The infographic shows that only eight women were represented in the top 50 trade groups. Furthermore, only one woman, Pamela Bailey of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, was in the top 10 best paid industry lobby executives. She made less than half of what the highest paid man earned in take-home pay.

A Huffington Post article also notes that the number of women CEOs at K Street’s top firms, just over 15 percent in 2011, is lower than the ration of women currently in Congress—18 percent after last year’s historic election year.

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Originally published in the Public Affairs Council‘s May 2013 Impact Newsletter.

Because Hurricane Sandy bypassed much of Duke Energy’s six-state service area, the Charlotte, N.C., power company was able to dispatch 3,000 of its workers to help restore electricity in areas damaged by the storm. While commendable in themselves, the company’s efforts also drew favorable publicity.

But there were no guarantees the hastily hatched plan to obtain that coverage would succeed. Knowing how much good Duke Energy’s work crews would do, the company’s communications staff wanted to tell their story. But the way they hoped to make this happen was innovative and untried.

“At 2 p.m. on Oct. 30, one of my colleagues pulled me aside and said she had this ‘crazy idea,’” says Lee Freedman, a company speechwriter. “If she got authorization to go ahead with it, she asked if I would be willing to participate. Figuring she’d never get buy-in, I said, ‘Sure.’”

Telling Their Own Story

To his surprise, Freedman was on a plane that night to Cincinnati, where he would meet a work crew as it prepared to go to New York. In New York, he would be embedded with the work crews, using Facebook, Twitter and blog posts to report on Duke Energy’s work in real time.

“Instead of relying on traditional media to repackage our material and localize the Sandy story, we opted to tell the story ourselves,” Greg Efthimiou, a communications director for Duke Energy, writes in PR Strategist.

Duke Energy is not the only company helping out after natural disasters and improving its reputation in the bargain.

“We always help other power companies when we are done restoring power to our own customers,” says George Nelson, vice president for operating and engineering for Pepco, which has about 793,000 customers in Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

Pepco dispatched workers to New Jersey and New England after the snowstorm of October 2011; and, after Hurricane Sandy, to northern New Jersey and New York. After Katrina, Pepco sent personnel as far south as Florida and Texas.

“This isn’t just people working on the lines,” Nelson says. “This also means people who handle the logistics — securing hotel rooms, preparing meals in the staging areas and handling countless other tasks.”

Inevitable Surprises

None of this is easy, and it must be done in a hurry. Surprises are inevitable. When Duke Energy sent Freedman to Cincinnati, “none of the workers there knew who I was or what I was there for,” he says. “I had to introduce myself and explain that I’d be going with them to report on what they were doing, but that I wasn’t some spy from corporate. I had to help them understand that I would be there to tell the world of the good work they do.”

Earning Trust

To earn their trust, “I had to do a lot of listening,” Freedman says. He also had to show he could accompany them “without being a nuisance or getting in the way of our work,” according to field supervisor Doug Akins.

Some workers were skeptical at first, Freedman says. “They had heard of Twitter, and some are on Facebook, but a lot of the crew members don’t use these tools on a regular basis.”

Buy-In From the Top

The “crazy idea” was Paige Layne’s. A communications manager for Duke Energy, Layne says she came up with the plan not long before she obtained Freedman’s agreement. “Before that, I had to go to my boss, who had to go to his boss, for buy-in,” she says. “I told Tom Williams, who I report to, that if it worked, he could take all the credit, and if it flopped, it would be on me.”

Williams liked the idea, as did Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, and Freedman was on his way to New York a short while later. “We wanted Lee to be the reporter, not just to make it possible for other reporters to tell the story,” Layne says. “With new media, we could tell our own story and tell the world what our crews were doing to restore power to all the people.”

Pepco has employed a similar tactic, embedding 10 journalists from local media outlets with its work crews. Pepco also disseminated reliable information as soon as it became available.

“Throughout Hurricane Sandy, we provided customers with as much information as possible, through as many channels as possible,” says Myra Oppel, Pepco’s regional communications director. “We shared regularly, with updated, detailed and aligned messaging through our website, our social media channels, our call center and other communications outlets.”

Favorable Coverage

Over the hectic days that followed, Freedman posted more than 100 Twitter updates and published eight blog posts. He also had numerous interviews with journalists, few of whom had his enviable access. An Associated Press story that resulted from one of these interviews was picked up by 50 news organizations.

“That was great, because almost all other coverage was about millions of people being out of power and the struggles they were going through,” Layne says. “That’s what most storm coverage is always like. But the AP story was about what Duke Energy work crews were doing to help.”

The crew in Manhattan “spent its first day climbing under streets on the West Side, pumping water out of vaults and disconnecting switches that were ruined by the flooding,” AP’s Jonathan Fahey reported. “After ConEd restored power to the networks that serve Lower Manhattan, the Duke team visited customers who were still without power to determine if the utility needs to fix equipment or if the customer has a problem in the building that an electrician must address.”

One night, the crew members — Freedman included — slept on cots on a dinner cruise boat docked at Pier 41.

Giving the Story a Voice

“Aside from just giving the story a place and voice, [Freedman’s] updates helped to give our readers an idea of what the crews faced and what the people of New York and New Jersey faced,” wrote John Downey of the Charlotte Business Journal.

Before long, Freedman’s work was helping with work-crew morale. “During downtime, I would go truck to truck and hold up my iPhone to line workers in the utility trucks so they could see the tweets of support and encouragement we had received in response to my blogs and tweets,” Freedman says. “Once they saw social media in action, it actually picked up their spirits, because they realized people were cheering them on from afar.”

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The 113th Congress is is also stacked with first-time representatives who are likely to be approached by advocacy groups eager to get their issues back onto the legislative agenda. The uptick in lobby registrations is an indication that Congress is returning to “business as usual” after a chaotic few months where the debt ceiling debate and fiscal cliff dominated conversations.

“Congress has already taken action more quickly and decisively than expected on issues that affect a wide swath of industries, which is prompting some business interests to amp up efforts to influence the decision-making process,” according to Ho. Taxes, immigration, and cyber-security are expected to be at the top of the legislative agenda in coming months.

Click here to read more in The Washington Post.

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Over 300 government relations professionals will gather to honor Senator Mary Landrieu, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and WGR’s Distinguished Member Angel Riley of Lockheed Martin Corporation.

When: Thursday, May 16 (5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.)

Where: Union Station’s Columbus Club (50 Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington, D.C., 20002)

The event will include an awards presentation, food-drink-and-networking, live music, a wine wall raffle, and a silent auction. One of the distinguished items up for auction is a custom audit of your organization’s social media properties, including an assessment of how well your channels are performing, offered by Adfero‘s Senior Vice Presidents, Suzanne Zurn and Sue Zoldak.

Click here to register.

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The debate about a possible new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation on political spending is portrayed as a battle over disclosure. But it’s really a battle over risk. If there’s no major risk to shareholders when companies get involved in politics, there’s no need for SEC-mandated, one-size-fits-all disclosure rules.

For the past decade, the Center for Political Accountability (CPA) has argued that corporations that spend time and money on politics are recklessly endangering investors. Where does the risk come from? CPA President Bruce Freed says lobbying and contributing to campaigns can damage a company’s reputation, create conflicts with its trade associations and even expose it to legal problems. He maintains there is “overwhelming concern” about this among shareholders and directors.

As I noted in a post last year, CPA’s evidence is scant. Freed often quotes the Handbook on Corporate Political Activity, published by The Conference Board. The handbook, which features CPA’s code of conduct, was co-authored by none other than Freed, who has taken full advantage of the platform given him by the business research organization. The other proof he offers are CPA-sponsored surveys that include absurdly biased questions about lobbying and campaign contribution practices.

The concern about political spending that does exist among investors has largely been generated by CPA’s savvy media relations and grassroots campaigns. CPA created a benchmark called the CPA-Zicklin Index that purports to showcase firms that have increased their transparency and accountability. (The news media love indexes.) But lest high-ranking companies get too comfortable, CPA tightened its rating system this past year. While some companies did quite well, the group noted the index “also reflects vast gaps that shroud many corporate spenders in secrecy during a bitterly contested election year marked by surging hidden political spending.”

So, given the negative scrutiny, can someone tell me again why encouraging the SEC to mandate disclosure will improve my firm’s reputation and reduce business risk?

Now other players, including labor unions, campaign finance reform groups and socially responsive investment groups, are joining the movement, saying the SEC needs to shield investors from practices that decrease shareholder value. Their cause has been buttressed by academics like Michael Hadani of Long Island University, who claims that political spending “more often results in a negative effect of firm financial performance, as well as an increase in firm risk taking, which will also erode future earnings.”

Really? Not long ago, after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, many of these same groups complained that big corporations would exploit the ruling to create excess profits. Because of their sophisticated lobbying and contribution strategies, companies surely would dominate elections and earn a super-sized return on investment. Public Citizen, one of the loudest critics of Citizens United, said the court’s ruling “invites giant corporations to open up their treasuries to buy election outcomes.” In other words, greater political spending would give companies an unfair advantage.

So which is it? Corporate involvement in politics can’t be both ineffective and too effective at the same time. Former FEC Chairman Brad Smith, founder of the Center for Competitive Politics, sums up the reformers’ strategy:

“[Since] the Citizens United decision in 2010 upheld the First Amendment rights of corporations to make partisan political expenditures, the ‘reform’ community has pivoted, and now argues that corporate spending is harmful to corporations and must be regulated to protect shareholders. Unable to lawfully prevent that spending, they have sought to have the SEC mandate corporate disclosure not only of direct political spending, but of dues to trade associations and contributions to 501(c) organizations. The goal … is to use that information to organize public relations campaigns and boycotts against companies that spend money to defend their political interests.”

Ironically, it’s not a bad idea for companies to be more transparent about political involvement; a policy of openness can build trust among employees and customers at a time when most people are cynical about politics. That’s one reason why so many large companies already have disclosure and accountability policies. In fact, in a 2008 survey of directors sponsored by CPA, 89 percent said their company had the policies and oversight in place to protect it from risks associated with campaign spending.

But transparency practices, as defined by most big companies, are different from the transparency directives demanded by activists. When CPA was first getting started, proposals called for companies to provide easy access to publicly available campaign contribution information on their corporate websites. Now these proposals from CPA and socially responsive investment groups have morphed into a long list of demands that include:

• Disclosure of trade association dues
• Disclosure of lobbying expenditures and procedures
• Disclosure of grassroots expenditures and procedures
• Prior approval of political expenditures by the general counsel
• A preferred policy of not making contributions through outside groups
• Disclosure of contributions to 501(c) organizations

While the SEC says it may only propose regulations related to contributions, you can be sure that reformers will push for adoption of a broader policy.

How have major investors reacted to the argument that political involvement increases corporate risk? Let’s look at the numbers. Though proposals on the subject are now commonplace, shareholder resolutions related to political spending have had a win-loss record of 0-19 this proxy season (as of May 7).

Brad Smith doesn’t mince words when it comes to his assessment of these results. “Shareholders,” he writes, seem “well aware that this is politically motivated jockeying by those who are not particularly interested in increasing shareholder value.”

Click here to read the original piece.

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Originally posted May 7, 2013.

Imagine this scene: A CEO, VP of government affairs, communications director, media spokesperson, social media manager and webmaster are huddled in a conference room somewhere in Washington, D.C. Sipping on Starbucks and bottled water, they are diligently brainstorming about how to raise awareness about a particularly challenging issue facing their organization.

The CEO says to the spokesperson, “I know what to do. Write me an op-ed or get me a page one interview in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Or get me on one of the Sunday morning talk shows. Better yet, a one-on-one with Piers Morgan would be cool!” The VP of government affairs says, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to run some inside the beltway ads?” “Too expensive,” chimes in the communications director. “Let’s just hold a press conference or send out a press release.” “That’s so old fashioned,” exclaims the social media manager. “We should create a Facebook and Twitter account and post our positions every day.” The webmaster speaks up, “Why not just build a micro site with lots of key facts, infographics and motion graphics videos to educate the public? No, no, let’s create a mobile app!” Then the general counsel walks in and, well, you see where this is going.

What’s wrong with this picture? While this highly-educated, seasoned team of Washington-savvy experts is well-intentioned, they are going about fixing the right problem in the wrong way. Like throwing spaghetti at a wall in the hope that something will stick, they are throwing random tactical solutions at a target, only this one is moving. And even though a strategy should have been in place to guide this entire discussion, it was nowhere to be found.

If this sounds like your organization, you are not alone. More than once, I’ve been approached by a client or potential client who comes to our firm and tells us they want our help in executing some predetermined tactic they have come up with, like running an ad or a press conference or creating a Facebook community. This is not unlike going to a doctor with a headache and telling him, “I think you should prescribe so and so.” Stone-faced, that doctor might retort, “And where did you get your medical degree – the Google School of Medicine?” Warning: Tactics without strategy and trusted expert counsel could cause adverse side effects.

Communications professionals, like physicians, are there to help you when you need it most. They are trained and experienced in the best ways to handle even the most difficult situations. And just as a physician should treat each patient differently, a discerning communications pro will help you figure out which course of action is appropriate for you and most likely to succeed. The best counselors spend most of their time listening, asking a lot of questions, and then thinking deeply about how to create a customized solution to your particular problem, rather than throw a one-size-fits-all prescription at it in the hope that it will work.

Speaking of physicians, I represent the molecular imaging doctors. Recently, I came across a PET scan image showing real time molecular activity in a person’s brain as it is engaged in four distinct processes: seeing, speaking, listening and thinking. What it revealed was amazing – most mental activity occurs during thinking, followed by listening, then seeing. Coming in last place, not surprisingly, is speaking.

The starting point for any successful communications campaign is by thinking and listening more, then looking (reading, researching) and talking. No matter who you are, whether you are a business, lobbying group, law firm or congressional office, it’s critical that you think carefully and follow a few simple steps before launching into your public education, public relations or public engagement campaign:

• Step 1: Determine your goals, the problem you need to solve or the desired outcome you seek (i.e. – what success looks like).
• Step 2: Determine your strategy. In short, this is the big idea plan that helps you move from where you are now to where you want to be. It’s “what” you want to happen to achieve an end.
• Step 3: Determine objectives. These are the measurable tasks along the way that help you know if and when you are getting closer to achieving the overall goal.
• Step 4: Determine tactics. These are the tools (ads, mobile apps, blogs, social media, etc.) you will use to execute against the strategy and achieve your objectives and ultimate goal.

If strategy is the “what,” tactics are the “how”, and tactics should always follow the strategy.

So before you invest a lot of time, money and effort rolling out a communications campaign, be sure to get the sequence right. Thinking before acting. Strategy before tactics. And if you need more help, make sure you hire a communications firm that follows the same process. Used as directed, these simple suggestions can be your prescription for a healthy communications campaign.

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The Hill‘s Kevin Bogardus explains why some are wary of the political intelligence industry: “Observers see it as secretive network of tipsters who shop information about Congress and the administration to hedge funds and other financial firms. Information about pending bills and regulations can move markets, and the appetite for it appears to be growing.”

The political intelligence industry came under fire in early April when it was reported that a spike in healthcare shares was sparked by a Washington firm with insider information. The incident provoked a federal investigation into a number of political intelligence firms, though reps insist that they are not providing any government information to their clients that is not available to the public.

Click here to read more in The Hill.

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• There has been major growth in political activity on SNS between 2008 and this survey in 2012. The number of social networking site users has grown from 33% of the online population in 2008 to 69% of the online population in 2012.
• In 2012, 17% of all adults posted links to political stories or articles on social networking sites, and 19% posted other types of political content. (That is a six-fold increase from the 3% of adults who posted political stories or links on these sites in 2008.
• In 2012, 12% of all adults followed or friended a political candidate or other political figure on a social networking site, and 12% belonged to a group on a social networking site involved in advancing a political or social issue. That is a four-fold increase from the 3% of adults who took part in these behaviors in 2008.

The study also found that younger adults are just as likely as older adults to be engaged in many political activities, but younger adults are much more likely to be politically active on social networking sites. This finding would suggest that Americans’ political activity on SNS will only become more prevalent in future years.

Click here to read the full Pew Internet report.

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Besides Facebook’s Zuckerberg, FWD.us is backed by a number of Silicon Valley power players, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. According to POLITICO, there is “widespread speculation” that the group aims to raise $50 million, though FWD.us is not disclosing how much it has raised so far and from whom.

FWD.us is also facing its share of scrutiny, and the big names (and deep pockets) involved are not helping it fly under the radar. Many are upset by the group’s lack of transparency when it comes to its donor contributions. “Even as Zuckerberg and other tech titans proselytize openness, many have closed off any public access to the full extent of their influence operations,” reports POLITICO’s Tony Romm.

The reality is that FWD.us is one of many 501(c)(4) groups whose tax designation allows them to avoid disclosing their contributions to the IRS, so long as they declare that political advocacy is not their chief function. These groups have become so ubiquitous in Washington D.C. that reported lobbying spend, along with the number of registered lobbyists, have seemingly declined.

Click here to read more in POLITICO.

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Three days before the May issue of Boston Magazine was set to go to print, the bombings at the Boston Marathon occurred and turned the city on its head. The writers, editors and designers at Boston had to figure out how to report on the tragedy and honor those affected – victims, their loved ones, runners and virtually all Bostonians – in a very short time. Rather than relying on third party narratives, the May issue provides a collection of firsthand accounts from a number of the Marathon runners. Each runner’s story is accompanied by a photograph of their actual running shoes, a touch that adds authenticity and moves the reader to identify personally with those affected by the bombings. Fifteen runners were featured in the magazine, though the publication created “a special page where the overflow photos and stories would live, and where people from around the world could submit their own stories and photographs of their shoes. “

While it wasn’t easy for the magazine to attain dozens of runners’ first-hand accounts in just a few days – not to mention acquire and photograph their shoes – leveraging personal stories is a surefire way to resonate with readers. This approach also informed the cover of the May issue of Boston Magazine, which ended up being a photograph of all of the shoes collected arranged in a heart shape.

Click here to read more on Boston Magazine’s blog.

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