Better #58

Gidday legend!

Are you using AI deliberately - or are you just using it?

AI has gone from shiny new toy to everyday tool staggeringly quickly. Most of us are using it in some form, whether that's brainstorming, drafting, editing, research, or strategy.

But beyond the usual LinkedIn hot takes, we don’t have much of a sense of what AI use actually looks like across the profession for comms and social media pros.

Do your organisations encourage it, tolerate it, or still haven't worked out what the hell it is yet?

Are people open about using it? Or is it your shameful secret? 😱

And is AI actually helping us create better experiences for our audiences - or just more stuff?

I've been exploring these questions with fellow Wairarapa resident and copywriter Hayden Maskell, whose podcast, Brave New Word, has been digging deeeeeep into AI and creativity for yonks.

We've put together a short anonymous survey to take the temperature of the profession. If you've got two minutes to spare, we'd love your perspective.

SURVEY: AI in comms and social - sector pulse check

I'll share the results in the next newsletter, so you can see where everyone else is at, and we’ll use the insights to help shape some practical training and resources for communicators.

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

Greer Forde-MacNaughton is a Senior Engagement Advisor at Wellington City Council with a background in youth engagement.

I was lucky enough to work with her during the 2022 local body elections, where she brought a huge amount of knowledge, energy, and care to our project team.

As you'll see from our conversation, Greer has a wonderfully direct way of getting to the heart of what matters - in this case, the fact that young people can end up as afterthoughts (or no thoughts at all) when public sector orgs go about their business.

Our discussion also raises some uncomfortable questions for government communications and social media teams - we often invest significant time and energy communicating on platforms that many young people simply don't - and won’t - use. Which I reckon is hugely problematic.

Plenty to think about below, hope you enjoy it.

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Hi Greer, let’s start with who actually counts as a young person, and where do these definitions come from? Am I a young person? [spoiler, I’m not 😅]

It's a surprisingly tough question as there's no consistent, universally agreed definition, it's more  context-dependent. International documents often put young people at 15-24, but the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child goes up to 18, which muddies the waters. Most government work lands at anywhere from birth to 24 or 30. And honestly? People seem to make it up to fit their project and the kind of reporting they want [laughs]. 

Are young people actually that different from everyone else - or do we just treat them that way? Why do we separate them out at all?

It's a funny one, because one of the biggest challenges in engaging with young people is that they represent one of the broadest cross-sections of community we work with - different religions, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, beliefs, interests. So you're basically being asked: can you engage the entire population … but only within this age range? 

Its also clear we need to separate them out, because our current approaches aren’t working. Pull any engagement data on any government project and you will see a gaping whole across our younger communities. 

The benefit of putting an age frame around it is that it acknowledges the shared life experiences young people are navigating - a very transient period where they're learning about themselves and the world, maybe moving out of home, studying, still in school. It's also the time when people are working out who they are, what matters to them, and where they belong. That makes it a really formative phase for building a connection to community.

We also know that when young people and children are brought into civic processes early, they're more likely to keep engaging throughout their lives. At a time when participation rates are declining across the board, this is a huge opportunity to not only do the right thing, but also set a foundation for life long engagement and trust. 

What benefits do we get from listening to or engaging with young people?

Yeah, and I always find that question really interesting -  it's kind of uncomfortable to be asked to justify why people should be included in decisions that impact them. That's the whole foundation of our democracy. This idea that young people somehow don't qualify - that you hit a certain age, buy a house, reach some arbitrary milestone, and suddenly you're worth listening to? It's a weird concept. All of our communities should be engaged. Age, ability, and status shouldn't determine whose voice counts.

And beyond the moral case, young people have really good ideas, and they're really creative. Sometimes it's just about changing how we listen and what we take from it. I remember doing engagement on a long term plan and I was talking to a seven-year-old, and she said her vision for the city was a zip line from the top of the hill down to the city. Everyone laughed - ‘Oh, that's so silly’. And I'm like, ‘Is it though?’ Because what I'm hearing is she wants different forms of transport that are effective and fun. Someone else wanted bubble machines, and I'm like, ‘They want interactive art around the city’. So you have to sometimes apply a lens to what they’re saying, while also taking what they're saying at face value. You don't want to take away their idea of a bubble machine - maybe they do actually do just want a bubble machine [laughs].

Do we target the easy ones - the already-engaged young people - because it's just simpler?

Yeah, 100% and I'll be honest, I've done it myself in situations where we didn’t have the time and resource to develop an appropriate and engaging process for a wider net of young people. But I don't think that's always the failure it's made out to be. Having some young people in the room is still valuable - the problem is when we stop there and see it as enough.

The much more interesting opportunity is what you do with that access. Those already engaged young people can help you design better approaches for reaching the ones you're not hearing from. So yes, start there if you have to, but know it’s not enough and treat it as the beginning of the process, not the end.

And then there's social media - which feels like it could be a real opportunity for first contact with young people, rather than going straight to formal consultation.

Yeah, something we talk about a lot internally is that people don't always want to engage with us, and they don't always have to. We don't live in a world where everything's mandatory. Some young people might not feel connected to the issues right now - they're worried about exams, moving out of their flat or whatever. But we need to be seen as a trusted place where people know they can engage if they want to, and social media plays a really important role in building that.

The fun content matters. It can pique interest, and then when you start layering in educational content - ‘this is what councils do, this is what we work on’ - you're setting that foundation of trust.

The challenge is that so much pressure gets put on the social media team to sell a really complex organisation to young people. And sure, maybe they get someone to click the link - but if you take them somewhere that's too complex, too confusing, or makes them feel like they don't belong, then we’ve wasted all of the trust the comms team built.

There's also a difference between the occasional "have your say" Instagram post and actually committing to something like TikTok as a long-term trust-building channel, right?

Yeah, because one of those has got an immediate ask. And it's the same with in-person engagement - if there's an immediate ask, you're probably not going to get an immediate response. People don't want to be immediately farmed for content. They’ll be like, ‘This is my lived experience you want - and we don't have a relationship yet’.

Whereas those platforms targeted at young people, where you are spending time creating relevant, appropriate content and an extended relationship - like TikTok, where maybe you're posting for six months before someone decides to commit to engaging further with something. As opposed to Instagram where you're producing content for 50-year-olds with a house, and then ‘oh, here's an ad to reach a 24-year-old’. It's immediately transactional. There's no buy-in. They haven't had a giggle at your videos for a few months while also secretly learning about the services council provides, or putting a face to the people who work there. There's something about time and trust being built before you go in for the ask.

I see some great content aimed at younger people from councils around local election time - why do we wait until every three years to do this stuff well?

A lot of it comes down to resourcing and priorities. Elections tend to have larger teams, bigger budgets, and genuine pressure to perform. And when you look at declining voter turnout, it's clear that young people represent the biggest opportunity for growth - so teams are willing to shift focus and invest there.

But there's a missed opportunity in that. We spend all this energy desperately trying to capture attention once every three years, and then don't maintain it - making it harder for ourselves every time we start from scratch.

The silver lining is that it proves we can do it. When we want to, and when we resource it properly, we absolutely can reach young people, its just a matter of maintaining that commitment. 

How important is it to have young people actually delivering some of these messages themselves?

On one hand it’s super important for building trust and authenticity and buy in . Young people are living that experience and they know what will resonate and connect with people best.

But we also don't want to get to a position where we see young people as a proxy for us doing the work ourselves. All our content should be accessible to everybody. You don't want it to feel like all our promotion has to be placed through a youth filter - but then young people go to read more and it's awful council-speak and they don't know what it means and they feel dismissed. We've got to meet them in the middle.

At what point does our channel choice become a structural decision about who we choose to engage with? Because I see a lot of government Facebook and LinkedIn, and not a whole lot of TikTok or Snapchat…

Every single day, organisations make choices that structurally prohibit young people and children from participating in our processes. If our communications channels are using platforms that demographics and data show young people aren't accessing, we are making a structural choice to engage with one community over another.

There's so much onus put on young people to make the connection to our work. It's always - why aren't we hearing from them? Why aren't they doing this? And you're like, who are you asking? You have no strategy for engaging young people through your comms or your engagement. And then you're sitting there going, 'Oh my god, what a surprise, no 17-year-olds gave feedback on the new infrastructure policy' - that we made no effort to connect to their experiences or aspirations, or even write in plain language. Like, listen to yourself [laughs].

I want every government and council person to record themselves for a day and ask - did I say anything that would include young people? Probably not. And I don't think it comes from a bad place, I don't think anyone's actively excluding young people. But we could all take a bit more ownership for why we're not hearing from them.

Last one - what's something cringey organisations do in this space?

Okay, first I need to defend ‘Pokémon Go to the polls’, because everyone was so mean to Hillary Clinton’s team about that in 2016 and I thought it was really funny. I thought it was the right note of cringe. I've been re-pitching it every election since and they keep saying no [laughs].

But honestly, my biggest pet peeve is that we put so much on the wonderful comms team to create really engaging content, and then we send young people to a place that makes them feel like s..t. They come to these websites, they go to these council meetings, everything's too complex, it makes them feel small, like they don't know enough to be there. And the worst thing you can do is make someone feel small.

Young people are so often shocked at the idea that you're asking what they think. They're like, ‘What do you mean? I don't know enough.’ And I'm like, ‘No one knows enough, so let's learn together. All you need to know is your experience - what you think, what you've lived, what you've seen in your community. That's enough’.

Quick 6 with Greer Forde-MacNaughton…

1. Strategy or tactics?
Strategy.

2. Favourite platform?

TikTok.

3. Least favourite platform?
Snapchat - this should have died a decade ago.

4. One public sector account to follow?
Public Sector adjacent … but any library account - City of Marion is great.
 
5. One non-public sector account to follow?
@Batsconservation on TikTok. Bats, conservation - what more could you need?

6. Something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?
There is always so much to be learnt from those around you.

Alright, alright, alright.

That’s it for today.

Now if you could be so kind to turn around and go back up to the top and fill in that survey :) And maybe even flick it on to a colleague or two. Thanks!

Have a lovely day, and see you soon 👋