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Women Really Don’t Trust You
We’ve often referenced the Edelman Trust Barometer as one credible source for a lot of ongoing evidence that shows people just don’t trust institutions – especially government. Turns out, some of the most recent data indicates that women are even less trusting than men when it comes to institutions....
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The Catastrophic Consequence of Communication Failure
Time flies. It’s hard to believe that it was 33 years ago – just last month – that STS-51-L, the Space Shuttle Challenger, exploded 73 seconds after launch, taking the lives of seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from New Hampshire. Much has been written, documented, re-enacted ...
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The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
It’s a tough work environment for people in a lot of organizations these days with forced changes, shutdowns and shifting priorities. People are on edge, and understandably so. Keeping things moving internally usually falls on the shoulders of communicators and group leaders, so I thought you might be able to ...
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Listen Up!
Active listening is a big but often disregarded part of real communication and public engagement, but sometimes it’s easy to forget the true core of why it’s so important. People who believe that they’re actually being heard feel like the listener cares about them and what they have to say. ...
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They Don’t Get It and They Won’t Remember It
Your mission and the work that you do is complex and full of detail. It may not be that complex to you because you’re the expert, but for most of us it’s a struggle to figure out. If you expect people to trust you, they need to understand you and ...
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Humility
Power and control usually manifest as arrogance and that makes people angry. We use different terms and euphemisms – reducing public anger and outrage, calming the waters, lowering the temperature, building trust – for the same basic goal: getting people to the point of having a reasonable dialogue or debate or interaction ...
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Guess Who’s Coming to Your Meeting?
If you answered ‘an old white guy’ you win … congratulations! The following data shows that the preponderance of public participants tend to be white, older, male and there to protect their status quo. Big surprise? Probably not. Is that most effective and useful? Probably not. Determining who really ...
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Most Public Participation Sucks
We in the public involvement biz like to pat ourselves on the back about what a good job we do, but it’s healthy to take an objectively critical step back and look at the broader state of the field, and the state of the field described in the following article ...
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Government Shutdown Blues
We talk about (re)building trust in government a lot in this newsletter and it will be interesting to watch the long-term reputation ramifications of the partial government shutdown – still underway, as of this writing. Public trust in government continues to erode and increasingly permeates down into state and local ...
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