This quote is hitting home for lots of folks now…whether you’re a non-profit organization, a school district or a business (or government!):

Transparency has become the order of the day. People want the opportunity to shape a company’s products and services.
Steve Borsch
principal, Marketing Directions Inc

Here’s one story from a colleague that caught my attention:

At a contentious, bond committee meeting recently, the need for crafting a communications plan came up. The desire expressed by community members was for transparency. In no time, even though there was only 15 minutes allotted for the topic, there was a list of must-haves and a ferocious discussion that grew to an hour and a half. Could it be that community members are demanding more openness and transparency, less management of image, by school districts?

Here’s a list of the demands:

• blog with regular posting schedule
• audio/video recording
• streaming video of meetings
• easy way for the community to participate in conversations

In short, a potential public relations nightmare for any school district to consider. To simplify the story, I’ve re-written it as a conversation. Let me know how effective it is, ok?

“Man,” he started, “it was unbelievable. This was supposed to only take about 15 minutes and it turned into an hour discussion with everyone throwing out requests to video, audio, blog and having the Press present and more.”
“I could see how you could do the streaming video piece,” I ventured thinking about uStream.tv and Mogulus.com as possibilities. Mogulus.com would allow for multiple cameras to be setup and stream live conversations. But, what about the privacy issues? Did they really want meetings that were supposed to be open but weren’t because people would be afraid to talk, broadcast live to the world?
“How did you handle the desire for streaming video?”
“We ruled it out saying that it would use up bandwidth that was in short supply during student testing.”
“That almost sounds plausible, but…aren’t these meetings taking place in the evenings and on Saturday? How could the hit on the District’s bandwidth be THAT significant?” He simply smiled.
“Ok, if video is out, what did you do about the audio recording? Surely that’s too easy.”
“Committee members would have to have recorders out every table, and that would be too complicated to edit the audio files and post them. And, if you started editing, someone could accuse you and say you’d edited too much.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I responded. “So what did you finally decide that you could do?”
“Start a blog using WordPress and establish editors from the group at large. Designate a person at each table and have them scribe the conversations. This would prevent unwanted statements from finding their way into the public record.”
“Now,” he leaned in, “get this. We have to put together a communications plan about the use of the blog in this school district committee and public forum work.”

“A communications plan?” I asked. My mind drew a blank. Usually, my approach to a communications plan was to fire off an email before the “opposition” knows what’s going on, or publish a blog entry (that no one reads) striving for transparency.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “Thank goodness the Public Relations Manager was present.”
“Did you have to contribute anything to the Plan?”
“I probably will. For example, I wonder if I’ll have to explain the different roles and responsibilities of the editors and bloggers in WordPress. That might be helpful.”
“How do you know what you’ll need to contribute? Has anyone called you yet?”
“No,” he replied. “No one has called me yet.”

The story piqued my interest as well. As an avid reader of The ClueTrain Manifesto and Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae, I’m curious as to what would constitute a Communications Plan. You see, my idea of a communication plan certainly isn’t perfect, and probably isn’t as good as this:

While you’ve been hiring consultants to create a slick corporate intranet, establishing policies about who gets to post what, and creating a chain of command to ensure that only appropriate and approved materials show up on your internal corporate home page, your engineers, scientists, researchers — hell even the marketing folks — have been creating little Web sites for their own use.

No one is controlling what’s posted on them except the people doing the posting. No one is making sure that the corporate logo is in the right place. No one is making sure that the writing is official, officious, and as dull as the pencil drawer of a recently downsized middle manager.

A communications plan flies in the face of that 2nd paragraph and it’s ludicrous to imagine a blog changing anything when it is just…meatballs heaped on a sundae:

The meatballs are the foundation, the things we need (and sometimes want). These are the commodities that so many businesses are built on.

The sundae toppings (hot fudge and the like) are the New Marketing, the social networks, Google, blogs and fancy stuff that make people all excited.

The challenge most organizations face: they try to mix them. They attempt to slap new marketing onto old and end up with nothing but a failed website.

In this scenario my friend shared, the blog is what the people want, so you give them a blog…but it’s a blog that is too tightly controlled…and that just won’t work.

To get a better understanding of where blogs might fit into this PR-centric view of the world, I started googling and ran across these:

• How to Develop a Communications Plan
• The Communication Plan
• Dave Fleet’s free eBook (which was a pain to read the way he published it)
• An MS Excel template for a Communications Plan

Is your organization slapping a meatball sundae together? How do you help them re-align what they’re doing?

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