklings of creativity in and amongst the sometimes carnage in which we ply our trade.
But it’s also helpful to remember – and point out – where we have come from and why we do what we do, in the way that we do it.
Let me know if you think it’s helpful.
And if you have a good name for the phase from 2024 onwards please let me know.
Darren Caveney is creator and owner of comms2point0 and creative communicators ltd
*Sign up for the comms2point0 eMag*
The comms2point0 eMag features exclusive new content, free give-aways, special offers, first dibs on new events and much, much more.
Sound good? Join over 3.4k other comms people who have subscribed. You can sign up to it right here
