Lessons from Eight Years of Football Programs

Over the course of eight years, I worked in various capacities on high school football programs.  For the most part, my role was advertising sales and project management, but in many, many cases, I had to get hands-on in creative direction, layout, production and in the development of copy or individual ads for businesses and families.  I didn’t do this in my role at O’Brien Communications, but rather as a parent volunteer.

Without getting into great detail, the process usually started in the early Spring and culminated with a print run prior to the first game at the end of August.  With so many people involved in the effort, and almost all of it volunteer or in-kind, a football program is much different from producing an annual report or CSR report. 

With this in mind, here are some of the lessons from producing high school football programs:

• Most peoples’ favorite pictures of their kids are grainy, hard to see and sometimes coffee-stained.
• Underclassmen families will always complain there is too much emphasis on the seniors. 
• Senior families will forget their underclassmen complaints from the previous year and always demand there be more emphasis on the seniors.
• Never ask high school football players for creative input.  There's a reason their coaches always look on edge and yell a lot.
• You can’t double-check name spellings enough.
• Most small retail businesses still don’t use email.
• High school activities would not exist without the support of orthodontists and pizza shops.
• People love pictures, usually of people, always of themselves.
• Deadlines are meaningless to most people.
• No matter how much professional experience you have in supervising photo shoots, it’s always best to get out of the way and let a cheerleader mom run the group photo shoot. 
• The most important thing you can do when overseeing a photo shoot of teenagers is to watch the group and make sure no one is using nonverbal communication that could eventually make the photo unusable.

Update on O'Brien Communications' Web Site

The off-site servers that host O’Brien Communications’ Web site, along with many others, had apparently been hacked.  For this reason, we took down the full OBrienCommunications.com Web site and have re-posted a summary site.  Meanwhile, I will continue to use this blog space for current information on and from O’Brien Communications.  Thanks.

We Get to Play...

In the spirit of October baseball that’s about to descend on the nation, I thought I’d use a Disney movie about baseball that’s starting to emerge as a classic to support a point. The motion picture is “The Rookie,” a true story about a high school baseball coach that had missed his chance at Major League Baseball fame and fortune because of an injury many years before.

Now, a husband and father with bills to pay and obligations to keep, the coach played by Dennis Quaid, goes about the business of living and coaching. One thing leads to another and much to his surprise, the coach gets noticed and has that second chance at the majors that he never dreamed would come. Of course, he’d have to earn his way up by spending time in the minor league system. That’s the struggle of the story.

He knows time is not on his side and this is his last chance. He’s put his life on hold to pursue his dream, and it’s creating hardships at home. He misses his family and wonders if it’s all worth it. The stress shows in his performance. He’s in a slump, and as negativity dominates his thinking, it all starts to spiral.

Through the course of it all, he has an epiphany. He finally remembers what it was about the game that drew him to it as a boy. He loves baseball. When he was a kid, every day on the ball field was pure joy, and seen by him as an opportunity to live his passion, if only for a few hours each time. The solution becomes clear, change his mindset.  To get back to the love of the game, his passion for it, and the notion that every day he gets to put on a uniform and take the field is an opportunity, not a job, an obligation, a struggle.

The turning point of the story is when he realizes this and then returns to the locker room with a new attitude. While not profound, the line stands out as a classic. He approaches the young star of the team and says simply, “You know what we get to do today, Brooks? We get to play baseball.”

It’s a great movie moment even if you’re not a baseball fan.

So how does this apply to communications?

Quite simply, we are often confronted with communications challenges or business challenges where communications plays a role. We become preoccupied with the nature of the challenge or the work. And sometimes we forget that what may have drawn us to the profession is a love of writing, strategizing or problem-solving.

Every now and then, it’s good remember our own “love of the game.” Play ball!

First Response in a Crisis

The concept of first responders came to mind recently when I was involved in a discussion on how fire, police and emergency medical personnel respond to emergency situations. While the term may have been around a long time, “first responders” took on new meaning on September 11, 2001 when we saw these everyday heroes run toward the problem while trying to help everyone else escape.

Their real-life example provides a certain model for those who may serve as “first responders” of a different sort – crisis communications.

That said, the first thing that a first responder does is assess the extent of the problem, who is affected, how they might be affected, and the potential risks to the public. This all serves to help alert all who might be affected to at the very least, remove them from or keep them safe from danger. First responders must follow clearly established protocols for establishing a perimeter around a problem area, and then they must enter the fray, doing what they’ve been trained to do to take control of the situation and then resolve it.

No matter who you talk to, a police officer, a firefighter or a paramedic, all will tell you how important it is to have clear lines of communication and an established chain of communication and decision-making so that first responders can do their jobs.

In the business world, an effective first-response strategy is to apply some of these basic principles to crisis communications:

1. Assess the risks to those already affected and those who could be affected.
2. Make sure the public well-being is top of mind from the very outset.
3. Make sure your response team is properly trained and briefed on the situation before they get actively involved.
4. Have established operational protocols in place, including chains for communication and timely decision-making.
5. And make sure that you have sound systems in place for communication within the team.

All of this is very basic and very fundamental to the larger process of gathering information, assembling a crisis communications team, and creating the strategies, messages and action plan required to put forth an effective crisis communications response.

Remembering September 11, 2001

It’s been ten years and a common question these days is, “Where were you on 9/11?”

My memory is probably less interesting than most, but for that matter, I remember being in a meeting with a colleague right next to the Pittsburgh airport. The air traffic outside became a distraction over the course of the hour we met. By the time we finished, as I was leaving, an administrative staff member asked me if I had a plane to catch. I said, “No.” She said that was good because all of the air traffic was backed up due to a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

I hustled to my car and listened to the latest on the radio. By that time, it was being reported that two planes had hit the towers and one of them may have been from Delta. I have a niece who is a flight attendant stationed in Boston at the time. I spent the ride calling my sister to see if my niece was okay. She was fine. By the time I got back to home base, like everyone else, I was fixated on the live TV coverage the rest of the day.

A few months earlier, I had been on the 93rd floor of one of the towers in a meeting with people from Fred Alger Management. This was in my prior position just before starting my own business in May of that year. I wondered how the people I had met were doing on that day.

In the days to come, like so many others, I gained a new appreciation for so many things and continued to watch the news more carefully than I already had been doing.

Eventually, an article in a business publication reported that 35 of Fred Alger’s 39 employees at the World Trade Center had lost their lives on 9/11.

This past week, National Geographic has been running a series of compelling documentaries centered on 9/11, focusing on how leaders at that time felt and dealt with the minute-to-minute decisions they had to make.

If you have the chance to spend an hour or so watching, you won’t regret it. It’s a very good way to step back and reflect on how 9/11 changed this country’s worldview.

The Art of the "Thank You"

For as much as I try to focus in this space on communications topics where I have enough good experience to provide some value, I have to admit that there is one area where I could stand some improvement. That area for me is the art of the “thank you.”

I have a friend and colleague who is the absolute model of the proper way to thank people, whether the context is business or personal. I’ve come to expect that after nearly every interaction with her, she will surely follow up with the appropriate level of acknowledgement. If we meet for coffee, she’ll likely send an email shortly thereafter just saying how good it was to catch up. If we’ve worked on a project together, she usually sends a handwritten ‘thank you’ note that is written in such a way that you know she put some thought into it.

When she was a client, she was well known for how she would thank everyone who supported her efforts in any number of ways, but always accompanied by a nice ‘thank you’ note. I’d mention her name here, but I’m sure it would be against her wishes to call attention to her quiet practice of treating others with respect and appreciation.

What I’ve learned is there is a right way to thank people, and when you do it, it really can strike a positive chord with others. The key is first to be consistent about it. Don’t just thank people after particularly big projects or challenging times. Thank them all of the time.

When thanking people, consider the various ways to do it, from a simple email, to a handwritten note, accompanied by a token of appreciation in the form of a gift card, a specialty item, or even balloons or flowers. Handwritten notes are not only very personal, but because they can physically be saved (unlike a phone call or email) in a box or a drawer, they are quite often kept by their recipients for days when they need a pick-me-up. Handwritten notes can have a very long shelf-life.

And whenever thanking people, make sure to put some thought into the words you choose. Don’t just use stock language that suggests you have not given the message proper attention. Rather, in your note, tell them specifically what they did for you and why it was so important to you. Then thank them from the bottom of your heart.

I wish I could feature all of these tips in the context of a skill I’ve mastered, but in this area I am still a work in progress. But as I’ve been on the receiving end of proper ‘thank you’ notes, and as I have tried to work at it, I have gained an appreciation for the difference it can make.

Five Things They Don't Teach You in PR School

Since I graduated from college PR School has emerged as the primary feeder for the public relations profession. Unlike today’s PR graduates and like many from my generation, I entered the PR field after spending the earliest part of my career working in the media and after studying journalism in college. In the many years since, colleges have produced countless numbers of very bright and talented PR professionals who learned about everything from communications ethics and new media technologies, to how to create winning communications strategies and how to integrate research into public relations campaigns.

This is not to say college PR instruction hasn’t had some major failings. The dead horse I refuse to beat in this space (beyond this paragraph) is the ever-increasing number of incompetent writers graduating with PR degrees. This is probably the most common complaint in the profession when it comes to PR curricula, and it seems to be largely ignored by the university community. Most PR hiring managers would rather see resumes that showcase extensive and rigorous writing instruction rather than courses like “Media and Sports Relations,” or “Sex, Myth & Media.”

There are, however, some lesser known areas where PR majors enter the profession with little to no clue as to what they may need to do to be effective professionals. Let’s call these the “Five Things They Don’t Teach You in PR School.”

1. “Nothing Happens Until You Make the Sale” – I wish I could take credit for this, but I’m quoting the founder of a company I once worked for, though I doubt he was the first to say it. Bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Public relations is a business whether you work for an agency or a nonprofit. You can’t be effective in public relations if you can’t convince people to buy into a strategy, a creative approach, and garner the necessary funding and resources to pursue that approach. Sales skills and a willingness to sell are major assets.

2. Menial Details Matter – Proofing, media lists, checking spellings and titles, hand-delivering important documents that could have been e-mailed or snail-mailed. Sometimes the most important things we can do for our clients and companies are the most menial. While there may be a place in PR for fantastic cocktail parties and nationwide media events, we can never be above the seemingly unimportant tasks. Remember the old saying, “The devil is in the details?” It’s true.

3. Some Organizations Deserve Their Reputations – It’s almost assumed in PR school that through PR, we can save organizations from themselves simply through communications. There are times communications cannot solve systemic problems. If an organization consistently neglects its important stakeholders, an employee barbecue, a news release and a new Web site can’t fix that. If the organization has been consistently insular PR can’t save the day when the organization finally decides to communicate when it is under fire from the media. Goodwill must be earned over time.

4. Journalists Build Reputations on the Change They Effect – There are many reasons for the changing behaviors of today’s journalists, from the economics of shrinking newsrooms and shrinking market share, to the rise of the “new media’s” influence. Regardless, if you are a journalist wanting to make a name for yourself today you know this is best achieved, not simply by being a good reporter, but by effecting change – forcing management changes, shaming elected officials into resigning, or even driving changes to legislative or corporate policy.

5. Keep it Human – Members of the current generation graduating from college are considered “digital natives,” a term meant to describe people who’ve grown up online through any number of electronic devices. They are not the only ones however, who may have fallen into the trap of distancing themselves from real, in-the-flesh, human interaction. Thanks to email, smart phones, texting and social media, the need to physically meet or even talk personally on a live telephone call seem to be unnecessary. A business editor recently told me one of the best ways to reach her now is simply by picking up the phone and calling her. She said she only gets around five or six real telephone calls a day. Good advice for any PR pro.