Choosing the right PR/digital agency

Looking for an outstanding PR/design/digital agency? There are plenty to choose from and the vast majority of them are honest, hard-working and will do a great job for you.

The most important thing as a client is to be clear about what you need from an agency, and it’s vital to go in with a firm and realistic budget.

Depending on the size of the project and your budget, you may choose to put the work out to tender which will involve inviting a reasonable number of appropriate agencies to pitch their ideas and approaches.

Never think that you have to go to big city agencies for good work and great results: there are many smaller agencies around the provinces that can deliver first class work and offer a more personalised but equally effective approach, often at a more competitive cost.

Alternatively, make an appointment to visit two or three established local agencies and talk to them about what you're looking for and what you want to achieve. Satisfy yourself they have the skills you need, that they are people you can work with and that they really understand what you want. Was there a buzz around the place? Did they make you feel good? That’s important too.

If media relations is to form part of the approach, look for good writing skills and established media contacts. Also ensure they have the necessary digital skills for social media work. These days it’s not about just a press release – it’s all about ‘content’ and making sure messages are communicated through all the relevant channels.

Your chosen agency should be able to discuss and demonstrate the advantages of an integrated approach using as many channels as are appropriate.

If it’s a website you’re after, remember that there are three main elements: the content - words and images; the design of the site, and finally the actual building and maintenance of the site.

Some PR agencies offer all the skills in-house for all these elements but do ask the right questions. There’s no harm at all in an agency subcontracting some elements of a project as long as they tell you that’s what they’re doing.

Perhaps most importantly of all, look for creativity, passion and transparency. Choose an agency that makes you feel comfortable, that places adding long term sustainable value above short-term commercial gain, and that has real integrity.

Whoever you talk with, ask which members of the team will be working on your account and put in place a reporting structure with regular meetings. Any good agency will welcome scrutiny and embrace accountability. Agreeing KPIs is essential: these should be geared as much to outcomes as outputs.

Membership of a professional body such as the CIPR or PRCA is also reassuring.

Don’t worry too much about whether they have experience of your specific sector. It helps, but it’s the skills that matter most. And please don’t be nervous about telling an agency what budget you’ve set aside! It’s not about being mercenary, it’s  knowing what we have to work with so that we can use your hard-earned resources to best effect.

Any agency worth its salt will want to deliver great results so that they can keep and hopefully grow your business.

Look for an agency that will challenge your views and assumptions: they’re the experts. That’s what you’re paying for.

For example, we’ve had several clients asking us to quote for a website. They believe that’s what they need when they come in to talk to us. When we challenge them, it quickly becomes clear that what they actually want is more clients and customers. A website may have a role in achieving that objective but it may not be the most effective or only approach.

We’re immensely proud to have celebrated our 25^th anniversary this month. How have we survived so long in such a fast-changing and competitive marketplace?

It helps to be good at what you do, and we are: 14 awards in the last three years alone, including Agency of the Year and achieving the honour of being voted one of the UK’s top 150 agencies. We’re really proud of that.

But it isn’t just about being good t what you do and delivering results. People expect you to deliver. That’s what they pay for. It’s how you do it that gives you sustainability.

We work hard to build and develop a great team made up of people who support and genuinely care for each other, who are willing to leave their own egos at the door for the good of the clients and the business, and who trust each other enough to be comfortable in robustly challenging each other. Team de Winter is a great entity to belong to and it’s a massive compliment that people genuinely want to be part of it.

Our people understand and fully embrace the concept of ‘moments of truth’ where every email, call, welcome, report and meeting is a massive opportunity to engage, influence and develop relationships.

We have incredibly close relationships with all of our clients, some of whom we’ve worked with for over 22 years. It’s no coincidence, since we work only with people and organisations that share our values and for whom we know we can make a difference. Grasping for short-term commercial gain is simply unsustainable.

Openness, authenticity and trust are the cornerstones of our client relationships. They are our friends and which of us would ever wish to let down our friends?

We understand the importance of matching external perceptions with internal realities and we recognise that if you set out first and foremost to help your clients as people, add real value and make them feel good, financial success inevitably follows.

We’re a team in which people do what they say they’re going to do when they say it's going to do it. We practice stakeholder alignment: if we look after our people, they will give of their best, that will delight our clients, helping us to grow our business, please our shareholders and enable us to improve the team’s standard of living, completing the virtuous circle.

So, if you’re looking for an agency, look for:

• Shared values

• Genuine passion

• The right skills

• Transparency

• Accountability

A reminder of what true journalism is all about

Whenever an application form asks for my occupation, I’m always proud to write ‘journalist’. I could use ‘PR Consultant’ or ‘Company Director’ but ‘journalist’ is what I’m most comfortable with.

Although good writing is at the core of what we do here at team de Winter - www.thinkdewinter.co.uk - and all of us write content of one kind or another on a daily basis on behalf of our clients - I admit that I haven’t actually been commissioned to write anything for any journal of any kind for more than thirty years. I did plenty of that over more than a decade as a reporter on a series of Weekly newspapers, and enjoyed every minute. Journalism is where my heart is.

Reporting is a function. It involves writing with style, purpose and accuracy for newspapers or magazines, or preparing news to be broadcast on radio or television. And what a rewarding role it is.

The greatest thrill during my newspaper days was watching people on the bus or in a café reading what I had written. That feeling of connecting with people, touching them through the written word is indescribable.

For me, journalism is something far more subtle. To be a great journalist requires values, masses of integrity and the ability to tell right from wrong.

Working in a busy newsroom with proper journalists has been a highlight of my working life. ‘Proper’? Well, people with a genuine love of the English language and an innate ability to pick the right word and put it in the right place to create impact or illicit the required response from the reader, be it joy, anger or wonder.

They are people who use words as a force for good, have a real concern for their fellow men and a need, more than a desire to connect with them.

To my mind proper journalists are driven to make a difference through their writing, to right wrongs, teach and inform and, in some small way, improve the quality of life for the ‘man on the street’. At their best, they have the ability to touch souls.

You can add passion, resilience and a generous helping of courage to the mix. It’s a massive thrill to work amongst kindred spirits but working with journalists takes that to a whole new level. 

I’ve worked with people who have embodied and displayed the best of these qualities and it’s been particularly depressing these last few weeks to see the spotlight focused so sharply on the worst of them. Devoid of any integrity, they have betrayed their duty to protect and educate their fellow man in favour of figures and personal power. Instead of exposing malpractice, they have engaged in it with enthusiasm.

For those who may be starting out in the business, or forging their own reputations in journalism, I’ve pulled out of my wallet, where it has been kept for over three decades, a tattered newspaper cutting that sums it up perfectly.

The late John Gordon wrote these words in the diary of a struggling 22-year-old journalist in 1949. They were subsequently published in a national newspaper in the ‘70s.

‘Gold amongst the rubble’

‘Great reporters are born, not made. They have minds that are acutely sensitive to what interests most other men and women. They are tireless in their digging out of facts. They have an uncanny sense of the one little gleam of gold in a heap of rubble. And they are as accurate as a plumb line.

Many of the best of them cannot write. But when they can they are treasures beyond price.

The really great journalist is always first a reporter. If to reporting he can add the rarest gift of all – the power to crusade, to make articulate what is in the minds of millions of his fellow men, with such vitality that he merges their thoughts together and so creates what is called ‘public opinion’ – then he becomes a dazzling star in the sky.

If he uses that power to change life for the greater good of his fellow men, he in time joins the immortals and deserves his place among them.’

 See de Winter's latest blog: http://www.thinkdewinter.co.uk/news-and-views/look-back-in-wonder.aspx

The loss of a nation’s heritage

Without ever having given it any detailed thought, I assumed that the process of finding and exploring – or should that be ransacking? – the tombs of the Pharaohs and their entourages in Egypt had all but been exhausted, and that the unearthing and subsequent display of the magnificent Tutenkhamun artifacts had been the pinnacle of well over a century of formal digging.

Not so, it would seem. I had the honour of being invited last week to a regular dinner of well-retired members of various branches of the seafaring fraternity at the naval shore base, HMS Eaglet in Liverpool.

Having served for some years in the Naval Reserves, an opportunity to share lunch with like-minded people and all the traditions that go with such an event was a rare treat.

It’s nearly always the case at such events that you meet real characters, members of the ‘old school’ of living and doing things the like of which I doubt we’ll see again.

I had the privilege of sitting next to one such character, the spritely Michael, a quiet, unassuming ex-Naval man now well into his retirement who is a keen and very experienced Egyptologist living in Cairo and with his finger firmly on the pulse of all things do to with exploration of the tombs of the grand and not-so-grand!

During a fascinating discussion he explained that only a tenth of the tombs that actually exist have so far been unearthed, despite an unrelenting process of intense exploration that has continued uninterrupted for well over a century and a half!

It was shocking to hear his revelations of how many of the tombs that have taken decades to locate as part of ‘official’ explorations are often found to have been ransacked years before, their treasures systematically removed and even entire sections of walls bearing ancient graphics and art cut away and disposed off by unscrupulous people, perhaps forced by poverty, and sold to even more unscrupulous collectors.

It seems that these tombs often appear at first inspection to be sealed and undisturbed and yet once entered they reveal a depressing scene of theft and wanton vandalism.

Egypt has been robbed of so much of its heritage. The grim fact that mummies were dug up and made into medicine until the 18th century (the medieval doctors of Alexandria in Egypt prescribed powdered mummy as a kind of wonder drug) can’t account the full extent of what is a real cultural tragedy.

Michael explained that the pillage continues to this day. Tombs are discovered on a regular basis but it appears that their priceless contents are removed and find their way on to the black market, sold and exported for a fraction of their monetary and historical value without ever being officially catalogued.

Those in overall charge appear unable to address this. How immensely heartbreaking and frustrating it must be for the proud people of Egypt to know that their heritage is being plundered on a daily basis and lost to future generations, thanks to the unscrupulous few.