Australia is the one of the few developed countries that don’t set targets for gender equality. There are 128 Councils in NSW and women represent only 30% of all councillors, with more disparity in the rural areas. Four councils have no women councillors at all.
On February 18 2021 we woke up to the stark reality that we don’t own or control our Facebook pages.
Not only had Facebook blocked the pages of corporate news sites and removed links to news articles from all of our Facebook pages, retrospectively (!) – thousands of government, community service and not-for-profit organisations pages became collateral damage in the war between the social media giants and the Australian government over the news media bargaining code bill before the Senate.
There will be many of us communications professionals looking at the strategies, key messaging guides and content calendars that we spent the first part of the year drawing up, and effectively throwing them out the window right now. We get it. It’s hard to launch a new fundraising campaign or announce a new program, let alone communicate any more bad news about human rights abuses or funding cuts while a pandemic grips the globe.
One thing about the mess we’re in with COVID-19 is that we’re all in it together – globally.
But it’s quite a challenge for progressive change-makers and organisations to rise above the panic, get positive messages out and lead with our values in the way we communicate to all our stakeholders.
We live in an age bursting with communication channels where we are bombarded with messages from the moment we wake up – but how many of them do we really take notice of and how many get through to inspire us to change?
Effective Strategic Communication is about cutting through to those key audiences that you need to motivate to take action to achieve your objectives.
