“The outcome of a successful communications strategy should be that your institute has fantastic relationships with its audiences.”
Description
How do you communicate science so complex that even scientists find it hard to understand? How can communicators cope with the vast number of digital channels and platforms used today? What does 'values-based communication' mean and how can it help you develop a fantastic relationship with your audiences?
Join Peter Barker in conversation with Ali Bailey - Director of Communications and Public Engagement at The Francis Crick Institute, one of the world's largest biomedical research institutions, located in the heart of London.
Conversation
The below excerpt has been condensed and edited from the original for the sake of brevity.
Peter: What aspects of your work are especially complex?
Mind boggling biology
Ali Bailey: ‘Biology is particularly complex and difficult to put across. It’s highly specialist and sometimes quite difficult even for scientists at the Crick to understand each other's work.
And with biology everything's alive, so it's infinite numbers of chemical reactions going on and they all seem to feed back on each other in a mind boggling loop. So it's quite difficult to put that across.’
Same story different channels
Communications has become more complex as a discipline. When I started at an in-house role in the NHS I was in a team of two, and we really only did two things:
We did a monthly bulletin for staff, a kind of core brief session.
We put out press releases to the media.
By the time I left that job we were running the website within communications, we had social media just coming on stream. And so you've got this complexity now of trying to tell, maybe the same story, but in multiple different ways, in channels that are behaving very differently, engaging very different audiences.
Values-based complexity
Working at a strategic level I'm quite interested in values-based complexity.
We're communicating for the purpose of having a relationship with other people. And that’s particularly relevant when we're trying to build relationships with other organisations, for instance, that have their own set of values and their own aspirations that don't quite match ours.
But there's also value-based complexity within an organisation. Organisations like the Crick like to create a set of values and they'll describe what those values are but within that organisation there will be people coming in that have slightly different values, or they've got values that might conflict with what we [as an organisation] are doing.
For example, you've often got staff who care passionately about sustainability and climate change and yet they're working in organisations that have to burn a lot of carbon to do their work.
And I think that when it comes to having a successful communications strategy, the outcome of that should be that your institute has fantastic relationships with its audiences and an appreciation of that values-based complexity is difficult to get to. It requires a lot of careful insight and thinking about where everyone else is coming from.
Peter: How do you unravel that complexity?
Single motivating idea
A good communications strategy should have a single motivating idea, if possible. I got closest to that when I worked at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, which is a very big hospital with about 20, 000 staff and massive complexity around it.
The communication strategy was to ‘make a big hospital feel smaller’.
The strategy was really helpful because you could take that idea and make it work in lots of ways. It was about having person-to-person, face-to-face briefings instead of just sticking out emails. It was about the language that we used, the tone of voice, it was about the leadership being more visible, much more focused on customer service, even details like minimising the use of capital letters, which every communicator likes to do!
Creative storytelling at the Crick
At the Crick, our strategy is focused on telling a compelling story. That’s to say, we've talked a lot about the Crick as an institute because it’s still new, it’s just over five years since it opened, and there’s been a lot to establish about what the Crick is, why we work the way we do, how we've been set up, and what we're here to deliver.
And now the Crick's moving into a phase where the proof is in the pudding. We really need to start talking more about the science and what the impact of that science might be in society.
So we're working hard as part of our strategy to develop a creative storytelling confidence within the team, so that we can tell those stories and we can share them with audiences. And we can do that in the current environment because we can run and manage our own digital channels. And we can actually amass a decent sized audience, which was not the case ten years ago.
Peter: What’s one piece of advice you’ve been given in your career that you keep coming back to?
A piece of advice I was given once by a doctor who I worked with was, “Don't buy into the organisation too much”
I'd put together a set of photographs that had some quite sexy images of surgeons doing their work. I was quite new into the NHS at the time, and I thought the images were great, but it was way too inwardly focused.
I thought about that advice a lot because I think communicators need to have one foot inside the organisation and one foot outside, and to balance those two perspectives. Part of our job is to actually bring the outside world in.’
Peter: Can you recommend a book that’s inspired you?
‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman.
It tells you a lot about how communications really work, and behavioural economics, it’s a really interesting book.
Also, I was lucky enough to do a master's in social innovation quite recently, so I've had a grounding in sociology and some of that has been hugely useful. My advice would be just go on Google Scholar and type in ‘communication strategy’ or anything else that you're working on because someone will have spent some time studying it.’