Year in review reveals additional priorities for Daymark clients

As reputation challenges continue to mount, nothing stands still with the issues and communications needs of our clients.

Here we take a dive into the over 60 projects completed in the past year for clients to see what we can learn for you when it comes to building, managing, protecting or restoring reputation.

The breadth of stakeholders is increasing

We have engaged with hundreds of government and industry stakeholders on behalf of our clients in the past year. They have ranged from ministerial offices, industry bodies, influential businesses, parliamentary committees, customers and consumers, regulatory agencies and the fourth estate.

We include both naysayers and barrackers and although they have not always agreed with our clients, their messages have been delivered, important relationships built and others maintained and strengthened.

What has shifted the most in the past year however is that the range of stakeholders in any one project has increased, both in number and diversity.

Clients who have acted upon our recommendations have variously changed their approach to certain issues, trained their staff, adjusted their leadership teams, built coalitions with other industry players and created new communications materials to better explain their situation.

Stakeholder engagement is one of Daymark’s core services – and the increase in the number and diversity of groups our clients’ regard as key stakeholders is certainly adding more value to them.

Daymark’s recommendation: broaden your approach to stakeholders. Get qualitative input; the ‘nuggets of gold’ found in our stakeholder sentiment survey anecdotes (the non-attributed verbatim comments) provide rich guidance to our clients.

Listed companies need it all, and in one place

The universality of reputation management has seen our ASX-listed clients expand their services over the past year. This is a natural progression perhaps as messaging to one audience group can be more effective when delivered in greater consistency across all audiences.

In addition to managing half and full-year results communications, we have worked with our clients to announce pivotal events such as new CEOs, Board Chairs, legal actions and court wins, voluntary administrations, and outcomes of hostile EGMs.

We have seen increasing demand for additional services to support these communications, including:

• Bespoke media and presentation skills training
• Media relations across the breadth of publications and platforms, not just the majors
• Improved websites – we built several during the year and delivered upgrades to others
• Independent testing of investor sentiment, and
• Issues and crisis management – because potential problems are always on the horizon.

Daymark’s recommendation: leverage your core message and narrative across your audiences. Get strategic about this – it works. Manage your risks by knowing what your investors think and by getting ready for reputation damaging events which are nearly always present.

Media – it’s increasingly all about engagement, not media releases

We love being asked “can we get some media coverage on our x or y initiative?” During the year we have challenged our clients to get behind the real news in their request. What other proof points are there, and who else can we involve?

Standard practice really, but now engaging media requires the news to be increasingly substantive from its topic to the spokespeople, and with a clear understanding of the intended audience. Transparency remains key of course.

During the year we secured coverage through hundreds of media outlets, including The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, the ABC, the Herald Sun and other News Limited sister publications, Nine News, Sunrise, the Project, The Age/SMH, Sky News, Mamamia, SBS, 3AW, 2GB and numerous trade and local publications.

We also secured coverage in several international outlets including Bloomberg, the BBC, the NZ Herald, and Channel News Asia.

All were based on tailored outreach campaigns and reached an audience of over 20 million people.

Daymark’s recommendation: Media remains a vital avenue to get your message out. Your news needs to be news – ask us how.

More questions about engaging the community and First Nations

In the past year we have seen a clear shift in the desire to engage with communities properly, from first principles. In the past we were often asked to come and fix a consultation program that had gone awry. Not so much anymore as clients ask early what to do.

During the year we also completed workshops with clients to help orientate their corporate strategy with new or better engagement with First Nations communities, potential partners and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees.

Our work with First Nations groups extended to reviewing Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs), developing business cases for client partnerships with First Nations groups, preparation of important speeches, protocols for engaging with and recognising First Nations groups, and producing an inaugural RAP for clients.

On the community front, a comprehensive approach to launching consultation, building feedback into the project planning, and getting in front of issues is now the new norm.

Daymark’s recommendation: It is better to ask where to start than how can I fix this problem. Get advice early on your project when you want to engage new groups or if your project has a major impact, positive or negative, on your community.

Still not prepared for issues and crisis management

Managing issues and preparing clients for crises is a key part of our offer. Our experience in senior corporate affairs roles in large corporations has exposed us to a vast array of issues and we have rich experience being part of crisis management teams both in-house and as reputation consultants.

Each crisis is unique but there are some broader trends that are affecting how clients prepare for potential reputational issues. The ongoing influence of social media means news is spreading faster and wider than ever before, while technology is also driving new risks, including hacks, scams and other cybercrime.

To add to this risk most of our clients in the past year have had in common a cumbersome and out of date crisis management plan. Daymark has assisted leadership teams to deal with crises in diverse industries including sport and leisure, transport, infrastructure, insurance, agriculture, manufacturing, forestry and aged care.

We would like to say our clients are always prepared, but that is often not the case. An outdated crisis management plan (or no plan at all) will only increase the stress and confusion in a crisis, with potentially far-reaching effects.

As well as assisting clients to update their plans, we have run crisis readiness and crisis training workshops to highlight potential challenges.

Daymark’s recommendation: as a minimum get your crisis management plan up to date and useable. Test it too. If you would like to understand the issues that may be dormant in your organisation and are potentially your next crisis, talk to us. And check out our AI product designed to find issues: Foresight AI.

Prepared by the Daymark Team