I’m concerned about the future of PR

Written by Katie test Davis

As a PR firm founder, it’s my job to watch for macro-trends and patterns across our work. I’m keeping an eye on the big picture and constantly taking a pulse on the audiences (parents, school district administrators, child care providers, etc.) we frequently target through our work.

And honestly? I’m concerned.

I don’t need to run through the litany of challenges we’re facing. You know it — you live it every day. Instead, I want to send up a warning flare about what we’re seeing and how we can shift our work to meet these challenges, head on.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

Our audiences are burnt out in a particularly complicated way.

The child and family work that we do centers and relies on women. Women make up 73 percent of the nonprofit workforce, 92.4 percent of childcare workers, 76 percent of full-time philanthropic foundation staff and 74 percent of teachers.

And women? Women are not okay right now.

When you pull back, you get a really matrixed picture of suffering – just as Claire Suddeth describes in her piece “It’s Getting Harder to Be a Woman in America”. She writes, “I don’t know what else to do. I work, I go to my prenatal appointments, my daughter follows me into the bathroom for the thousandth time, and I wonder: When will women reach a breaking point? For years now we’ve been telling ourselves, if we can just get hired, if we can just get paid fairly, if we just lean in—and then, through the pandemic, if we can just hold on until schools reopen, or vaccines become available, or this week’s crisis has passed, things will be better. But it’s not getting better.”

And that’s the baseline. Then, we must recognize the women of color in our spaces who are working-while-wounded.

Friend of Forthright, Sabrina Slade, recently shared an important article on LinkedIn: “I was physically feeling the toll of racial equity on my health, and it frightened me…I became a master at my own self-care regime. Yet, it wasn’t enough. I wondered, was it too late for me? Why weren’t my self-care efforts sustaining me?... I am fully aware that I am part of a sector that both benefits me, and historically excludes funding to organizations led by people who look like me. I’m working-while-wounded in the work of racial equity -- working to address systemic issues that also impact me. My position in philanthropy does little to shield me from the experience of being proximate to systemic racism.”

When you zoom out from just our field of work, to how we’re doing as a society, the answer remains: not well.

I’ve been haunted by this New York Times article “Pedestrian Deaths Spike in U.S. as Reckless Driving Surges”, ever since I read it this spring, and in particular this section: “We’re so saturated with fears about the virus and what it’s going to do,” Dr. Spiegel said. “People feel that they get a pass on other threats.” Dr. Spiegel said another factor was “social disengagement,” which deprives people of social contact, a major source of pleasure, support and comfort. Combine that loss with overloading our capacity to gauge risks, Dr. Spiegel said, and people are not paying as much attention to driving safely. “If they do, they don’t care about it that much,” Dr. Spiegel said. “There’s the feeling that the rules are suspended and all bets are off.”

SIGN ME UP

Our typical communications channels aren’t working as well as they used to.

A recent Axios study caught my attention. The lead says it all: “Engagement with news content has plunged…Despite a slew of major stories, readers have retrenched further in 2022. The war in Ukraine, a series of deadly mass shootings, the Jan. 6 hearings and the Supreme Court's revocation of abortion rights haven't been able to capture the same level of attention spurred by the onset of the pandemic and the 2020 election.”

We’re also seeing that engagement and impressions are down on social media — across our clients and beyond — prompting everyone to wonder if social media is worth the return on time and effort investment.

This stood out to me: “Asked if the social media era is over, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told Axios last month in an interview, "I don't think it's over. But I do think consumers are looking for more and different ways to relate to one another.”

Harmful messages focused on the individual are thriving.

Our advocacy work on behalf of children and families requires people to care about each other and rally around one another. This is tricky when you combine the idea that people are crispy burnt out and not engaging with the news.

As psychologist Jean Kim writes in her scathing cultural analysis “How America Fell Into Toxic Individualism” in Psychology Today: “Everything that had been stewing in the house of cards has now led to an ongoing free-for-all, a chaotic brew of incompetence and indifference magnifying our society’s worst tendencies… in what has become weaponized selfishness, a cult of me, myself, and I, that will be hard to repair in the years to come, if we can ever get there again.”

Messaging focused on individualism – messaging that has an underlying frame of “You, person, are doing great, you are fine, you are right. Everyone around you is wrong.” – is thriving in this environment. This means messaging focused on supporting others, especially those your audience doesn’t immediately identify with, is going to have a harder time breaking through and resonating.

So what’s a communicator to do?

Well, I have two urgent things I want our community of child and family advocates to do.

Gather your people.

As we’ve said before, in times of crisis, root down in your people. This means that you need to double down on your most ardent supporters. They need your care and feeding right now to stay connected to your work and your mission.

You need to remind them of your impact, even if they know you well. Because remember: not only are they not getting information the same way they used to, they are tired and burnt out.

This is the time to stay true-blue to your best donors, your closest allies and your internal teammates. As Graham-Pelton writes: “With high gift officer turnover and fewer events due to the pandemic, many donors feel abandoned right now. There’s an opportunity to be the nonprofit that is showing up for your donors. Talk to donors about the impacts of their giving in the world or in your community. If your case for support does not communicate this, now is the time to rethink your case, because for donors, giving is less about keeping your organization’s lights on and more about supporting work that has tangible outcomes.”

Simplify Your Message and Repeat It

A typical, effective highway billboard has 7 or fewer words. This is your goal right now — your organization’s messaging needs to be as simple as a billboard. Can someone, driving 70 mph down the highway, grasp your work’s impact? If not, reduce. Simplify. Streamline. Keep going until the answer to that question is yes.

Then, tell one story. I wrote about this a few weeks ago and it bears repeating — telling a single story, with a single ask, is more important now than ever before.

The marketing rule of seven says that people need to hear something seven times before they remember it. I joke with our clients that we need to double that these days. People will need to hear something 14 times before it sinks in. Triple down on your message and hold steady.

The bottom line.

Here’s my hope: we take our own (often limited) bandwidth as advocates and narrow our focus. Draw our people close, remind them of our mission. Then center extremely clear messaging that supporters can rally around.

And then slowly but surely, we can break through individualism, stand out in people’s minds, rally our supporters and reimagine our world.

We’re right here with you.

PS - I know that was a lot. I remain hopeful, because in the words of Michael Tubbs, “Pessimism is a luxury. I remain optimistic not because I am blinded but because I believe in agency and that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

Forthright Advises