In the current financial climate, however important or worthy a service offer, no sector is immune to the collective belt tightening of supporters, donators and potential stakeholders.
Expensive mass media campaigns to raise awareness and promote services are out of reach for most organisations. In fact, evidence is showing that very few of these approaches, however well funded, controversial or emotionally moving, have proven successful.
The fact remains that the need for awareness, for support and to raise issues with the public has never been greater. Campaigns and initiatives need to be both economical, specific and highly successful, and rightly so. If you take time to get something right first time, to make your message meet a human need, it should not need doing again.
Organisations and those who operate on their behalf can no longer create complete systems purely based on opinion, and distribute to enthusiastic audiences in the vague hope that there will be a percentage of uptake.
Events and consultations are a becoming a far more suitable proposition for transferring information, quickly and efficiently to large audiences. They not only allow distribution of key issues but are ideal for discussion, debate, workshops and lateral thinking exercises, all far more effective ways of resolving issues and discovering creative solutions. Rather than acting as a climax to a campaign, these events needs to sit as a significant point of a expanding circular process. Developing a programme based on delegate involvement, acting to shape the process during the event and evaluating based on feedback to develop a continual programme of activity. The key to this approach being a changing mindset from events for dissemination to opportunities for collaboration.
Conferences that include service user speakers, public consultations and staff taking part in formulating ‘vision and values’ all conclude that if you want something to work, ask those who are going to use it. If you want to change a community for the better then consult them on what is wrong with it and help them to uncover how to put it right. This is putting the power back in the hands of those who need it most, communities gathering around their own cause and resolving it, a kind of ‘collective self care’.
So the role of the health and public sector communication is shifting from a position of distributing advice from above, toward being amongst those they serve and listening, learning and providing support for the kind of services they need.
If the formulation of new initiatives are structured by users and are implemented with feedback and evolution platforms in place, allowing continual involvement, they will become self supporting. If users participate in creation and own the project it may go beyond sustainable and do more than you could ever of anticipated.
