All CLOCS Champions undertake to widely promote CLOCS, internally to their colleagues and other parts of their organisation and externally to embed the CLOCS Standard into ‘business as usual’ across the UK. This commitment, which is part of the Memorandum of Understanding agreed to on membership renewal, is extremely important to the growth and sustainability of the programme.
CLOCS Champions are advocates, campaigners, promoters (within their day jobs) – who live by values of the CLOCS Standard. Great on paper but what can you actually do to make a difference?
To support CLOCS Champions to be more successful in their communications, the team sought advice from a leading consultant, Andrew Brown of Frank & Brown who was invited to speak at a recent Working Group Meeting. Andy was asked to provide some simple steps people could take to maximise their influence and become effective CLOCS Champions.
The first step – find the right people to promote your cause to, you’ll need to go to the top, a senior level appointment for example, a Council Leader or Chief Executive. You may need to explore beyond your comfort zone to locate thought leaders in road safety.
Use social media including Twitter, look at other people’s tweets; were they retweeted, did they use the @ or # to include potentially powerful and well-regarded people? By commenting and investigating others’ social media content there is increased chance of being noticed by many more people.
Whatever media you use, tell a story – find a hook. Create your elevator pitch. PEEL is a great structure to ensure your message is not lost: Point, Explanation (plot), Evidence, Link
- Point = the problem, issue or example of best practice or it could be reputational risk, cost in insurance claims, an incident close to home
- Explanation = how did you solve the problem – what needed to happen – how you did it
- Evidence = the summary of the action, illustrated with data, pictures etc.
- Links = The conclusion – the benefits, the outputs or the learning to share from the whole piece
Here are some small steps to help you to be a really good and active champion:
- Get incident stats from your locality – easy awareness raising
- Identify regional and local strategic objectives – local plan. Where does CLOCS align and support achievement of goals
- Identify regional growth strategy, and cite data from Glenigans, Construction News regarding biggest contracts to evidence potential problems
- Top down approach – appeal to the Mayor or local Council Leaders
- Engage with police force – their interest is reducing RTAs
- What is your local community most concerned with – engage with action/networking groups
- Local media – when there is a collision or incident respond and comment constructively. 4th emergency service?
Be aware of language (incidents not accidents), zealots and trolls. Engage directly and not online.
CLOCS Champions may use the CLOCS logo and repurpose any of the text and statistics published on the CLOCS website. This should make it very easy to create a killer argument for your communications. The CLOCS Standard flier – Oct 2019.pdf is a useful document to help people understand the key requirements of each stakeholder and convince others of the benefits of membership. The CLOCS team is currently preparing an up-to-date powerpoint presentation and notes to help with presenting to groups. CLOCS banners and posters are also available – click here for more information.
Frank & Brown is a communications consultancy providing public relations, writing and editorial support, strategic internal communications services, project management, training and publishing. Andrew has worked in the media as a writer and consultant for over twenty years.
