Greentarget

Authoritative messaging

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How do you capture history as it happens? When the coronavirus pandemic’s full effects became clear in March, History Factory began its COVID-19 Corporate Memory Project to capture Corporate America’s reaction in real-time and provide insight into how other organizations are responding to the crisis.

In this episode of Authority Figures, host Aaron Schoenherr and History Factory Managing Director Jason Dressel discuss the COVID-19 Corporate Memory project, rising above the noise of standard thought leadership, and how every organization will have its COVID moment.

Aaron and Jason will discuss which organizations are communicating effectively during the pandemic. But they’ll also discuss how technology continues to change corporate history efforts. 

Episode Highlights

1:30 – Jason discusses his background and introduces History Factory.

2:31 – A deep dive into the COVID-19 Memory Project and what Jason and his team discovered.

5:49 – Aaron asks Jason to elaborate on the connection between authority and organizational responses to social issues.

7:16 – Challenges in creating the COVID-19 Memory Project and capturing the nation’s definitive moments as they happened. 

8:48 – Jason explains how an organization’s history supports its own notion of authority. 

10:25 – Examples of organizations that have exhibited authority amid the COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest. 

13:30 – Jason describes how every organization will have its “COVID moment.”

15:21 – The role digital archives played in creating the COVID-19 Memory Project. 

16:42 – How technology has impacted responses to 2020’s major events versus those of the past. 

17:39 – Jason reflects on the powerful impact a tangible document holds in a digital world and provides first-hand examples.

21:25 – Aaron and Jason discuss how organizations and leaders have effectively expressed authority in their actions.

Subscribe to Authority Figures on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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It is time for business leaders to develop enlightened positions on social issues that are also authentic, constructive and on-brand for a new generation of ‘citizen consumers.’

To say that 2020 has been a challenging year would be a gross understatement. 

But the unprecedented chaos and confusion, our annus horribilis, has delivered a string of revelations for business leaders – revelations that will have lasting implications.

One of the most profound: Leaders in the private sector can no longer comfortably avoid taking an unambiguous and very public stance on what had been traditionally viewed as “social sector issues” such as climate change, racial injustice and economic disparity. 

The reason is simple enough yet – still – not widely accepted: Social challenges are business challenges. From the violent union struggles and workers’ strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; to the Great Depression and Cold War eras; to the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s; right up to the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter protests of the current day, business leaders have, time and again, been assigned a hard but necessary task, and that is to design strategies to respond to wide-scale social conflicts that impact those who produce and sell products and services as well as those who consume them – i.e., people.

There was a time when the C-suite grudgingly stepped up to meet an obligatory commitment to social responsibility simply to stay clear of bad publicity – and to keep the CEO out of the proverbial hot seat. But things have changed – dramatically. There are new, earnest expectations, articulated and memorialized by Business Roundtable in 2019, for businesses to true up on social responsibility in the belief that what is good for the planet and the society upon it is, in fact, good for business.

Therein lies another challenge for business leaders: How does a company effectively develop and communicate a position on key issues in a way that is constructive and not just reactive or performative? And is it even possible to do this while staying on-brand?  

Answering that question, nearly a decade after Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer said CSR should be framed as a shared value that will deliver on unmet social needs, is more pertinent now than ever.

“I see this [conundrum] not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum with different poles,” said Caroline Grossman, executive director of the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “At one end, CSR is about positive impact on the planet’s most pressing problems, and at the other end it’s greenwashing. Risk mitigation falls somewhere in the middle.” 

Getting to a meaningful place on this spectrum is about asking questions, sometimes tough questions – the most interesting of which focus on understanding why this new approach to key issues is, actually, good business.

Drawing from the Past – and Other Industries

Companies, specifically C-suites within those companies, should incorporate key questions as a strategy exercise or strategy reorientation. 

This approach has become increasingly common across industries, said Grossman, whose research center supports people committed to helping solve complex social and environmental problems. “Some dramatic examples are companies founded on innovation that itself has the potential for outsize impact.”

Take plant-based meat. Grossman points out that Beyond Meat had a successful IPO last year and, as of this writing, is trading well above the offering price (even after a recent plunge). Impossible Foods, based on current research, is not planning an IPO but continues to attract investors. Both companies are also drawing attention from companies like Walmart, Kroger, Burger King and Amazon, and McDonald’s just announced a new “McPlant” line for 2021.

“I don’t think these retailers and restaurants stock plant-based meat because of CSR but because they think it is good business,” Grossman said.

Tables Have Turned

In the latter part of the last century, the most successful American corporations were uniquely positioned to drive consumer habits. One need only think of Nike, Google and Apple when it comes to what is now socially expected of us when it comes to deciding what athletic shoes we should wear, what email service we should use and what smartphones we should palm.

During the last six months, however, there has been a noticeable shift. After a ponderous and reactive response in the first weeks of the pandemic and then widespread protests, the social – social concerns, social issues, social anxieties – became a bigger influencer of big business. 

As a placard at a Black Lives Matter protest in Chicago this summer read: “no justice = no peace and no profit.” [Emphasis added.]

Ideally, however, business leaders are not acting solely out of financial self-interest. Recent events should be spurring them to consider the concept of social responsibility as a vital part of business – an essential, indeed intrinsic, component nested within any for-profit enterprise. 

Currently, there is strong support from consumers and investors for positive social/business impact. in Aflac’s 2019 CSR Survey, 82% of consumers said that companies bear responsibility for “making the world a better place,” ahead of the 75% who selected “making money for its shareholders.” Nearly all investors surveyed, unsurprisingly, placed importance on making money for shareholders (93%), but a similar portion of investors said that making the world a better place was important.

“I believe every business is inextricably linked to social responsibility. It is now part of our culture,” said Diane Primo, CEO of Purpose Brand Agency, an award-winning public relations, branding and digital marketing firm. “Even asset managers, investment bankers and financial giants are evaluating companies that do not comply with extensive ESG matrices.”

Primo’s insights reveal something else. Present-gen consumers have awakened to the fact that they hold real power – buying power – and they are quickly giving way to what will surely be a new demo for the 21st century: citizen consumer.

“What consumers care about, and how much they care, is redefining social responsibility,” Primo said. “Shared activism in combination with digital engagement is shifting culture quickly. We witness shifting perceptions as Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 spread and corporate responsibility evolves.”

This “evolution” was one of the reasons GreenHouse and Greentarget, in partnership with LAB/Amsterdam, launched Immediate Frontier. An independent research and innovation initiative, it was designed in part as a model for leaders to better see how to engage with the concept of CSR in a new, more holistic, less compartmentalized way. 

Some business leaders are ahead of the curve, Primo said.

“Public companies are already undergoing significant change,” she said. “As powerful consumer action groups team with investment groups to modify sales and reduce capital flows, change will happen – and quickly.”

X (and Boomers) Includes Y and Z Now

The fact that more leaders are willing to tackle issues that would not have seemed relevant to a for-profit entity’s business goals previously seems all the more natural, indeed necessary, as one contemplates another revelation: These social issues, now front and center, are leading the way to entirely new value propositions for corporations – and serving up impressive business outcomes.  

But present-gen leaders – Gen Xers and, in some cases, Boomers – shouldn’t bear this burden alone, nor are they capable of taking it on, experts suggest. Next-gen leaders deserve a seat at the table. 

Grossman, who teaches a CSR course at Booth, said young leaders take a long view and have sprung into action when it comes to the pandemic and helping Black-owned businesses.

“The next generation is demanding that business does things differently,” Grossman said. “[They’re] challenging leadership to take issues of diversity, equity and inclusion into account.”

Students are eager to jump in to think about social issues in a business context, and vice versa. And, Grossman said, the leaders at companies that sponsor the course at Booth are listening to fresh, new perspectives and straight-up challenges that students bring to the experience.  

“It’s critical for me to connect with all of [Rustandy’s] stakeholders – students, faculty, alumni, social sector practitioners and business leaders,” she said. “But it turns out that it’s the students who always ask the toughest questions.”

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Advising business leaders in 2020 means helping them see through the fog of a pandemic, run their businesses from afar and keep themselves safe, not to mention sane. For the marketers who support advisors, it’s critical to stay abreast of those leaders’ fears and challenges, the shifting and often distorted market dynamics they’re facing, the opportunities they’re discerning, and even their personal travails.

Enter voice of the client (VoC) research, a tool for helping professional service firms get multi-faceted understandings of clients’ needs, expectations and most importantly, their pain points.

Built through client interviews, focus groups or surveys, VoC research arms marketers with a wealth of insights. It delivers individual insights that fuel business development, organic growth and client retention. And it produces broader qualitative data the firm can use to identify market challenges and opportunities.

The pain points unearthed in VoC research also fuel stronger thought-leadership research. After discussing their own business and professional challenges, interviewees generally get more candid and insightful on industry topics and trends. The resulting insights add depth, credibility and authority to a firm’s thought leadership – and turning it into a valuable business development tool.

Voice of the Client Research: Interview Best Practices

Research into client pain points aims to first understand what keeps the client up at night and where they seek guidance. The interview findings inform how the firm serves its client’s business, but the priorities and opinions of each individual interviewee matter too. Topics, for example, could be:

  • Attitudes about where their business was, where it is now, and where it’s going
  • Constraints that prevent them from accomplishing more, personally and organizationally
  • What better outcomes would look like from both personal and organizational perspectives
  • Assessment of the most pressing and emerging business and legal risks and opportunities

For example, when a law-firm client wanted to evaluate the ways it assigned and delegated work, we conducted interviews with clients that produced blunt insights on where the firm’s approach diverged from its clients’ business objectives. The firm responded by reconfiguring the project management process and tailoring roles and responsibilities according to project scope.

While pain points are the primary focus of the interviews, the conversations often lead to insights on where the advisor or firm have fallen short. The conversations can evolve into discussions of the subtleties that advisors can’t see from the outside – how a particular business’s needs are different than others in its industry, for example.

Clients may not be expecting those discussions. But business leaders always appreciate transparency and candor. And while the conversations occasionally get awkward, pushing through the awkward moments breaks down communication barriers. Knowing their outside advisors care enough to ask makes clients eager to open up.

Picking the right interviewer

It’s important to think about who’s asking the questions. Putting interviews in the hands of a trained researcher always pays dividends; aptitude in eliciting candor, probing for fresh insights and analyzing the interview content will ensure nobody’s time feels wasted. And interviewees tend to be more candid with a third party.

At the same time, the firm has to be a collaborator – connecting the interviewee with the interviewer, introducing the project and process through an initial email or phone call. The advisor or firm rep should also thoroughly brief the interviewer on any pertinent issues. For the interviewee to feel at ease, the interviewer should understand the relationship history and any hot button issues.

The right approach for your clients – and for you

There are several options for undertaking this type of research. Selecting one approach versus another depends upon the topics and objectives at hand:

  • One-on-one, in-depth interviews often make the most sense for pain points research. There are situations where clients will dish frank insights if they feel they’re engaged in conversation with an audience of one and that person is a trained moderator who they can trust to report the conversation accurately – and with the right discretion.
  • Focus groups, online or in-person, can reveal challenges and serve as forums for testing potential solutions. In some cases, it’s preferable to have a group of peers weigh in on business pain points in an iterative discussion, particularly if a firm wants to get a sense for differing priorities among executives in different roles. The CFO and CMO may be thinking about the same problem with very different levels of urgency, for example. 

    Working on behalf of a financial institution, Greentarget moderated an online discussion between attorneys, claims administrators and the judiciary regarding pain points in class action settlements. Each group provided a different level of awareness about our client’s capabilities (and letting them interact with each other enhanced the discussion). Our findings gave the client a road map for determining which of their services and audiences – clients and prospects – deserved greater focus and attention.
  • Online surveys can also foster pain point conversations. Greentarget sees stronger data sets overall – with more decisive opinions – when we kick off a survey with a series of thoughtful questions around how respondents are feeling and where they are most desperate for guidance. In a recent survey about business operations in Latin America, we uncovered a business challenge that had not been directly addressed in messaging by any of the respondent’s outside counsel. It was easy for our law firm client to address the issue – but they didn’t know about it until we asked the right questions in the right setting.

Turning interviewees into advocates

Finally, engaging clients in one-on-one or small-group interviews, even surveys, can generate advocacy. There are a couple of important considerations for professional service providers here – and they should be considered in advance, lest an interviewee feel his or her insights were wasted or commoditized.

First, the firm should have a clear follow-up plan. Keeping in touch with the interviewees through individual outreach, even with just a summary of the interview content, can prove important in generating their long-term advocacy. Second, in cases where VoC research is part of a thought leadership initiative, the firm should have a clearly defined role for interviewees in the resulting article or report. In some cases, it may have an opportunity to quote them as experts.

Steve Jobs once urged companies to get as close as possible to customers, “So close that you can tell them what they need before they realize it themselves.” Getting to that level of intimacy takes more than treating clients to the occasional dinner – especially in the social-distancing era.

Asking the right questions, in the right moments, knowing how to process the answers and acting on the results helps a firm stay a step ahead of its clients’ needs.

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In the age of information overload, connecting with an audience requires knowing exactly what they want – and how to give it to them.

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The idea was straightforward but big: Identify the norms that govern the ways we work and the spaces we work in to better understand how those norms shape workplace wellness. The goal was to help corporate America reduce employee burnout, attract talent and build healthier organizations.

To accomplish this, Greentarget and two partners planned to convene a roundtable of experts from an array of industries through the new Immediate Frontier initiative. On February 4, we announced that the roundtable would happen in late April.

In between, of course, the world changed on us.

Without the ability to bring a group of experts together and amid the chaos of the abrupt work-from-home transition, we seriously considered spiking the project. But then we realized that finding solutions around work, wellness and space had just become more important than ever.

We just needed a new approach – so we created one. We call it qualitative, consultative research.

And that approach is fueling Work, Wellness & Space, the inaugural research offering by Immediate Frontier. The project, which is a partnership between  GreenHouse::Innovation and Greentarget in special collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam, launches today.

How We Got to the New Approach

If our task became more important in March, it also became more difficult. Decision-makers around the globe didn’t just face an economic disruption in the wake of COVID-19, they also faced momentous questions about how work would continue in the months and years ahead.

We could have pivoted to a traditional quantitative survey, but we knew (even from brief conversations with decision-makers in March) that direct conversations would be the best way to thoroughly explore attitudes and opinions. We considered a video roundtable, but finding a mutually agreeable time when many participants were dealing with critical business issues seemed tone-deaf and unlikely to work.

Instead, we set about a series of one-on-one qualitative interviews with experts in commercial real estate, architecture, medicine, design and several other fields. But from the earliest moments of our earliest conversations, we saw that these weren’t just interviews. They were consultative discussions.

How the New Approach Works

A good analogy is traditional beat reporting, in which a reporter, after months or years covering similar topics, develops knowledge bordering on expertise, enabling her to ask better questions and write more fully developed, insightful stories. Over the course of two months, our team began that journey through a combination of seeking out top experts, asking informed questions and knowing our stuff better every day.

We pulled this off through close collaboration with our Content & Editorial Strategy team, which has a strong background in journalism, and our Research & Market Intelligence team, which has years of experience in qualitative research. The new approach also benefitted from the willingness of our research participants to hop on Zoom within a few days’ notice.

This all led to something we hadn’t expected, something we think we can replicate. While providing guidance in research reports is something we’ve done for years, we were able to test possible guidance before findings were released by bouncing one expert’s view off others. And by bringing actionable insights from one related field to another – e.g., telling a commercial real estate executive what we heard from a healthcare executive and discussing why and how that mattered – we connected some interesting dots.

The Result

This approach has fueled a research report – the first chapter of which we’ll release today – covering a bevy of work, wellness and space issues. As decision-makers around the world think about what their offices will look like, how workspaces will function and how employees’ wellness can be reimagined, the work we’ve done through qualitative, consultative research has provided an important perspective on what appears to be a generational inflection point. It has also afforded the ability to iterate and advance the conversation as the impact of the pandemic evolves in tandem with the release of our research report chapters.

We believe our findings could help pave a way forward – one that perhaps leads to greater workplace wellness. We’ll release the results each week between now and Labor Day.

We hope our insights spark broader conversations that help decision-makers at a critical time and that improve the interplay between work, wellness and space for years to come.

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Most GCs don’t find client alerts useful. Making them better may be easier than you think.

In a recent survey of GCs, we found that their preferred medium for Covid-19-related content was email – by a long shot – but only 35% found email content to be useful.

In other words, the majority of professional services firms’ client alerts, at least on Covid-related topics, aren’t up to snuff.

The good news is that in most cases, it’s not the information itself that’s letting recipients down. What’s missing, rather, is a sense of empathy for the stressed-out, inundated reader. Too often those readers get an email with a subject line that tells them nothing, containing massive blocks of jargon-filled text, loaded with background information they already know. There may be valuable insights hiding in there, but who has the time to hunt them down?

Firms can do better – with just a few tweaks. Here’s how.  

1). Subject lines: just tell us what we’re going to learn. Too many subject lines tell us the subject – “New EEOC guidelines” – without any hint of what the firm has to say about them. That’s only half the battle. A good subject line describes, in a few words, the subject of the alert (e.g., new EEOC guidelines) and what the reader will get out of reading it. For instance: “New EEOC guidelines, explained” ; “New EEOC guidelines – 3 things employers need to know”; or “FAQ: New EEOC guidelines”.

2). Cut to the chase. Everyone knows Covid-19 is unprecedented. Yet alert after alert opens with a preamble reminding us of the fact. No need. You’re talking to informed professionals. Lead with a sentence telling the reader why they need to pay attention (i.e., what’s at stake) then quickly describe what you’re going to offer.  

3). Understand what service your content is providing. The effective client alerts we read tend to include one or both of the following: 1) A clear, concise summary of a new legal development; or 2) Considerations, action-items, and/or insights around a certain topic. What’s key is to recognize which kind you’re writing and develop it with that in mind.

A mere summary – highlighting the key points of a complex law – might be useful if it’s easier to read than the law or regulation itself, and if it comes out before news organizations have covered it in-depth. Likewise, if you’re offering actionable insights, don’t wait until the final third to get them; hyperlink to the context and put your insights in clear, succinct bullet points.

4). Use descriptive subheads, short paragraphs, bullet points and even visuals if you can. Again, just think about how you read emails. You’re basically skimming for what might be useful, right? And what makes skimming easier? Subheads that tell you what’s in the section to follow; bullet points that have ample space between them and aren’t heavy on text; and short, concise paragraphs that aren’t filled with long names of laws/regulatory bodies that everyone knows by acronym anyway.

5). Consider employing a few reliable stock formats. I like knowing, when I get my New York Times morning briefing, that it’s going to follow a familiar format: a few summed-up stories, a recipe and little joke towards the end, and so on. I like, too, that it comes at pretty much the same time every morning. In short, I appreciate it because it tells me, via its format and style, what, where, and when I will find useful/relevant information.

Client alerts may not be so simple – it may not be possible to reliably send them out at the same time. But you can train readers on what to expect when they open one up. It will endear you to them and, as a bonus, it’ll make alerts easier to write.

Some stock formats that we’d suggest:

  • FAQs – Just remember that it’s better to have more questions (and shorter answers) than multi-paragraph answers to a single broad question.
  • Checklist – Providing a checklist of actions/factors to consider on a specific topic – that a reader could print out and keep on their desk – is the ultimate utility. Just keep it to one page.
  • Summary + Insight – In other words, two short sections: 1) What you need to know (i.e., brief summary of issue with hyperlink, and why it’s important – but again, keep it to a minimum); and 2) What to do about it (i.e., professional guidance). Clearly delineate them with the same subheads every time.
  • Panel – Why not just grab direct quotes from your subject-matter experts – (ideally) ones that sound like the way they actually speak – and toss it into a Q&A format? The alert could start with a quick summary of what’s at stake, then collect 3-5 paragraph-long quotes from different sources sharing their perspective/guidance on the topics. It’s a good way to make alerts engaging, personable and easier to write, while showcasing distinctive voices and the breadth of the firm’s intellect.

If for some reason none of those work, just remember your audience: a busy, intelligent, informed individual who doesn’t owe you any of their time and doesn’t need or want to be pandered to.

And remember that now more than ever, people do want to hear from subject-matter authorities. It’s your job (and ours) to deliver that message effectively.

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