Does your team reflect the communities you serve?

Calling all public sector communication professionals.

The first ever equality, diversity and inclusion survey of public sector communication professionals has just been launched by LGcomms.

It is open until Sunday 7 August 2022 and you’re invited to have your say.

I heard about about the survey and invited Zander Mills, Vice Chair of LGcomms and communication manager at South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue to come and write for the All Things IC blog.

If you are eligible to take part, please take a few moments to complete the survey.

Would you like to learn more about equality, diversity and inclusion? Please see the end of this article for a list of resources and articles I’ve published over the past few years.

I’ll hand you over to Zander…

Does your team reflect the communities you serve?

Have you ever been asked to deliver a recruitment marketing campaign?

Perhaps you’ve been asked to help to recruit more social care workers, police officers, firefighters or nurses.

Maybe as part of that campaign you’ve been asked to help generate applications from underrepresented groups, in a bid to make the workforce in your organisation more representative of the communities that you serve.

But hand on heart, at the end of the day, when all’s said and done- is your own team any better? Do you and your colleagues really represent the communities you serve?

And I don’t just mean in terms of gender and race.

What about disability, faith or sexuality?

And to what extent does someone’s social, economic or educational background determine whether they will land a job within your team?

How important is it to their chances of promotion?

Local public service communication teams showed during the pandemic and beyond how absolutely, completely and utterly critical they are to delivering vital campaign messages to communities.

Out with the nanny state, one-size-fits-all, top down messaging- in with the supercharged segmentation, hyper local marketing and audience based insight which only local public service comms teams can deliver.

The problem is, if our own communication teams don’t reflect the communities we serve- how we can be sure we are getting things right?

That’s why LGcomms has launched the first ever equality, diversity and inclusion survey of public sector communication professionals. 

So, please respond to the survey and share it. The more responses we get, the richer and more reliable the information, meaning a more effective and informed plan to redress any imbalances we discover.

Post author: Zander Mills.

Further reading about diversity on the All Things IC blog

• How to write about equity, diversity and belonging – published 2021
• Podcast: A candid conversation about inclusion with Keith Riley – published 2021
• Have we made progress on diversity in PR?
• A Candid conversation with Amrit Nijjar, Inclusion & Belonging Manager – Candid Comms podcast episode 2021
• Black History Month: a comms and inclusion case study – by Lia Crooks
• How to start a conversation about racism and unconscious bias – by Gihan Hyde
• Guidance from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations
• How to create a sense of belonging – Candid Comms podcast episode 2021
• How to create a sense of belonging for hybrid workers – written by Helen Deverell for my blog.
• How to understand and improve diversity – published 2018
• Can you work flexibly and succeed in comms?
• How Asda is building a diverse and inclusive culture – published 2016
• Ask yourself about diversity – published 2015

First published on the All Things IC blog 25 July 2022.