Expanding Digital Communications for Social Impact

Discover how to revolutionize your digital communications for social impact with insights from Nicolas Bruneau, a seasoned digital communications consultant from the United Nations. In the latest episode host Peter Woolfolk engages Nicolas to share transformative strategies from his book, "Engage with Impact: Five Steps to Transform Your Digital Communications for Social Impact." You'll learn about the Agile Framework, developed from extensive pandemic-era research, and how it can empower your organization's communication strategies through adopting a startup mentality, embracing digital-first approaches, and inspiring with personal stories. Using examples like the European Commission's pandemic response, Nicolas illustrates how agility and innovation can foster creativity and swift, effective communication.

Explore the art of building engaged communities and amplifying your social media presence through content repurposing and community empowerment. Nicolas explains the importance of transforming event content into blogs, podcasts, and videos, maximizing its impact throughout the year. Additionally, discover how AI can enhance brand consistency and engage followers more deeply through interactive activities and newsletters. Featuring the Malala Fund as a prime case study, Nicolas demonstrates successful community building and impactful initiatives. For those seeking to dive deeper into these strategies, his book offers a wealth of additional insights and resources, readily accessible at engagewithimpact.com.

Information on NEW podcast website.

Chapters

• 1:05 Digital Communications for Social Impact
• 16:13 Building Community Through Content Engagement

Transcript

Announcer: 1:06

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others. Now here is your host, peter Woolfolk.

Peter Woolfolk: 1:27

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to our listeners all across America and around the world. Now, this podcast is ranked by Apple as among the top 1% of podcasts worldwide, so let me say thank you to all of our guests and listeners for making this happen. Now, if you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a review. We certainly like to hear what you think about the show. Now a question for my listeners how do you transform your digital communications to have the largest social media impact? Well, my guest today has an answer, and that answer is provided in his new book Engage with Impact Five Steps to Transform your Digital Communications for Social Impact. His book details a process that shows communications leaders how to accomplish this transition in five important steps. So joining me today from Lisbon, Portugal, is Nicolas Bruneau, a digital communications consultant working at the United Nations. So, Nicholas, welcome to the podcast.

Nicholas Bruneau: 2:38

Thank you, Peter. Plet's te start re at eP the What caused you to want to write this book?

Nicholas Bruneau: 2:42

Nicholas-Well Well, I remember during the pandemic. Everything was changing right, we're all working from home and there seemed to be a lot of things as far as the way that organizations were communicating.

Nicholas Bruneau: 2:50

So I did a survey of marketing and communications professionals. I used LinkedIn to survey all of my connections and more, and I asked them has the pandemic helped your communications to be more agile and responsive to future changes? And actually 83% said or agreed that the pandemic had actually helped them to be more agile and helped them try new things, to be more innovative. Thankfully, in the survey I also had a lot of space for people to give their comments, to give their suggestions, what went well, what didn't go so well. It really gave me a treasure trove of information, and then from that, I decided then to do a series of interviews of communications directors to hear how they were changing the way that they were communicating, to get some success stories, to get really some input and to really then bring all that together so that it was going to be a book that was not just about theory but also about how people are really changing on the ground, and really something that was going to be inspiring for communications managers worldwide.

Peter Woolfolk: 4:04

Now, once you had gone through that process, you said that you were able to distill all those tactics, if you will, into basically five steps, so that they could accomplish this transition, if you will. So let's start with what those five steps are and just how does one go about implementing each one of those steps.

Nicholas Bruneau: 4:26

I tried to learn. Yeah, I mean, I I tried to sort of bring everything together to really learn from what everyone everybody was telling me. First of all, almost everyone was saying that engagement big challenge. So online engagement was a big challenge. Building community was a big challenge as well. So how can you then take that into a framework that can then help people? So I took all of the comments and the suggestions and developed something that I call the Agile Framework.

Nicholas Bruneau: 4:56

So the Agile Framework is five steps, which starts internally.

Nicholas Bruneau: 5:04

So internally, it's adopting a startup mentality, so developing that mentality where you're really thinking like a startup, developing systems and better collaborations internally, and then go digital first, which is really adopting new tools and tactics so that you can really innovate online and get people's's attention on social media and inspire with personal stories, and that's about really having authentic stories and tension with some storytelling strategies.

Nicholas Bruneau: 5:40

And then leverage your content is repurposing and that's I think we all know that we have limited time and resources, so it's important to then have a repurposing, and that's I think. We all know that we have limited time and resources, so it's important to then have a repurposing strategy. So that's all about making the most out of the content and the resources that you have and finally, it's bringing it together so that you empower your community, so having that digital funnel where you're getting your social media subscriber, your social media followers, subscribers, to then become participants and then finally to become advocates. So it's really trying to sort of take people through a process where they're changing the way that they're communicating and first, you know, learning to run, learning to walk before they can run, for my apologies so that they can internally develop the systems for them, and then externally, then building up that community online and then in person.

Peter Woolfolk: 6:36

Well, let's go back to the first one and let's build that up a little bit more, that is, to adopt the startup mentality, because when I think of startups, it's like for me starting up a business what do I need to do, contracts I need to make? I need a whole lot of things to decide. If I'm going to go into the business, what am I going to bring with me? What are some of the obstacles going to be? All those kinds of things. But in terms of making this shift, if you will, from just the outreach but into shifting your communications over to the digital side, what are those startup issues that they need to address and conquer and solve, if you will?

Nicholas Bruneau: 7:12

First it's having that collaborative outlook where you're collaborating internally and you're really having communications internally, where people see the value of approaching you with a brief before doing stuff, and so that you're all working together in a collaborative way. So I think an example was during the pandemic. The European Commission needed to fight disinformation and they needed to do so by reaching out to the scientific community. They needed to do by getting internal and external experts to really work together very quickly so they set up those systems. And then the second part is also innovating, being creative and having an attitude where you can accept failure. I think that a lot of organizations, big companies, nobody wants to fail and what happens is then it becomes paralysis, where you're not evolving, you're not learning, you're not trying new things. So the importance of failure is also a key factor for a startup, where they can learn, they can see the analytics and they can see what's happening and they can then adapt right.

Nicholas Bruneau: 8:29

So on a concrete level, one example in the book is an NGO called Candid that decided that they wanted to experiment with short form videos. They decided that they would have a three month period specifically where they would test 20 short form videos and they would look at the analytics. They would look at what works, what content works, what platforms are doing better, and then use that intel afterwards to then build a strategy longer term. So it allows them to have an experimental approach that is not going to be, let's say, something that is going to use up a lot of resources, that is not also going to make a lot of waves, because it's only 20 videos. So it allowed them to then progress into that and see how they can move forward. So it's really adopting that startup mentality. We're trying new things and you're really collaborating internally.

Peter Woolfolk: 9:25

You know, let me just. I want to go back to the startup mentality because that simply reminds me of some experiences that I had when I decided whether I was going to do this podcast or not. I didn't know anything about podcasts and a lot too many times when people think that they might fail or do fail at something, they stop because they don't want that again, I looked at it differently because, you know, because I didn't do it right meant that I did not know what I was doing, and then I went back to. I have two things that keep me going.

Peter Woolfolk: 9:55

On this one, when people talk about Henry Ford, obviously you know he built these trucks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he said he was going to shift the cars. And Henry, you don't know anything about cars. He says, well, that's true, but I'm going to hire some people who do know about cars, and those happen to be the Dodge brothers. So he had cars. And then I looked not too long ago when he had to get into the rockets that took people up to the space station. Elon Musk, he had five rockets, five and he invested his own money. The first four all exploded and went to hell. The fifth one made it, and that's the one that got him on to now this billion dollar contract that he has.

Peter Woolfolk: 10:38

So it's a question of you know. If you don't know, bring in some people that do. There's nothing wrong with that. I told some people I was going to produce a CD. I don't read music nor do I play any music, but I produced a jazz CD. I found out I had to have licenses from people, got their permission, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I got it done. So what I'm basically saying is that, yes, you might not know how to do this the first go-round, but ask somebody, bring people in that do, and don't just see failure as well. Wait a minute, I didn't get it right this time. I need to add tweak, tweak it or do whatever, and let's try it a different way. But success, failure should not be the game, be the beginning of you're not doing something. It should be your launching pad for saying what do I need to correct them the correct way?

Nicholas Bruneau: 11:23

exactly. If you look at, you know, the first videos of youtubers.

Nicholas Bruneau: 11:28

They're're probably awful videos, but they progressively improved they progressively learned how to change their message, how to have a hook, how to allow you to then grow and learn from it. So you have to have that mentality where you're trying to learn but, as I said, trying to have it in an experimental and a controlled manner so that it obviously doesn't take too much of your time and also doesn't have too much of a negative impact. We can also have an attitude where we're going to be open to new ideas. So in my book as well, I talked about the campaign that went really badly for the European Commission, where they had a video that was not well received to encourage people, encourage women, to go into STEM education, going to science fields, and they had a video that really didn't respond to the reality.

Nicholas Bruneau: 12:35

People then complained about the video. So what they did is they decided, well, let's encourage people from the scientific community to then create videos, let's crowdsource the campaign and let's really get people involved, and so they learn from that. So by having a failure, they really learned how to then developed crowdsourced campaigns and now, more and more, you're seeing the European Commission develop campaigns that are that are first of asking people you know what their opinion is and asking them to contribute with videos or solutions, so to really have that bottom-up approach as opposed to that top-down approach.

Peter Woolfolk: 13:20

Yeah, I agree with that because it's also like. I look at the other item you have here inspire with personal stories, and you know, obviously we've just related a couple of those because a lot of times that can be the inspiration for people doing some of those things. You know, one of the things that I do I mean I say this publicly now but it took me a while to get around to it. But I, being young, foolish and immature, I was kicked out of college twice. But when I finally went to the military I changed my attitude and approached a lot of different things. So when I speak to college students now, my opening comment is this how does a guy like me, who got kicked out of college twice, wind up working for the President of the United States?

Nicholas Bruneau: 14:03

Well, there's a whole lot of determination in that.

Peter Woolfolk: 14:06

in that I decided what I was doing wrong, or I was doing things the wrong way. I decided there's got to be some way to fix it, and I was not afraid to ask people for help when I needed it or some guidance. So how do I do this? How is this done? Personal stories can certainly be a motivator in having people accomplish what it is you're saying that they do in terms of, you know, shifting their communications over to the social media platforms. Personal stories will certainly be a driving force in helping that happen.

Nicholas Bruneau: 14:39

Absolutely. And for that storytelling it's trying to bring in that challenge that you're facing and trying to show how you're trying to deal with that challenge. And trying to show how you're trying to deal with that challenge and that's really what is going to get people to be interested about your story is not just, basically, you talking about how great you are or how great your organization is, but what are the challenges that you're facing and how are you dealing with it? And sometimes it doesn't go the way that you'd like it to, but people are interested in that and that's what really gets eyeballs on. Content is when you have a story that is really authentic, genuine and really shows, like, the difficulties that you're facing and you're dealing with it to try to find some solutions.

Peter Woolfolk: 15:21

So how has the book been going thus far? First of all, how long has it been out and how is it doing thus far?

Nicholas Bruneau: 15:27

It's been going well as far as having an impact with some people.

Nicholas Bruneau: 15:35

So one of my readers got back to me and said the book inspired her to organize an event about failure. So she lives and works in the European institutions in Brussels and she agreed with me that failure isn't, you know, very well seen in these politically charged institutions. So she organized an event inspired by the book and she asked me to speak. So that was really nice to see that it is having an impact and as well, you know, I think that it's.

Nicholas Bruneau: 16:13

I was also asked to speak in Brussels for the European Commission where they asked me how can the Agile framework help us to build a community, to then, you know, not only to have a great social media presence but then also build community and then have, you know, new partnerships. So I went there as well to speak and give them a workshop about that. So I think it's great when you have this feedback, that is great, that is constructive, and I've also tried to make it, as I guess the book, to make it as useful as possible. So there's like a list of tips and a workbook and all this stuff to help people on the way to when they read it.

Peter Woolfolk: 17:00

And I think that sort of leads into my next question or comment, and that is talk a little bit about leveraging content that you can begin to feed into your social media platforms a bit more. Amplify that a bit more.

Nicholas Bruneau: 17:14

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think repurposing is really underused. So before the pandemic, I remember I went to, I organized a big event. It was a big summit, a big European summit, and once the event was over you know that was it you know we were like relieved to go home and we had finally finished this event. But we hadn't thought about, you know, all the great content and all the great discussions that we could be working from that event so that, instead of the event being the last, you know the finish line, it should be the midpoint, so that if you've organized the event well, then you have all this content that you can then use throughout the year about.

Nicholas Bruneau: 17:55

You know, different topics, using it for either a blog, podcast, video, different ways in which you can use the content, maybe even make a report out of it, get some recommendations, so that you're really creating something that is going to have some legs after the event and help you continue to build your content. So it's having that mentality where we're creating something like a video, for example, you're already thinking ahead. How am I going to then take this 30-minute video, for example, of someone speaking into short-form videos for social media, into a podcast, into a blog and sometimes, of course, you can use AI to repurpose that. For me, ai is a great repurposing tool. It allows you to keep your brand but, at the same time, different pieces of information in different formats. So if you're able to do that as well, it strengthens your brand.

Peter Woolfolk: 19:00

So it strengthens your brand on the key issues, your brand visibility on yeah, I think those are all great tips and I think obviously repurposing certainly does and redirecting certainly does have extra benefits and that gives it additional mileage and so forth and so on. And I think the final one too you mentioned something about, I think you said, sort of engaging your, empowering, your community. Add a little bit to that too as well, so that folks can get some additional ideas.

Nicholas Bruneau: 19:30

We all we often we look at the way that we communicate as a communicate communicating to people, whereas social media should really be more, much more social, where, first of all, you're trying to have people more engaged with community building exercises, games, different polls, different ways in which you can engage people, different contests, for example, where you can engage people online and also trying to then take that engagement and those people from social media to then join your email newsletter, for example, so that you're able to capture their details and you're not dependent on them being on social media, for example, and you're able to have that direct relationship and then from that, so using a kind of a digital funnel approach, where then you're able to, thanks to them being on the newsletter, have them attend virtual events, for example, or real live events, and then gradually they start to know you, you better, they start to be more engaged and it becomes more of a relationship as opposed to just someone liking a post. So it's really building that community, and a good example why in in the book as well is the malala fund, where they developed a newsletter specifically for girls, talk about the challenges that they're facing, getting the education that they need or facing certain issues around the world and first they thought you know, let's just do a newsletter where we interview different girls and different people from our community. But then they had so much interest for people to contribute and send their information, send their stories and contribute directly to the newsletter that they became a whole microsite on its own. It became a whole community where the girls are each other. It's really a win-win where the Malala Fund. Now they not only have a great newsletter that helps to support their message that every girl should have access to a negate, and but they they're also able to engage with this community and also organize even small events where whenever Malala you service I is in certain countries, she'll meet some of the these young advocates and really it really builds that sense of community and I don't think there's anything stronger, you know, for a brand, for an organization, to really do that, to really have that high touch uh communication approach well, nicholas, you really provided us with a lot of insight about this book of yours and the benefits that it brings.

Peter Woolfolk: 22:09

I think we need to do now is tell people where it's available, so if they have an interest in going after it, they can do that.

Nicholas Bruneau: 22:16

That's right. It's really simple. It's available at engagewithimpactcom and there there's more information on the book and also there's the Reader's Guide, which has a view of the Agile framework and the key topics of the book.

Peter Woolfolk: 22:31

Well, let me say thank you. I really appreciated you coming on the show today, and again for my guests, you've been listening to Nicholas Bruno talk about the benefits of his book Engage with Impact Five Steps to Train your Digital Communications for Social Impact, and he's let you know exactly where you can get and the benefits of reading it that come with that book. So, nicholas, once again, thank you so very much for being a guest on the podcast today.

Nicholas Bruneau: 22:59

Thank you very much, peter, it's a pleasure.

Peter Woolfolk: 23:01

And to all my guests, thank you. Certainly we'd like to get a review from you. We'd like to hear what you think about it and if you've got some ideas of other program ideas, please leave a review. Once again, you've been listening to the Public Relations Review Podcast and thank you.

Announcer: 23:17

This podcast is produced by Communication Strategies, an award-winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you for joining us you.