IN January of this year, our Ipra Philippine chapter organized a webinar featuring as a major speaker our Ipra Global President Philippe Borremans who spoke on the topic “Communication Trends in 2021 and Beyond,” the highlights of which he also shared here in his guest column last February 1. There were four other speakers, including me, who tackled various topics before him and we are each sharing the highlights of our talks here for the benefit of those who missed it.
I am now pleased to share the key points of my short talk entitled, “How our Agency Adapted to the Pandemic” and why our agency—Buensalido Public Relations and Communications—is still happily active after hurdling the challenges of the pastyear.
With the unexpected lockdown in mid-March 2020 and ensuing quarantine protocols, we all experienced the loss of social interaction. The dearth of legitimate news allowed the proliferation of spurious information on the health crisis. Most of us were cast into a state of suspension. Despite the unfortunate turn of events—the loss of lives, the suffering, and the seeming hopelessness that nearly broke people’s spirits—one thing emerged as truly vital and essential for everyone, the singular factor that would let us reach out and connect…communication.
Those of us who work in media, marketing, public relations, government and corporate relations are supposed to be experts in communication, but how did we respond? In many ways, we are supposed to be primed for crises, not only for our companies but more especially for our clients. How did we cope?
I can only draw from my personal experience and I can affirm that we reacted mainly by instinct. Buensalido PR has been in existence for over 30 years now and we have grappled with many challenges in the past, but this pandemic was a first. While airline crews, for instance, are trained to handle life-threatening situations mid-flight, there was no manual or handbook that we could turn to for tips in dealing with the consequences of a deadly outbreak.
For our agency, I had to rely on instinct. Yes, instinct! In my case, I drew upon my maternal instinct. As a mother and as a woman who was faced with a threat to my work family, to our business, and even possibly to our lives, I acted the way every mother would.
Here are the five simple ways with which I led and steered our agency through the worst of times:
Protect and Defend my Family, My Team, and Our Clients
We prioritized the health and safety of our team. After closing down our offices, we asked everyone to work from home and informed all clients that we would continue to work remotely. We kept all communication lines open—to the team, to our clients, to our suppliers, and to the media and the community.
Save, Save, Save
We had to manage our resources, our people, and our energy in order to be able to sustain our work for the long run.
We are all familiar with the old saying: Always save for a rainy day. Well, that rainy day came and it was no ordinary downpour. We took an unexpected hit from a global catastrophe.
We had no idea how long the lockdown would last so we had to assess, analyze, and project what we needed to do in different scenarios. We took stock of the number of clients and staff we had, and projected our costs until at least the end of 2020. Based on our revenues, the limited savings that we had, and a projected workflow, we trimmed down all expenses, maximized the use of remaining resources, and continued to pitch and work for new projects and accounts.
We explained to our team that we all had to contribute to and take part in the management of our resources, and yet we were expected to work with the same dedication and often for even longer hours. They all understood and I’m very grateful that my team is made up mostly of young and resilient digital natives who easily took to doing everything digitally. As the only “digital immigrant” (read: late adaptor to the digital landscape), I also had to transform my set ways of communicating by learning and using quicker ways.
Sustain Our Relationships and Maintain a Deeper Understanding of and Presence for our Partners and Clients
Thirty years of working with various sectors and companies proved helpful during this crisis. Because we had won their trust and confidence, it was not difficult to ask them to quickly perform certain functions or decisions with our advice.
For clients whose businesses had been hurt badly such as the malls and travel-related services, we offered our assistance and assured them of our continuing help and advice. For those whose operations required more attention during the pandemic such as health institutions like the Makati Medical Center, we maintained our responsiveness, a greater dose of understanding, and willingness to do more.
This was a time to work harder despite the many limitations brought about by the circumstances.
One major lesson we picked up from the pandemic: the trust, reputation, and strong relationships that we had built and earned over the years proved to be the solid foundation that supports us, in good times but more so during a crisis.
We Quickly Adapted to New Platforms—We Were Not Afraid to Change
Difficult times will bring out the best or the worst in each of us. During this huge crisis, we needed to change and we did. We saw change as an opportunity to grow. So we undertook a lot of research—we read, we kept our eyes and ears to the ground and all around us, and we explored all possibilities. Given the new reality of no personal or social interaction, how could we communicate creatively?
We were not afraid to try new ways of doing things. In lieu of traditional methods, we jumped into new platforms. Technology became our staunch ally. We stayed connected through video calls, google meets, and zoom conferences. The virtual and digital world became our new reality. We even successfully launched a new product—the Sekaya line of organic, natural and plant-based products—in a webinar.
From our usual intimate roundtable meets and personalized launches of the past, we quickly shifted to virtual and online executions. Exercising creativity to maximize communications between client and the public, we contacted credible resource persons to help us communicate our messages. And of course, we also called on media to support us on our new platforms, and thankfully, it worked!
“We are the World” Use Communication Skills to Benefit the World
A final realization during the pandemic: we cannot exist in a vacuum or bubble. We need to communicate with a higher purpose. We must use our communication skills to reach out to our neighbors, our community, and the world.
How did we do that? We adopted a stronger sense of social responsibility. During the pandemic and even up to the present, we recognized the importance of our neighbors and our country—and the need to support each other. Support our own. Buy Local. Support Local Businesses. We are part of a larger community so as communicators, we must take an active role in caring for and helping others.
More than ever, it was time for us and our clients to not only focus on marketing and profit. We also needed to show genuine concern and contribute to issues of health, education, poverty and the environment. This must now be evident in our plans and action. Communicate to make a difference or impact on communities.
We were fortunate to have been part of a program for our client to educate the teachers via a nationwide communications effort called AKAP Guro CONNECTeD. This was a series of webinars sponsored by Unilab, Inc. that had us reaching out to thousands of teachers in cooperation with the Department of Education and the Department of Health so we could brief them about Covid-19 and how they could impart the correct information to their students about safety and health protocols.
As part of this need to communicate with the world with a refocused, recharged and renewed spirit, we also revisited our agency values and decided that we needed to put more emphasis on our positivity—something that we had always tried to infuse into all our plans and objectives, not only for ourselves but for our partners, in order to keep a positive mindset and communicate everything positive.
In keeping with this, we reminded ourselves of several traditional and positive values that we should always try to emphasize in everything we do: kindness, respect for others, gratitude, simplicity, and something that has consistently and personally worked for me: prayers. After all, I consider prayers as the highest form of communication.
These values have carried us through the toughest times and we believe these will also help us navigate whatever crises the future holds for us.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premiere association for senior communications professionals around the world. Joy Lumawig-Buensalido is the president and CEO of Buensalido & Associates Public Relations.
PR Matters is devoting a special column each month to answer our readers’ questions about public relations. Please send your questions or comments to askipraphil@gmail.com.