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How to Build and Keep a Consistent Message from the Government
                                        Address to acop conference
                                                   Bilbao
                                               17 June 2010
Let me start with a disclaimer.
I am not a communications professional,
In fact I started out aiming to be a mathematics teacher. Unfortunately I got waylaid and found myself
teaching all right but not at a secondary school as I had planned, but at a University, and not in
mathematics but in Economics and public policy.
None of which should have lead me to be talking to you today about how to build and keep consistent
messages in government.
That path started when I left academia to start advising the Minister of Housing in the Labour government
in New Zealand in the late 1980s.
Some might say it was all down hill from there.

Having had the experience of having to put my academic work on economics and public policy into
practice by advising across a range of different portfolios, the wonderful people of New Zealand decided
to give me some experience of working for the Opposition.
My work over the next few years involved not only helping to redevelop the overall Labour policy
programme, but also leading the research programmes for the Opposition.

That taught me a lot about campaigning, messaging and politics in general.

Then eventually the good people of New Zealand decided to let us have another go at running the
country, so for three parliamentary terms I was the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister.

So I reiterate I am not coming at this discussion today from the point of view of a communications
professional but what I would hope to do is to provide you with some of the lessons I learnt along the way
about government messaging, in the hope that there may be some insights you can draw from that which
may be relevant to you.

The key point I want to make to you today is that building and keeping a consistent message in
government is a different challenge to messaging in any other arena not only because political messaging
is much different from corporate messaging overall, but also that messaging from government is much
different than the challenges of messaging from opposition.
On the other hand some things about messaging are the same wherever you start.

Difference between Opposition and Government
Many of us end up in advisory positions in governments having come through the undergraduate college
called the Opposition.

In that college we have learnt a number of valuable lessons about how to get our message across, and
we must have been reasonably successful at it at least for a short period of time because we are now in
government.

Unfortunately that undergraduate college very seldom has good courses in the differences between
government and opposition, so there is a danger that we expect the same techniques to be successful.
In reality there is a significant difference between the challenges of messaging in government and
messaging in opposition, and equally as big a difference between the challenges of messaging during
election campaigns and during “normal” periods of government (if there ever is such a thing).
So let me spend a little time on what I found to be the most significant differences between being in
Government and being in the Opposition, from the point of view of messaging.
First let me say it is much more fun being in government because at long last you get to actually change
the world. Unfortunately along with that comes the bit that is not so easy to deal with and that is that as a



                                                                                                            1
result of being in government you also have a responsibility to change the world. And that “responsibility”
word makes a big difference.
Suddenly you move from being “responsible” only in a very generic sense for being a ‘good” opposition
to actually having to take responsibility. That responsibility comes in a number of different forms

     1. You are now responsible to and for all the citizens, not just the ones “on your side”
     2. You are now responsible for all the government departments not just the ones that you are
         interested in. and finally and perhaps most annoyingly
     3. You are responsible for whatever happens, whether you had anything to do with it or not!
All of these factors have to be taken into account as you plan your messaging.

The second big difference between opposition and government is that you suddenly get to work with, or
for, or against, (depending on how things are going), your public service.
So suddenly you move from being dependant on a small number of advisors (most of whom at least
share your own political values), to having access to a vast array of advice. But along with that advice
comes a few other added extras.
First each of your departments has their own Minister and any senior public servant worth their title will
figure that part of their job in life is to co-opt their latest Minister to agree to all the things the department
has been trying to get Ministers to agree with for years.
That may sound a little cynical but in my experience it is also the reality. As a new government you may
well be coming in with a clear manifesto for change and in that case the public servants can be expected
to have studied your manifesto and will be ready with a spread of advice ranging from how quickly they
could implement your grand plan to the 25 good reasons why it would now be either foolhardy or
impossible to do any of the things your manifesto promised.
How you handle that range of advice will be crucial to how effective your government is going to be over
the long term, but for the purposes of my talk today the important point to note is that the advice your
Ministers will be getting will not be coming from a consistent value position. Your Ministers (and their
teams) will have to do the values analysis which will guide them in terms of what advice to accept and
what to reject.
That quality of that values analysis is the first step in achieving a consistent message in government.
But I will come back to that later.
The final point I want to make about the influence of the public service, is that not only do they provide the
advice, they also produce a large proportion of the communications which come out from a government.
That is an important consideration when you are thinking about how to manage the consistency of your
government messages, because if your “formal” government communications are inconsistent with your
“political” messaging the public will soon notice. .

The third big difference between government and opposition is that in government you no longer have the
luxury of choosing the issues you want to talk about.
Part of the problem with being responsible for, and to everybody and everything, is that you have to be
prepared to talk about an issue even if it is not the thing that you want to be talking about that day (or in
fact ever).

So while in Opposition you can choose to not engage in a particular debate, if you are Prime Minister and
there is a problem in customs or immigration or the tax department or there is an outbreak of foot and
mouth disease, you cant choose to ignore it! (Especially when it is one of your Ministers feet which has
just appeared in his/her mouth!)

So while in opposition you are constantly struggling with how to get yourself noticed, in Government you
are quite often wishing your weren’t being noticed quite so much!

The fourth relevant difference is that the timeframes in government are quite different to those in
Opposition and in this respect the timeframes are both much shorter and much longer.
In government you are having to react to issues immediately as they arise. The 24 hour news cycles,
global communication etc mean that you are constantly on call to make pronouncements on issues.


                                                                                                                2
Because you don’t usually have the luxury of choosing not to comment, this means you have to be able to
gather and process information very quickly in order to ensure message accuracy..

On the other hand the timeframes in government are also much longer. Announcements of policy are
only step one in a long process of delivering change. Implementing policy takes time and achieving
results from policy change even longer. Unfortunately the public often expects results to be
instantaneous, so if, as a government, you are not careful with your policy messaging you will set up
expectations which cannot be met. That again needs to be taken into account in messaging.
Having now looked at some of the things which are different between government and opposition, let me
remind you of the key thing which is the same in both.
What doesn’t change is that whether you are in opposition or government the objective of your
communications programme is to get voters on side!

That may sound obvious but within in government I often found that there was confusion about what the
desired result was, and that is one of the reasons you end up with confused messaging.
In government there can be many reasons why you may be putting out specific messages,
               You may be trying to impart factual information to a community about a public health
                 campaign
               You may be trying to soften a community up for a tax increase
               You might be trying to convince a community that following a low carbon growth path
                 would be better not only for the planet but for them as individuals as well,
In other words the specific messaging may be about either information or persuasion
But whatever the purpose of the individual piece of messaging going out, as political advisors we have to
remember that the final objective of all the messaging is to get your government re-elected.
While in one sense that may seem obvious, in many other ways people either
               Deny it or
               Forget it.
They deny it because they don’t want to think that “information’ campaigns should be tainted with nasty
political messaging, or because they think that “campaigning” should be different from governing.
Well I say that political life is a continuous campaign. The only difference is that at different times we are
in different phases or playing different roles, but it is dangerous to ever believe there is not a campaign
going on.
Now the fact that I say life is just one big campaign does not mean that I think a public health information
campaign should be full of blatantly political messages. Obviously that would be inappropriate and what
is more it would be counterproductive.
But what I do say is important is to ensure that the public health information campaign is done in a way
which reinforces the image your government is trying to project rather than being inconsistent with it.

If your message is that you are a caring and sharing government which treats all people equally and with
respect, then when your public health department puts out a public health campaign advertisement which
implies through its imagery or language that one particular ethnic group is principally responsible for the
spread of some communicable disease, your government message is going to be tainted.

And the problem arises not because the language between the public health campaign and your political
messaging was different, after all you would expect it to be, but there is a problem because the underlying
messages being conveyed were inconsistent.

And here I come to the most important point I want to make about how to keep a consistent message in
government. When we are thinking about messaging we have to think as much about values as we do
about language.

All of you who have worked in election campaigns know that people make up their minds about how they
will vote based much more on which party or politicians they believe share their values than they do on
specific policy initiatives. This makes sense because it doesn’t matter how detailed a parties manifesto is,
voters are actually electing a government to make decisions about things they don’t know about, that are


                                                                                                             3
going to happen in the future, and for that they have to judge what sort of decisions a party or leader will
make. That will depend on their value set not just on their manifesto.

So how do you ensure that the values reflected in your messaging, and the messaging itself stay
consistent in government given all the difficulties I have already talked about
I believe there are seven key things to remember

First to maintain a consistent message in government you have to know what the message you are
wanting to convey is. That may sound simple but in my experience that core point is often forgotten
The core message you need to be communicating all the time is your values message.

So if your core values are “fairness’ “environmental concern” and “effective public services” then all the
communications you are choosing to put out ought to be able to reflect at least one of these values, and
not contradict any of the others.

If you don’t believe you can reflect one of your core values in your communication the question needs to
be asked why are you choosing to produce the communication??

Second for you to have any chance of achieving consistency all members of your government need to
understand the importance of message consistency, In opposition to a large extent you can get away
with many of your people not understanding the why and how of messaging because to a large extent
you can centralize what you are doing and saying.

Unfortunately in government you can never impose that same discipline. You will have large numbers of
Ministers or spokespeople who will be authorizing many publications and press statements etc every day.
No central control can manage it all so unless people understand what they are doing and why you will
never achieve consistency.

Third the only way you can have consistent messaging in government is if your policy programme is in
fact consistent with your core values. It doesn’t matter how great your communicators are if you are
claiming one of your core values is environmental awareness yet your fisheries policy is encouraging
overfishing, you will not be able to have consistent messaging.

This is fundamental to managing a government And again the only way to ensure you maintain
consistency is for all members of your government to understand the core values which are driving your
government. If Ministers don’t ensure that they are using these core values to test policy proposals being
put in front of them by the “apolitical Public service” they run the danger of agreeing to policy proposals
which as the detail comes out they will not be able to defend.

Fourth to get consistent messaging you have to make sure you have thought of all the different ways
your message is getting out and ensured consistency between those avenues even for what is meant to
be the same message. In this regard a commonly overlooked messenger is your lowly back bench MP or
even your party member.

These people are your front line messengers on a daily basis. It is therefore hugely important that they
also understand your core values and understand the policies and messages you are putting out.
Unfortunately we often spend an awful lot of time thinking about media briefings etc to ensure the media
understands our message etc but spend very little time ensuring our caucus is as well informed.
Not only will your caucus be your front line messenger in the electorates, but they are also an easy
source of information for media looking to show inconsistency. Taking the time to ensure all caucus
members properly understand the message and the policy will pay dividends many times over.
Furthermore I always found that using your caucus as a means of bench testing your communications is
always a good test. The reality is if your presentation is not convincing for your caucus it certainly wont
be convincing to people who are not predisposed to believe you.



                                                                                                               4
Fifth I would suggest that in order to get consistent messaging across government it is important that
more than your Prime Minister is thinking about whole of government messages. One of the most difficult
challenges I had in terms of consistency of message was to get Ministers in different portfolios to
understand the importance of showing that our government programme was actually an integrated
programme not just a series of unrelated portfolios all doing their own thing.

As I said earlier, Ministers each have their own departments who often effectively capture their Minister,
making him or her the champion of their cause. That is all very sensible behavior, but as a government
you have to present yourselves to the populace as understanding all the interconnections.
The first part of achieving this is to try to have Ministers take an active interest in what is happening in
other portfolios so everyone takes responsibility for testing policy options against core values. I admit this
is much easier said than done,

The best way I found to make some progress in this regard was to put an expectation on all Ministers that
whenever they gave a speech or issued a significant press statement there should be included in it a
reference to some other part of the governments programme.
So if the Minister of Health was announcing a new public health programme there was an expectation
that reference would be made in the communications with how this complemented the new education
programme, or how it was integrated with the senior citizens policy or something.

I will admit that I wasn’t always successful in this endeavor either but it was certainly a useful tool to force
some thinking about connections.

My sixth point is that if you want to keep a consistent message in government then it is important to
ensure you don’t crowd your own consistent messages out with other irrelevant ones.

As I have said before government is involved in a myriad of things every day. Not all of them warrant
putting out press statements or other forms of communication but it is often difficult to convince Ministers
of that. This is especially so when there are more and more avenues of media looking for copy.
Ministers often seem to think that the way to impress on their leader that they are doing lots of things is by
putting out lots of press statements. Most of these are never going to create a positive headline
anywhere so all they are is potential noise, or worse. I used to tell Ministers that if they wanted to impress
the PM with how much they were achieving then do her a monthly report, rather than expecting her to be
the only person in the world who was reading all their less than exciting press statements.

My final point on keeping consistency is perhaps the most important.

This relates back to my earlier point that in the end people generally vote according to their values rather
than on any particular policy programme.. But it is important to remember that how people judge your
values is not just about what you say but equally if not more importantly it is about what you do. It is as
much about how your Ministers behave as what they say.

In delivering a speech, or participating in a discussion the body language is at least as important as the
spoken word.

It is therefore essential that when you are doing your values analysis you need to think not only about
what that means in terms of the language you use in all your communications but also about what your
values say about how your Ministers behave, how they present themselves etc.
Consistency in messaging can help build up trust in a government, but while it takes an awfully long time
to build trust it takes very little time to destroy it. Behavior which is inconsistent with your values will
destroy trust quicker than anything I know. I just mention here MPs expenses.

So in conclusion all this comes down to three simple messages
    1. Be very clear within your government what you stand for and make sure all parts of your
        government understand and keep those values in mind when determining and communicating
        policy initiatives.

                                                                                                               5
2. Consistent messaging is not about always using the same words (although ensuring the same
       words appear on a regular basis helps), it is about always reflecting one or more of your core
       values
    3. Walk the talk

If you manage to do all that, all the time, the public will always be on side, and you will be in government
forever!

So Good Luck!!




                                                                                                               6

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Simpson, heather

  • 1. How to Build and Keep a Consistent Message from the Government Address to acop conference Bilbao 17 June 2010 Let me start with a disclaimer. I am not a communications professional, In fact I started out aiming to be a mathematics teacher. Unfortunately I got waylaid and found myself teaching all right but not at a secondary school as I had planned, but at a University, and not in mathematics but in Economics and public policy. None of which should have lead me to be talking to you today about how to build and keep consistent messages in government. That path started when I left academia to start advising the Minister of Housing in the Labour government in New Zealand in the late 1980s. Some might say it was all down hill from there. Having had the experience of having to put my academic work on economics and public policy into practice by advising across a range of different portfolios, the wonderful people of New Zealand decided to give me some experience of working for the Opposition. My work over the next few years involved not only helping to redevelop the overall Labour policy programme, but also leading the research programmes for the Opposition. That taught me a lot about campaigning, messaging and politics in general. Then eventually the good people of New Zealand decided to let us have another go at running the country, so for three parliamentary terms I was the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. So I reiterate I am not coming at this discussion today from the point of view of a communications professional but what I would hope to do is to provide you with some of the lessons I learnt along the way about government messaging, in the hope that there may be some insights you can draw from that which may be relevant to you. The key point I want to make to you today is that building and keeping a consistent message in government is a different challenge to messaging in any other arena not only because political messaging is much different from corporate messaging overall, but also that messaging from government is much different than the challenges of messaging from opposition. On the other hand some things about messaging are the same wherever you start. Difference between Opposition and Government Many of us end up in advisory positions in governments having come through the undergraduate college called the Opposition. In that college we have learnt a number of valuable lessons about how to get our message across, and we must have been reasonably successful at it at least for a short period of time because we are now in government. Unfortunately that undergraduate college very seldom has good courses in the differences between government and opposition, so there is a danger that we expect the same techniques to be successful. In reality there is a significant difference between the challenges of messaging in government and messaging in opposition, and equally as big a difference between the challenges of messaging during election campaigns and during “normal” periods of government (if there ever is such a thing). So let me spend a little time on what I found to be the most significant differences between being in Government and being in the Opposition, from the point of view of messaging. First let me say it is much more fun being in government because at long last you get to actually change the world. Unfortunately along with that comes the bit that is not so easy to deal with and that is that as a 1
  • 2. result of being in government you also have a responsibility to change the world. And that “responsibility” word makes a big difference. Suddenly you move from being “responsible” only in a very generic sense for being a ‘good” opposition to actually having to take responsibility. That responsibility comes in a number of different forms 1. You are now responsible to and for all the citizens, not just the ones “on your side” 2. You are now responsible for all the government departments not just the ones that you are interested in. and finally and perhaps most annoyingly 3. You are responsible for whatever happens, whether you had anything to do with it or not! All of these factors have to be taken into account as you plan your messaging. The second big difference between opposition and government is that you suddenly get to work with, or for, or against, (depending on how things are going), your public service. So suddenly you move from being dependant on a small number of advisors (most of whom at least share your own political values), to having access to a vast array of advice. But along with that advice comes a few other added extras. First each of your departments has their own Minister and any senior public servant worth their title will figure that part of their job in life is to co-opt their latest Minister to agree to all the things the department has been trying to get Ministers to agree with for years. That may sound a little cynical but in my experience it is also the reality. As a new government you may well be coming in with a clear manifesto for change and in that case the public servants can be expected to have studied your manifesto and will be ready with a spread of advice ranging from how quickly they could implement your grand plan to the 25 good reasons why it would now be either foolhardy or impossible to do any of the things your manifesto promised. How you handle that range of advice will be crucial to how effective your government is going to be over the long term, but for the purposes of my talk today the important point to note is that the advice your Ministers will be getting will not be coming from a consistent value position. Your Ministers (and their teams) will have to do the values analysis which will guide them in terms of what advice to accept and what to reject. That quality of that values analysis is the first step in achieving a consistent message in government. But I will come back to that later. The final point I want to make about the influence of the public service, is that not only do they provide the advice, they also produce a large proportion of the communications which come out from a government. That is an important consideration when you are thinking about how to manage the consistency of your government messages, because if your “formal” government communications are inconsistent with your “political” messaging the public will soon notice. . The third big difference between government and opposition is that in government you no longer have the luxury of choosing the issues you want to talk about. Part of the problem with being responsible for, and to everybody and everything, is that you have to be prepared to talk about an issue even if it is not the thing that you want to be talking about that day (or in fact ever). So while in Opposition you can choose to not engage in a particular debate, if you are Prime Minister and there is a problem in customs or immigration or the tax department or there is an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, you cant choose to ignore it! (Especially when it is one of your Ministers feet which has just appeared in his/her mouth!) So while in opposition you are constantly struggling with how to get yourself noticed, in Government you are quite often wishing your weren’t being noticed quite so much! The fourth relevant difference is that the timeframes in government are quite different to those in Opposition and in this respect the timeframes are both much shorter and much longer. In government you are having to react to issues immediately as they arise. The 24 hour news cycles, global communication etc mean that you are constantly on call to make pronouncements on issues. 2
  • 3. Because you don’t usually have the luxury of choosing not to comment, this means you have to be able to gather and process information very quickly in order to ensure message accuracy.. On the other hand the timeframes in government are also much longer. Announcements of policy are only step one in a long process of delivering change. Implementing policy takes time and achieving results from policy change even longer. Unfortunately the public often expects results to be instantaneous, so if, as a government, you are not careful with your policy messaging you will set up expectations which cannot be met. That again needs to be taken into account in messaging. Having now looked at some of the things which are different between government and opposition, let me remind you of the key thing which is the same in both. What doesn’t change is that whether you are in opposition or government the objective of your communications programme is to get voters on side! That may sound obvious but within in government I often found that there was confusion about what the desired result was, and that is one of the reasons you end up with confused messaging. In government there can be many reasons why you may be putting out specific messages,  You may be trying to impart factual information to a community about a public health campaign  You may be trying to soften a community up for a tax increase  You might be trying to convince a community that following a low carbon growth path would be better not only for the planet but for them as individuals as well, In other words the specific messaging may be about either information or persuasion But whatever the purpose of the individual piece of messaging going out, as political advisors we have to remember that the final objective of all the messaging is to get your government re-elected. While in one sense that may seem obvious, in many other ways people either  Deny it or  Forget it. They deny it because they don’t want to think that “information’ campaigns should be tainted with nasty political messaging, or because they think that “campaigning” should be different from governing. Well I say that political life is a continuous campaign. The only difference is that at different times we are in different phases or playing different roles, but it is dangerous to ever believe there is not a campaign going on. Now the fact that I say life is just one big campaign does not mean that I think a public health information campaign should be full of blatantly political messages. Obviously that would be inappropriate and what is more it would be counterproductive. But what I do say is important is to ensure that the public health information campaign is done in a way which reinforces the image your government is trying to project rather than being inconsistent with it. If your message is that you are a caring and sharing government which treats all people equally and with respect, then when your public health department puts out a public health campaign advertisement which implies through its imagery or language that one particular ethnic group is principally responsible for the spread of some communicable disease, your government message is going to be tainted. And the problem arises not because the language between the public health campaign and your political messaging was different, after all you would expect it to be, but there is a problem because the underlying messages being conveyed were inconsistent. And here I come to the most important point I want to make about how to keep a consistent message in government. When we are thinking about messaging we have to think as much about values as we do about language. All of you who have worked in election campaigns know that people make up their minds about how they will vote based much more on which party or politicians they believe share their values than they do on specific policy initiatives. This makes sense because it doesn’t matter how detailed a parties manifesto is, voters are actually electing a government to make decisions about things they don’t know about, that are 3
  • 4. going to happen in the future, and for that they have to judge what sort of decisions a party or leader will make. That will depend on their value set not just on their manifesto. So how do you ensure that the values reflected in your messaging, and the messaging itself stay consistent in government given all the difficulties I have already talked about I believe there are seven key things to remember First to maintain a consistent message in government you have to know what the message you are wanting to convey is. That may sound simple but in my experience that core point is often forgotten The core message you need to be communicating all the time is your values message. So if your core values are “fairness’ “environmental concern” and “effective public services” then all the communications you are choosing to put out ought to be able to reflect at least one of these values, and not contradict any of the others. If you don’t believe you can reflect one of your core values in your communication the question needs to be asked why are you choosing to produce the communication?? Second for you to have any chance of achieving consistency all members of your government need to understand the importance of message consistency, In opposition to a large extent you can get away with many of your people not understanding the why and how of messaging because to a large extent you can centralize what you are doing and saying. Unfortunately in government you can never impose that same discipline. You will have large numbers of Ministers or spokespeople who will be authorizing many publications and press statements etc every day. No central control can manage it all so unless people understand what they are doing and why you will never achieve consistency. Third the only way you can have consistent messaging in government is if your policy programme is in fact consistent with your core values. It doesn’t matter how great your communicators are if you are claiming one of your core values is environmental awareness yet your fisheries policy is encouraging overfishing, you will not be able to have consistent messaging. This is fundamental to managing a government And again the only way to ensure you maintain consistency is for all members of your government to understand the core values which are driving your government. If Ministers don’t ensure that they are using these core values to test policy proposals being put in front of them by the “apolitical Public service” they run the danger of agreeing to policy proposals which as the detail comes out they will not be able to defend. Fourth to get consistent messaging you have to make sure you have thought of all the different ways your message is getting out and ensured consistency between those avenues even for what is meant to be the same message. In this regard a commonly overlooked messenger is your lowly back bench MP or even your party member. These people are your front line messengers on a daily basis. It is therefore hugely important that they also understand your core values and understand the policies and messages you are putting out. Unfortunately we often spend an awful lot of time thinking about media briefings etc to ensure the media understands our message etc but spend very little time ensuring our caucus is as well informed. Not only will your caucus be your front line messenger in the electorates, but they are also an easy source of information for media looking to show inconsistency. Taking the time to ensure all caucus members properly understand the message and the policy will pay dividends many times over. Furthermore I always found that using your caucus as a means of bench testing your communications is always a good test. The reality is if your presentation is not convincing for your caucus it certainly wont be convincing to people who are not predisposed to believe you. 4
  • 5. Fifth I would suggest that in order to get consistent messaging across government it is important that more than your Prime Minister is thinking about whole of government messages. One of the most difficult challenges I had in terms of consistency of message was to get Ministers in different portfolios to understand the importance of showing that our government programme was actually an integrated programme not just a series of unrelated portfolios all doing their own thing. As I said earlier, Ministers each have their own departments who often effectively capture their Minister, making him or her the champion of their cause. That is all very sensible behavior, but as a government you have to present yourselves to the populace as understanding all the interconnections. The first part of achieving this is to try to have Ministers take an active interest in what is happening in other portfolios so everyone takes responsibility for testing policy options against core values. I admit this is much easier said than done, The best way I found to make some progress in this regard was to put an expectation on all Ministers that whenever they gave a speech or issued a significant press statement there should be included in it a reference to some other part of the governments programme. So if the Minister of Health was announcing a new public health programme there was an expectation that reference would be made in the communications with how this complemented the new education programme, or how it was integrated with the senior citizens policy or something. I will admit that I wasn’t always successful in this endeavor either but it was certainly a useful tool to force some thinking about connections. My sixth point is that if you want to keep a consistent message in government then it is important to ensure you don’t crowd your own consistent messages out with other irrelevant ones. As I have said before government is involved in a myriad of things every day. Not all of them warrant putting out press statements or other forms of communication but it is often difficult to convince Ministers of that. This is especially so when there are more and more avenues of media looking for copy. Ministers often seem to think that the way to impress on their leader that they are doing lots of things is by putting out lots of press statements. Most of these are never going to create a positive headline anywhere so all they are is potential noise, or worse. I used to tell Ministers that if they wanted to impress the PM with how much they were achieving then do her a monthly report, rather than expecting her to be the only person in the world who was reading all their less than exciting press statements. My final point on keeping consistency is perhaps the most important. This relates back to my earlier point that in the end people generally vote according to their values rather than on any particular policy programme.. But it is important to remember that how people judge your values is not just about what you say but equally if not more importantly it is about what you do. It is as much about how your Ministers behave as what they say. In delivering a speech, or participating in a discussion the body language is at least as important as the spoken word. It is therefore essential that when you are doing your values analysis you need to think not only about what that means in terms of the language you use in all your communications but also about what your values say about how your Ministers behave, how they present themselves etc. Consistency in messaging can help build up trust in a government, but while it takes an awfully long time to build trust it takes very little time to destroy it. Behavior which is inconsistent with your values will destroy trust quicker than anything I know. I just mention here MPs expenses. So in conclusion all this comes down to three simple messages 1. Be very clear within your government what you stand for and make sure all parts of your government understand and keep those values in mind when determining and communicating policy initiatives. 5
  • 6. 2. Consistent messaging is not about always using the same words (although ensuring the same words appear on a regular basis helps), it is about always reflecting one or more of your core values 3. Walk the talk If you manage to do all that, all the time, the public will always be on side, and you will be in government forever! So Good Luck!! 6