How to avoid an own goal when running corporate advocacy campaigns
Learn ways you can engage, educate and empower your customers and employees to take action on an important issue.
In my last blog, I wrote about how politicians should be thinking about long-term brand building. Today, let’s flip the script and look at a similar idea from the opposite side: that corporations can learn from the non-profit sector and political campaigns. In many ways, corporations are in a similar position to campaigns and political parties. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle means that nobody has the ability to control the news agenda as they used to.
Reputations, it seems, now have to be earned under an increasing culture of public scrutiny. If you need a living, breathing example of this, look no further than at the fallout from the European Super League last week.
Expectations have changed. Edelman’s hugely respected Trust Barometer 2021 showed that a year into the pandemic there is broader trust in businesses than government, NGOs and the media. With that trust comes an expectation that companies and CEOs engage with the public on the issues of the day. The barometer showed that 86% of those surveyed expected CEOs to speak out on one or more of the following areas: impact of the pandemic, job automation, societal issues and local community issues.
Despite CEOs performing better than government officials and journalists on trust measures, Edelman also found that individuals are more likely to trust academic experts and people like themselves. There’s a belief in collective power at play here. 68% of consumers and 62% of employees believe they have the power to force corporations to change. And why not? Everyone has an opinion and can quickly start an issue-based campaign if they feel moved to do so.
This means that in today’s environment, a top-heavy approach with one-way communication doesn’t work. Instead, it’s time to put your customers and employees at the heart of everything as if you were cultivating voters.
So, here are my top tips for corporations who want to embark on a corporate advocacy campaign.
Be strategic about what you champion—and how
It’s important as you embark on this journey that you understand it’s not just about broadcasting information to yet another email list. It’s about generating deeper, more meaningful engagement. Ask yourself and your teams:
With what issues are your company uniquely positioned to engage? How do these issues align with your overall brand and purpose?
Are you willing to create real engagement, or do you just want to broadcast your own messaging?
If you just want to broadcast a message, aren’t you already doing so through marketing? How is that working for you?
Is broadcasting changing people’s behaviour, or are you just getting stuck in a vanity matrix land of impressions served?
Are your teams and senior decision-makers within the company aligned on why corporate advocacy is important?
Is there a budget to do it, or are you simply hoping someone will do it off their own back in their spare time?
What’s the vehicle for the engagement?
Do you want to use your leading brand for your advocacy, or do you want to develop a sub-brand for corporate engagement? A sub-brand might make it easier to be more agile and flexible in your engagement strategy. You may also find it helpful to create a sub-brand identity with its own website, social media channels and domains.
Consider dedicated channels for your corporate advocacy work. Ideally, these are separate from your primary corporate sales and marketing channels, letting you communicate differently. You can engage more frequently and with a warmer and more personalised approach to your ambassadors. Your sign-off process is quicker this way, too. No need to go through ten layers of sign-off to get a single email out.
Of course, you should still promote your corporate advocacy on your main channels from time to time to encourage people to convert.
What does engagement look like?
Your goal is to create deeper relationships through the intentional, long-term engagement of your customers and employees. Now, what does this unicorn of engagement look like?
Frequent readers of my blog know that I think surveys and quizzes are great engagement tools. They can be a fun way for people to offer feedback, share their opinion and test their knowledge (and learn something in the process).
Collect stories. How do the issues you’re championing impact people and their lives? In my experience, the best campaigns put people and their stories at the centre of the narrative.
Encourage people to contact their elected representatives. I am a massive fan of grassroots campaigns (now more so than when I interned in Parliament and helped reply to all the letters). The more voices that are advocating with you, the more likely you are to see action on the issues that matter to your company.
The more, the merrier—help make it easy for employees and customers to bring in a friend. As mentioned above, people are more likely to trust people like themselves. Moving away from using traditional spokespeople and enabling normal people to help you is a powerful strategy. Ideally, you should be able to track these recruitment efforts to reward your advocates.
Donate to the community fund. Mobilising the community to support a partner’s cause is a great way to show support for an organisation that aligns with your purpose, while also doing good in the world.
Educate and empower
Once you have engaged with your customers, you have the opportunity to educate them. Share with them your broader corporate social responsibility, purpose, and motivation for advocating for change or awareness. Through education, you can demonstrate how you are different, and why that makes you trustworthy.
These people can be your biggest advocates both in good and bad times. The best way to equip them for this is by letting them feel connected to you and knowledgeable about your company. Be open: people like to feel involved, and by offering a peek behind the curtain, you will be more approachable than most other corporate brands. Equip people with the facts: what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and what you’re hoping to achieve.
The goal isn’t getting customers to recite soundbites, but rather to understand what you stand for and how you’re taking action to live into your values. For example, how do you view employees’ rights or the environment? What value do you bring to those issues? While I’m not a huge fan of detailed policy documents telling people what they should and should not say, I am a fan of sharing the ‘why’ behind the work you’re doing to create alignment. Once there is alignment, empower people and offer them opportunities to take action with you about the issues they care about.
Encourage and reward
Impact matters. Do you make it easy for people to help you, do you share the impact their contribution has and do you reward them when they take action? It can be as simple as a virtual feel-good with a pat on the shoulder, or consist of rewards, exclusive opportunities or freebies. Elevating stories of how people like them are helping you do good work is both motivating, and a chance to generate great content that resonates.
Encourage yourself too, through processes that allow you to see the progress you’re making in the area of corporate advocacy. This is an ongoing opportunity to make a difference, and you’ll want to know that your actions are having an effect. Ensure you develop a mechanism for setting goals and evaluating how you are progressing so you can adapt and change accordingly.
Do you see the strategic lesson here?
Here it is: forward-thinking businesses know the public relations environment has changed.
In addition to engaging with customers, they intentionally build up their staff to help them advocate in the long term. The employees on your teams are now crucial when it comes to real, authentic engagement. Internal and external communication teams, customer engagement and public affairs teams must all work hand-in-hand to create complementary strategies that cover top-down and bottom-up advocacy.
Everyone has a role to play, both as enablers of customer advocates and as advocates in their own right. Harness that collective power, generate reputation and goodwill, and you’ll be less likely to score an embarrassing own goal like the European Super League.