Public relations is the business that boondoggle aficionados love to excoriate. It seems -- well -- so useless. And for all their vaunted skills, flacks often seem incapable of defending themselves well.
So perhaps it was no surprise that the California stem cell agency's PR and the huge Edelman PR agency came under fire this week. But there is a tad more to the story than what has surfaced so far.
But first, let's look at what happened at the Oversight Committee meeting on Tuesday.
"Several oversight committee members seemed surprised to learn yesterday that the institute is being billed $27,700 a month for public relations services it receives from Edelman, a national firm. The institute is receiving the bills and services on a monthly basis and isn't paying them until a longer-term contract can be negotiated with Edelman," wrote reporter Terri Somers of the San Diego Union Tribune.
"Committee member Jeff Sheehy, deputy communications director at the University of California San Francisco's AIDS Research Institute, said he was 'shocked' to learn that the institute has been billed for these services since April because he 'just hasn't seen the product.'
"But oversight committee chairman Robert Klein said the institute's one staff member dealing with communications cannot handle the high volume of media calls, public speaking requests and other public relations work."
Reporter Laura Mecoy of The Sacramento Bee also noted that Sheehy was a "little appalled" at the PR situation.
The stem cell agency's PR certainly can stand some improvement. But as a former California governmental and political flack and the recipient of enormous amounts of PR attention over decades of newspaper work, I have a sense that there may be internal issues that could explain some of the lack of product. That said, agency should be doing a better job at this stage of the game.
Some of it is basic stuff, such as assuring that the web site's "what's new" feature actually shows what is new. But where the PR really fell down was losing the positive spin the agency had coming out of the election because of maladroit management and allowing critics to set the terms of the debate. As readers may recall, the agency's first meeting in December ran afoul of questions about its legality, turning what should have have been a celebration into a PR debacle. Since then, the headlines about the agency have been dominated by controversy about its conduct.
Given that background, we can ask whether the nearly $30,000 a month is excessive, ? Probably not. Let's look at some numbers. The agency probably needs at least two PR types and a secretary/administrative assistant. Figure the salary for the head flack at about $100,000, No. 2 at about $90,000 and the assistant at about $40,000. Add one-third or more to that for fringe benefits and you are looking at a total in salaries and benefits of something in the neighborhood of $25,000 and $30,000 a month, which doesn't include the profit that a private firm would need. And the $100,000 salary for the chief spokesperson may be too low to hire the talent needed. Additional PR costs would include printing, phones, work on the Web site and more. We should also note that Edelman's bill does not include the salary of the agency's current spokeswoman, a state employee who has only been on the scene for a few months.
Some times these types of figures come as a shock to newspaper reporters and government PR types. Their salaries are generally lower that what top flight, private sector PR people earn, which is not to say that there are not many top flight PR people in government.
So what does the agency receive for nearly $30,000 a month? The terms of Edelman's working agreement are secret because stem cell chairman Robert Klein says its contract is under negotiation, another PR mistake by the agency and by Edelman. But we can learn something about the scope of the needed PR work by looking at the contract with Red Gate Communications, which resigned from stem cell service earlier this year.
The Red Gate agreement shows that its responsibilities went far beyond fielding reporter calls, emails and writing a handful of press releases. (We should note that some of the agency press releases show nonprofessional earmarks that probably can be traced to others at the agency.)
Here is a partial rundown from the Red Gate contract: develop identity and logo for CIRM, serve as spokesperson for CIRM for all media and editorial boards, manage editorial briefings and interviews, staff all public hearings, prepare op-ed pieces and write editorials, write speeches, prepare the 29 members of the Oversight Committee for media interviews, create CIRM brochures, fact sheets, FAQs, media information kits, newsletters, quarterly reports and Power Point presentations and work on the web site. Public outreach and education, which is sorely needed, also comes under the PR rubric.
To be effective, the top PR person would have to sit in on tens of hours of private CIRM meetings each week in order to be well-informed and speak authoritatively. That person should also be the lead on developing an informational strategy that helps to keep CIRM out of the kind of a corner it has found itself in so much of the year.
Many of the PR chores facing CIRM are routine or would be routine if the agency were not a new and strange entity. Creating a PR program entirely from scratch in an understaffed, fledgling agency is, to say the least, difficult.
Whether Edelman is worth the cost depends on what we see from them and the agency over the next few months.
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If you would like a copy of the Red Gate contract, please send a request to djensen@californiastemcellreport.com. But do it quickly. We are going to sea again soon and will be only intermittently online. For a few more details on the Edelman contract, click here. For a list of all the contracts with CIRM, click here.
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