Good communications advice is all about common sense, not spin

Oxfam admitted it made ‘a serious error” by hiring a man who previously been dismissed over sexual misconduct allegations, writes Terry Prone

Two weird compulsions take over in public-facing organisations when they hit a crisis. The organisations can be governments or major corporations or NGOs in the charity or development area. It doesn’t matter what sector they’re in, the same two urges take over. Always.

The first is, in the words of the anxious, “to put something out”.

The second is “to put someone out”.

“Putting something out” means the issuance of a statement. “Putting someone out” has great appeal as long as the someone isn’t you, although it tends, as a communications decision, to result in the incineration of a human being. The people who promulgate the putting out of a statement believe that this is what PR people are for and that it’s a magical process which will put all the critics and accusers back in their boxes from which, it is firmly believed, bad PR let them escape.

The PR people, caught between a rock and a hard place, tend to agree to put out the statement. Or because they’re so far down the pecking order, have no choice.

That’s the first bit of a ritual dance which then moves on to the preparation of a Q&A document. If you haven’t met a PR person’s Q&A document, you haven’t lived. It consists of all the questions they hope not to be asked, with answers so formal and so influenced by the lawyers that it takes five readings of any answer before a hack could begin to understand what’s being said.

Sometimes the two urges come together in the belief that if the organisation is to have a top manager interviewed by a friendly media outlet, this will allow the manager to utter the inhuman but legally safe answers on the Q&A crib sheet. If anybody sensible intervenes, telling the organisation that they’re still heading up the first side of the crisis bell curve and getting chatty at this point would be ill-advised, they get looked at as if they are: a) lazy; b) crazy; and c) incompetent. The corporate credo is that if they don’t put someone out, they will, in effect, cede the ground to the enemy. Which makes superficial sense. But only superficial sense, not least because it begs the question: who’s the enemy?

Take Oxfam as a case in point. Oxfam’s enemy is the sleazeball having sex with prostitutes in the middle of the humanitarian crisis that was (and still is) Haiti. Not the people who exposed said sleazeball. Not the people who exposed other sleazeballs within the organisation playing variants on the central squalid theme. Not the charities regulator. Not the Government that part-funds Oxfam. Not the media.

This is where good communications advice is all about common sense, not spin. This is where a calm external voice says: “Lads, yiz’re in the wrong. No, no. Silence. You’re in the wrong. Clear? Now, we have to find out just how deeply in the wrong you are. Not start talking about nameless enemies with unspecified agendas.”

No doubt some sensible person said that to the top bods in Oxfam, and no doubt, as is classic bad crisis-management, they listened, not to her or him but to their own need for action, calculated, in their belief, to lead to self-justification. That’s clear from what chief executive Mark Goldring said when he was interviewed at the lead-in to the weekend by Decca Aitkenhead of The Guardian. He identified the enemy. Or, rather, misidentified the enemy. The enemy, he stated, were people with an anti-aid agenda. These nameless anti-aiders were, he said, “gunning” for Oxfam, which, as a result, had been “savaged”.

No. Here is the narrative of this stinker. Once upon a time, a disaster hit Haiti and an internationally admired and globally respected aid organisation named Oxfam moved in to help, along with dozens of other, lesser organisations. This primus inter pares NGO went to work, but it also, at the highest level, engaged in parties involving local sex workers. That’s bad enough, before we even get to discussing the possible ages of the sex workers. It’s just bad, full stop.

It’s bad enough, when it was discovered, to generate internal action, with Oxfam firing four staffers and accepting the resignations of three. Internal action, please note. This was not caused by external attack by anti-aiders, although in fairness, if the anti-aiders had known about this squalid partying, they might have gone “gunning” for, and “savaged” the NGO. The NGO, perhaps because of that, quietly got rid of its bad ’uns and didn’t tell many people about it, thus ensuring one of the bad ’uns landed another grand job in the aid area in no time at all, thank you very much.

When the truth burst on the public, the current CEO made an appearance on radio which didn’t dampen down the criticisms. But the “put someone out” urge was not assuaged, and he then agreed, cancelled, and then delivered on an interview with a major newspaper. As he and his colleagues started to read the resultant copy, they may have felt vindicated. The writer talked of his courage and of the unguarded candid way he spoke to her alone. So far, so good.

Then she says, with sympathy, that he hasn’t slept for six nights. Now, he may not have slept much in the last six nights, but if he hadn’t slept at all, he might be dead. One way or the other, it’s a disabling amount of insomnia. If you’re a commercial pilot who for some reason hasn’t really slept in a week, it would be inevitable that you’d disqualify yourself, in the immediate aftermath, from taking charge of a flight with 300 souls aboard. For the CEO to embark on an in-depth interview in the same situation is mind-boggling, given that Oxfam has a lot more than 300 souls on board and that the story is morphing every hour, with more recent allegations emerging of sexual abuse at Oxfam charity shops.

In that situation, of course you are going to be unguarded and candid. Unguarded and candid gives great newspaper copy but can seem pretty damn reckless and unrealistic when we’re in charge of the lives, not just the livelihoods, of thousands of people throughout the world.

Unguarded and candid led this probably good man to say things he shouldn’t have said.

In a crisis, if you give a press conference, every media person jumps up and down on you but feels you at least had the courage to face the music.

If, on the other hand, you give an interview to one journalist from one outlet, every other outlet’s nose is dislocated and every other outlet has to cover its competitor’s coup but do more than simply re-print it. Which in turn means that secondary coverage of such an interview is likely to be hostile. The simplest example of this hostility was The Telegraph headline. Here it is:

Oxfam boss:

What did we do?

Murder babies in cots?

In this instance, “putting someone out” meant exposing an exhausted CEO to his own naïveté, with concomitant damage to him, his organisation, and sector.

If you haven’t met a PR person’s Q&A document, you haven’t lived