Why PR support in COVID times is going to be cheaper and easier to find for business owners, and where to find it.

Today, I'd like to say that it's a great time to go "shopping" if you're thinking about having PR support for your company. No matter how big or small your company is, it's always useful to have a consultant that has practical experience, great media relations, and quite probably, gives you an extra set of hands to go and engage with public relations. According to Francis Ingham, the Director General at the Public Relations Council here in the UK, there are 100,000 people employed within the industry, within mainstream agencies, and some 20,000 of those were furloughed. According to Ingham, he believes that at least 5,000 of those people will not be going back to work. This means that for those companies that are looking for a little bit of extra support, there's going to be a flood of people that can help them. At the start of 2020, there were some 2 million freelancers working in the UK. The problem with general freelancers when I go, to Fiverr or Upwork, for example, is that you put in a post there, and you can get any number of replies. There's some ranking and some ratings but frankly, it can take as long to find a consultant as it does to have the consultant do the work. But the news from Ingham and the PRCA that there could be an influx of some 5,000 agency-trained consultants is really good news for everybody and anybody who would like to get some support for their PR and doesn't know where to look. One of the places that you can look is The Work Crowd. It's in the UK, and it boasts some 3,100+ registered and vetted freelancers. The number of PR freelancers on that website has doubled from 1,200 to 2,200. I imagine that they're going to have those numbers swell in the coming weeks as the furloughed workers start to go back to work and the reality hits the agencies. The number of websites around the world, for those of you not in the UK, for public relations is terrific. You can use some of the big ones like Upwork and Fiverr, but they're not specialists. There are some, for instance, like Shortlist and CreativeHunt that actually work for agency recruitment, and others like Telum Media, Marketing Interactive (both in Asia), and PR Week. They all have directories available and job postings that you can use. Another opportunity, if you think that you know more about what you want to do and could just have someone in-house do it for you, is the new apprenticeship funded in the UK, like the digital marketing apprenticeship, which I'm just filling out the paperwork for. Through this, young people in the UK are getting skills training funded largely by the UK Government as long as a company like mine is willing to support them for 15 months. Young learners will get access to what they call the Cloud Academy. They have access as well to tech labs and online learning whilst they are working with me, and because they're not needing to go into college, these people are going to be working online for their course. With me, currently, it'll be online as well, but at times in a facility or an office or wherever. I want to mention this, because governments all over the world are starting to create financing to help young people get into the workplace. The young learners on this UK Cloud Academy program will have 15 days of classroom training throughout the 15 months. Over that period of time, they're only gone for one workday a month. This is the great part: if you have a company already, the government will cover 100% of the apprenticeship training program for a young apprentice between 16 and 18, and they'll cover 95% if they're over 19. In other words, these young people who are looking for work and that I can help to mentor will be coming to me virtually for free. I do have some costs, but they recommend 200-300 per week as, if you like, an apprenticeship fee. I think that's quite fair in that if we've taken, as I have, the bounce back loan, which is on offer here in the UK. I can't think of a better way than to recycle that money by putting it into the pockets of a young person that I can train in the industry. Maybe one of those 5,000 that are going to be let go might turn up on my books. If you've got some dedicated work that needs to be done, and you can offer some mentorship and leadership, this apprenticeship could really be a great addition to the team. I've built a program called SPEAK|pr, which is to Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know, and what I can do with my young apprentices is I can work with them on making this into an online course, which is where I'd like to go with this to enable the knowledge that I've got to be shared by business owners, as and when they want to take the methodologies that we've got, so they can get noticed, and learn and deploy them within their own business. I do understand that not everybody wants the expense of an agency, but not everybody knows how to manage a consultant, so the SPEAK|pr program is going to be a template and a guide. In fact, it already exists at EastWest PR. The other thing that that I'm doing is I've just signed up for a program called the Outsource School. I've done this, because I've just contracted a virtual assistant in the Philippines with quite a good deal of success within the first week. There are some areas that I need to focus on, for example, like content creation for this podcast, where I then transcribe that to Otter. What we're doing is we're having some young people in the Philippines reauthor and edit the text of the article and then place that on our website, our social media, and onto LinkedIn. We're able to build a value chain, but that needs a process, and the Outsource School has a whole bunch of methodologies for how to select virtual assistant tools and templates that you can give to the assistant when it comes to things like tasks, lists, and so on. Why does this all make sense, and why is it about public relations? It's about public relations, because often, when we're cutting costs, and in the same way as these agencies are going to be cutting their members of staff, we cut one of the most important parts of the business, which is communication. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to share some solutions that would enable you to get public relations maybe more than you've had before by using what will become a pool of educated and trained PR people by finding them on freelance websites and quite possibly taking advantage of one of the many, many young people in the UK or in your own country that need to get back into the workforce. In Singapore, we've been approached to help older people get back into the workforce, and that's something that's being funded as well by the government; older people being not a lot older than me, in their 60s, people that have retired or have been forced to retire, and now having government funds to enable them to retrain. In public relations, a lot of the work that we need to do is on the messaging and the thought leadership. That's something that really only the founder can do. But getting that message into writing or into video or into text into audio, those are skill sets for reformatting and distribution which young people and old people can bring to bear for us. And with the financial conditions of COVID, it creates an opportunity for entrepreneurs to take advantage, if you like, not of the people themselves, but of the situation. At the same time, it gives these people that may be less fortunate than us an opportunity to get back into work. I think that will be a great way that we can all try and take advantage of COVID and reinvent our businesses and certainly to rejuvenate the public relations work that we all really need to do when the landscapes have changed so dramatically.