Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners

Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners.

says Jimmy Stewart.

(See, I've managed to squeeze a Christmassy reference in already through an oblique nod to It's a Wonderful Life!)

As Liam made a special mention of my interesting audiences I thought I'd make that the topic of my first post.

I seem to be making something of a speciality of working in academic institutions: first Warwick and now The Open University.

And, of course, the big difference, in terms of audience, is the variety.  Very often at Internal Comms events you hear about trying to engage people 'from the MD to the cleaners' - at a university it's 'from the academics to the cleaners'.  The academics are what make the difference.

I'm readying myself to be pilloried here - but in effect it's more like dealing with a membership organisation than dealing with staff.  Other useful comparisons might be with partnership organisations such as law firms, or with research intensive organisations, or public sector bodies like councils.

This is for two reasons:

1. You have a pool of 'talent' which is aware that it is the engine of the organisation and that everyone else exists to support.
2. A stereotypical academic will prioritise his personal research work (and research collaborators in other institutions), then his department and only then at a push will acknowledge membership of an institution.

This can make it very tricky to engage academic colleagues.  On the other hand, non-academic colleagues can often be very easy to engage - as long as they have PC-access...

Let us not forget the armies of non-desk-based people that it takes to make your average university run: groundspeople, catering staff, cleaners, security and lab technicians to name but a few.  Some of these may speak English as a second language or have limited literacy!

(The pitfalls of the 'non-academic' tag are self evident - don't define people by what they're not.  But what else do you use?  Support staff?  Academic-related?)

If you add to this the unique OU model of splitting your academic staff into central course designers on permanent contacts and in-the-field course deliverers on casual contracts then you're  upping the ante again!

This variety means that despite delving as much as you like into your staff statistics you will never know the best way to communicate with your different stakeholder groups without working with them.  And I don't just mean sending round a staff survey, I mean getting out and understanding the environment in which different stakeholders work and the pressures on their time.

Now, three months in to the new job, I can hardly claim to be a paragon of virtue in this respect - but I know that I will be within a year.  Challenge number 1.

Comments

[Peter Brill]

Casey. Interesting that you use the Jimmy Stewart quote. I use it as the start of my presentation training courses, carefully juxtaposed by two others:

“I'm not here for your amusement. You're here for mine.”
Johnny Rotten

“It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand.”
Charles Dickens

I wonder which one appeals most to the academic within us?

Happy Festive Season

Peter

[Indy Neogy]

Hi Casey,

Couldn't agree more. Partnership organisations make obvious what I believe to be true of most organisations: they are usually composed of more than one "subculture" and there are very few messages which will be heard in the same way by people in every group across the organisation.

I also agree that statistics can't tell you everything. Not only do they rarely point to this differences between local and generic stereotypes (e.g. "academics" vs "OU academics") but also, some important groups can be (depending on the institution) just not big enough to get a sense of statistically. Once the sample size is small, just a couple of shredded surveys and a couple "filled out for fun before the works night out" can throw the results off to one side.