Linda North 
is the founder of North Public Relations. Starting her career at Hill + Knowlton Strategies, she worked with Motorola Canada to launch their Twitter and Tumblr presence. Later at Venture Communications she learned from leading brand strategists and creatives, big ideas went from from conception to execution. After discovering her true passion for entrepreneurial companies, she moved in-house to the forefront of the connected home revolution, ecobee – makers of the world’s first smart thermostat. NorthPR strives for creative and new ideas, embracing new media, challenging the status quo and achieving outstanding results. One of her international clients at already the top of the map, outperforming all other countries in media coverage results – and that was in the second month working with them.
Linda will be speaking at our upcoming course, “Leading Process Change” in Toronto on Nov 5 & 6. Find out more about that and about Linda HERE.
Linda over to you:
Process and Public Relations
I’ll be honest, I hate process. I’m not good at it, and I have ‘no’ time for it. Case in point, I currently have 5,757 emails in my in
box.
I could be the perfect archetype as the person who needs to go through process improvement training. But then I think, oh no, I’d have to sit through 2 days and just feel guilty because I actually won’t change my ways. But I wish I could because I’d serve my clients, colleagues and ve
ndors a lot better.
Here’s the thing. Once you’ve gone through all the trouble of improving your processes – spending hours researching, finding and collaborating with right experts, and getting to the hard work of implementing process change – you deserve to yell about it from the rooftops. Your stakeholders need to know what you’ve done to improve your relationship with them.
Communicating and PR’ing your process improvements may be the last thing that comes to mind when you’re putting together your full process improvement plan, but it’s a very important step to consider. The reasons you’re going through these changes are so you can serve someone or something better.
While writing this blog post, I did a quick Google News search and came across these two articles:
Peace Corps improves application process
Evolving consent processes improve patient satisfaction
Both of these stories are sharing news about a significant change within an organization to makes things more efficient and better for their stakeholders.
So how should you share your process news? A few ideas could be:
- issue a press release
- organize meetings with key reporters
- send out a customer newsletter
- create a video case study
- social media (e.g. LinkedIn)
But most importantly, make sure you get your story and angle right.
No one cares about the intimate details about how you improved your process (well, process geeks Nicole and Ruth do, but they aren’t your typical people). Your story isn’t going to be about YOU, it needs to be about THEM.
Better yet, did your process improvement really, truly innovate your company culture, programs, products, etc.? If so, you may be able to go beyond your niche and become a true thought leader in the space of innovation and leadership. Don’t undermine the massive improvements you are creating within your company.
The world needs more people like you who are willing to embrace change to create a more efficient and productive world. So start sharing your story!
Linda