A multi-disciplinary approach to delivering communications
The UK Government Communication Plan for 2023/24 sets out what GCS will deliver in the year ahead, bringing together the 8 key themes where communications will support delivery of the Prime Minister’s priorities and the effective operation of public services. It also outlines how we will deliver by continuing to build on the three pillars of the GCS Strategy, with a focus on partnerships and collaboration, new communications technology and skills.
Throughout the plan, you’ll see references to the huge variety of campaigns being delivered by teams across government, aligned to our 8 priority themes. When we talk about campaigns, there’s a tendency to just think about traditional advertising and marketing. But our campaigns should have a firm basis in free and low cost channels. It’s crucial that we bring in expertise from across marketing, external affairs, press, digital, strategic communications, insight and evaluation, and internal communications in order to have the greatest impact.
Hear more from each of our Heads of Discipline below on how they are putting the plan into action this year.
Left: Clara Eaglen; top row (left to right): Andrew Darby, Russell Grossman, Kate Whitty Johnson; bottom row (left to right): Chloe Saklow, Pamela Bremner, Ed Bearryman
Internal Communications, Russell Grossman
Internal communications is there to help people at work understand the value they bring to their department or arm’s-length body (ALB) and to feel valued in return for their contribution. As a discipline, we will support leaders in their role to keep staff informed, engaged, and motivated at work. In doing so, we will help support trust across colleagues and showcase the brilliance of our modern civil service, creating both a positive, inclusive sense of community and positive advocacy for the Government Communications Plan among the very people charged with delivering it. With listening comprising half of all communication, we will also help our organisations to feel comfortable receiving feedback from staff and for those organisations to listen to, identify and address potential issues before they escalate.
Strategic Communications, Clara Eaglen
Strategic communicators will play a pivotal role in delivering the Government Communication Plan 2023-24. We will set direction and co-ordinate communication activity to help deliver the PM’s five priorities and broader goals. We will use our deep understanding of policy areas and audiences to make deliberate choices about how to focus efforts to achieve outcomes. We will ensure messages are evidence based, tell a compelling story over time and ultimately create long-term change – from encouraging businesses to export and grow our economy, to increasing participation in cancer screening, to increasing take-up of energy efficient behaviours. We will use our coordinating function to bring together the vast expertise across all our disciplines. By collaborating, we will speak to audiences with one voice using the most appropriate communication levers, interventions, and technologies.
External Affairs, Kate Whitty Johnson
For the external affairs community, next-level partnerships and collaboration is at the heart of what we are here to deliver. We build partnerships and important strategic relationships that help us to get closer to the audiences we are trying to reach. These relationships help us to unlock valuable insights, increase understanding of our work so our messages land better and partnerships help us to access new channels and voices, to reach audiences the government can’t reach alone. This year, we are focused on nurturing the relationships we have established and creating new partnerships to help us expand our channels further and ensure we are listening to diverse voices and opinions.
Media, Andrew Darby
Media professionals are often the frontline in communicating and explaining government policy to the public and responding to events of national significance. Our work moving forward is aligned to three strategy pillars to help build our capability and skills, grow the community of media professionals across GCS and enhance our profession’s reputation so that we can recruit and retain the best talent. Led by a senior working group, we want to establish a group of volunteers to deliver on these aims to foster innovation, to grow our network and share best practice and to support the development of media specialists at every stage of their career.
Marketing, Chloe Saklow
We are on a mission to transform government marketing by raising its reputation; building a sense of community across the profession; improving capabilities and skills; forging new connections within and beyond the government communications community; and championing innovation. We have a fantastic and growing group of volunteers – let me know if you want to get involved – to help us deliver the mission and who have put forward some great additional ideas. For example – Coffee Roulette to get to know each other better and foster collaboration opportunities, and Failure Club to learn from innovations that haven’t worked. Meanwhile, the Marketing Leaders’ Group is focused on reputation and repositioning marketing as a valuable investment. Watch-out for a celebration of marketing’s greatest hits from last year.
Data & Insight, Pamela Brenner
Everything we do begins and ends with our audience. Whether we’re delivering a complex behaviour change campaign or landing content in a dynamic media landscape, we need to build solutions around audience understanding. Who do we need to reach? What do they need to know? Why should they care? What levers can we pull to encourage a certain response? How can we best reach them? And are we doing what we set out to achieve? Answers to all these questions and more can be provided by the data and insight community.
Our key priorities for the year ahead include:
- Making all communications better users of data so that together we can make smarter decisions
- Enhancing evaluation capabilities so that we can better understand the real-world impact of our comms and learn what works (and what doesn’t)
The closer we work with colleagues across all comms disciplines, the more we can achieve and that means better outcomes for our audiences.
Digital, Ed Bearryman
Through the lens of the Prime Minister’s priorities, we are on a mission to increase public engagement with the work of government. Here’s how:
- Being audience-first – thinking about who we’re trying to reach, where they are, what they care about
- Being platform-specific – flexing our content and comms to match the audience need by platform
- Integrating digital – integrating digital with press, external affairs, evaluation and insight to create one, joined-up comms world
- Driving innovation – finding new ways to tell our stories and engage the public
Embedding these four areas across government, and upskilling teams to deliver, will help to transform the effectiveness of our comms over the next 12 months.