01 December 2009

The fifth lecture in the CIPR guest lecture series was led by NHS communications expert Carl Milner. The NHS Yorkshire and Humberside region, led by Carl, has a population of 5.12 million and covers an area of 15,510 square kilometres, serving major cities such as Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, and York, as well as a number of large towns and rural areas with scattered populations.

The lecture focused on the power of emotional PR and its ability to save lives. Emphasising the importance of a human focus, Carl explained that the core belief behind the team′s campaigns is that reputation is always about keeping your promises.

Carl revealed that he always applies five questions to any PR action- What is the message, when will the receiver be listening, who is the best mail man (who will deliver the message), how will we know when they’ve heard us and most importantly, does the tactic undermine what we have promised?

The lecture also drew attention to the importance of the campaign process, beginning with using data in order to identify the problem, then understanding the issue by knowing what′s wrong. Carl emphasised that the main problem with many campaigns was that they did not continue into the most important stage; gaining an insight and knowing how to fix the problem.

Carl focused a large part of his lecture around a campaign he devised in Doncaster, which has one of the highest lung cancer rates in the country. The campaign aimed to increase the number of men who would go to the doctors in order to check out a cough, in the hope that doctors would then be able to diagnose cases of lung cancer at an early stage. The campaign included innovative stunts such as coughing bus stops, which led to a lot of controversy about how the NHS were spending their money. However, this storm only enhanced the success of the campaign, which led to a 60% increase in the treatment of early stage lung cancer in the area. The unique feature of this campaign was that it was aimed at the daughters of the men at risk, as opposed to directly targeting the males themselves, after research suggested that the men would be more likely to listen to their daughters than anyone else.

Carl also touched upon the growing importance of social media, and spoke of how the NHS has introduced it into their campaigns. An example of this was uploading gory fake video footage of a girl giving birth in the playground to YouTube, in order to convey the contraception message. The campaign, which ran at a very low budget with little effort, received over 3 million hits and led to a flurry of discussion.

Before holding a Q&A session, Carl concluded with three pieces of advice; be proud of your profession, manage reputation and change lives.