Imagine that you’re the Winnipeg School Division and your current claim to fame is a couple of cell phone videos of two of your teachers simulating a lap dance and oral sex during a high school pep rally. The high school is pilloried by media around the world. The teachers in question are lambasted by students, parents, politicians and every human being who hears the story and shakes their head in dismay.

So what do you do if you are the Winnipeg School Division? Why, you pretend nothing has happened at all. That has been the approach of the WSD administration ever since the Churchill High School lap dance scandal broke.

Today’s Winnipeg Free Press reported that the division has even removed any media stories from the clippings it sends to its trustees. Those would be the same trustees that the citizens of Winnipeg elected to govern the administration.

Let’s repeat that: the trustees are supposed to govern the administration.But I digress.

This story continues to go from bad to worse. What started as a serious lapse of judgment for a couple of high school teachers has escalated to a potential crisis of confidence in the entire school division administration.

It’s hard to tell why the administration is burying its head in the sand on this. There have been a few comments saying that it’s a personnel matter and therefore is entirely private. That may be, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a full-blown communications crisis for the school division and the school in question.

As it happens, I live in the catchment area for Churchill High School. I also have a son for whom my wife and I have to soon decide if he’ll attend Churchill or some other school that doesn’t have lap dancing during pep rallies. As a parent, I’m looking for some sign that the school and the division understand the depth of the mistrust this episode has bred. As a voter, I’m searching for some evidence that the school division is capable of handling itself competently. Sadly, I’m seeing the exact opposite on both counts.

The school division could have taken a much more pro-active approach to this situation while still respecting the privacy of the teachers. Its executive management team should have immediately responded both within the school community (before it hit the media). And once it hit the media, it needed to speak through the media and via its own publications to the general public (to reach would be parents like me). We need to be reassured of the culture and policies at work in our schools and in our school division.

Instead, the only public action it’s taken has been to threaten the students who took the videos and to see that they’re removed from YouTube. Seems to me they’re trying to move mountains to protect the reputations of two teachers that have deservedly lost them on their own. Meanwhile, the reputation of the WSD and of Churchill High School has been permanently smeared by their inaction.

Adam Dooley, President of Dooley Communications, was recently interviewed by Uniter reporter Kristy Rydz on communications and corporate social responsibility. The question: can companies that pollute credibly call themselves environmentally sensitive?

The story examines the dilemma and wonders if some corporate efforts are only so much ‘greenwashing’.

What’s your view?

This time of year is always very exciting for me personally as we get closer and closer to the Manitoba Communicator of the Year celebration. This year, CPRS Manitoba will present the third annual award on March 24 at the Hotel Fort Garry.

I remember when we first started talking about creating the award some four or five years ago. Nearly everyone, especially the CPRS Manitoba board, was enthusiastic. That’s not surprising as we’d been looking for some time for new ways to bring value to our members and to promote both CPRS and our profession in Manitoba. The award has done a great job of that so far and I’m very proud to have played a part in developing it and organizing the celebrations for the past three years.

I want to thank Marketwire for its generous sponsorship of the award since its inception.
The nomination deadline has been extended to Feb. 26. So get your nomination in soon.

And as a special lead-in to the award, CPRS Manitoba is also hosting a half day conference on social media this year sponsored by CNW Group. It features Keith Bilous, President of ICUC Moderation Services as keynote speaker. ICUC has quietly grown to be one of the largest online content moderation companies in the world right here in our own backyard.

The conference also has a host of other homegrown talent on two panels dealing with the changing face of news media and how to leverage social networks. Come out and see, hear and meet: Bruce Owen of the Free Press, Glenn Tinley of Studio Publications, Curtis Brown of Endless Spin Cycle, Shel Zolkewich of ShinyPackages, Corey Quintaine of Kildonan Place, Rebecca McCormack of Cake Clothing, Jason Hasselmann of New Media Now, and Colin Whitney of Mars Hill Group.

It’ll be a great conference with plenty of fresh case studies on how to make social media work for you.

Buy tickets at www.cprs.mb.ca. Early bird rates end March 5!

The year is getting off to a great start for everyone at Dooley Communications with new clients coming on stream (stay tuned for more info) and old clients coming back with new projects.

It’s exciting to see the firm continue to grow. As we do, we’ll maintain our focus on being a service-oriented PR firm for the Canadian Prairies. Our focus remains on the Winnipeg and Manitoba markets for public relations and corporate communications services, but we also routinely reach into both Northwestern Ontario and Saskatchewan for our clients.

We use a variety of tools and tactics for our clients from traditional media relations to corporate communications, newsletters, magazines, social networks and blogs. We also develop and execute advertising campaigns, stage special events, and host photo ops and public speaking engagements.

As we get started on our third full calendar year in business, I’d like to personally thank all our suppliers for their highly professional and excellent help. They include:

• Twist Design and Communications
• Nova Design
• Prairie Research Associates
• GRP Media Services
• Mirek Photography
• Tony Nardella Photography
• Tint Marketing
• Contemporary Printing
• Marketwire LP
• Cision
• The Great Promotional Products Company

All the best in 2010!

Adam Dooley,
President

Knowledge can be a terrible thing… especially when what you know is horrible or salacious or illegal.

Since people are social animals, our baser instinct is often to spill the beans and tell all about what we know. As a public relations consultant, I am often called on to tell my clients to say nothing.

A perfect case in point was in the Saturday Winnipeg Free Press when Gordon Sinclair Jr. took a young woman’s story of her affair with her boss and turned it into a sermon on transparency in communications. Mr. Sinclair may be many things, but as a PR consultant he would fail miserably.

When you consider whether you should come forward and divulge your secrets to the rest of the world, you should ask yourself a few questions. First and most important are the twin-headed dragons of: what is the potential upside and downside of coming forward? If the only upside is to get some revenge, then zip up. That is made only truer when the potential downside is to turn a private embarrassment into a public humiliation.

Other questions to ask: is it likely that your story will come out on its own? Could a reporter reasonably sniff it out and get independent confirmations without your help? More often than not, the news never gets out. It can even go to court where all the details will be placed on the public docket, and chances are still fair that it won’t be reported in the newspaper. In Manitoba at least, there are too few reporters who can chase only so many stories.

The reality is that scandals are constantly occurring in businesses, charities and private homes all over this city. Most of them remain secrets. When it comes to malfeasance or criminality, that’s a shame. When it comes to private matters, it’s a good thing. Because contrary to what reporters and columnists tend to think and say, it is RARELY in your best interest to go public.

I feel badly for the young woman involved here. I know her. She’s a good person. She made a mistake in her private life and has now amplified it. I suspect (though I don’t know) that her decision to come forward was made in a cloud of emotion. It’s at times like those - when you’re too close to your terrible secret - that you should seek professional advice.

Good branding requires companies to tell a good story. And the sign of a good story is when others start retelling it for you.

That’s what we’re attempting to do for Keystone Processors Ltd. It’s a new beef plant in Winnipeg. For now, it’s selling beef solely within the province, but it has big plans to reach premium niche markets internationally.

So what? Well, Keystone Processors is the first new beef plant in Manitoba in a generation and it also happens to be owned by Manitoba farmers. When the US shut its border to Canadian beef in 2003, Canada’s beef plants in Alberta and Ontario were swamped with local livestock. With no access to local plants, Manitoba cattle farmers were devastated. A handful of them recognized they had to change the way they did business. So they united behind a vision of marketing a new brand of Manitoba beef to the world - and to own every stage of production from farm to distribution, gate to plate.

Instead of rewarding massive multinational companies, profits will go to farmers - many of them running farms that have been in their families for generations. At the same time, the new plant could mark a turning point in the Manitoba food processing sector too, which has been shrinking in recent years.

We raise great beef here. That shouldn’t be any surprise with our clean air, wide open spaces and history of agricultural leadership. And we want Manitobans to be proud of the company and the farmers behind it.

The company has come a long way in just a few short years. Thanks to dogged determination and countless hours of hard work, the farmers’ dreams of a brighter future are becoming reality. In fact, just last week, the plant received major new funding from the federal government and the Manitoba Cattle Enhancement Council.

For our part, we’ve begun telling this remarkable story wherever we can. We’ve had considerable success with media relations across Manitoba and in agricultural media across the country. Several international publications have also started following the company’s progress. These efforts are crucial as the company has to build its brand outside of our borders, but advertising is cost prohibitive to reach all the jurisdictions they need.

We’ve also been repeating the story locally, because we need Manitobans to buy in to the Keystone Processors success story first. To do this, we’ve been building a successful Facebook fan page, blogging and Tweeting all about the company. We’ve also run some small advertising campaigns, which we expect to ramp up in the months to come.

Early results have been encouraging. On a limited budget we’ve seen growth in Facebook fans, Twitter followers and, more importantly, traffic into the Keystone Processors’ online and real store to buy premium Manitoba beef.

That’s when you know the story is working: when people are buying.

The Winnipeg youth soccer community erupted in drama last week as the city’s community centres announced they were setting up a new youth soccer league to rival the one run by the Winnipeg Youth Soccer Association (WYSA).

Both organizations are case studies of how poor communications practices have led to distrust and anger among stakeholder groups, which has decimated goodwill on all sides.In fact, now that its secret plans for a new league are out in the open, the Greater Council of Winnipeg Community Centres has admitted that it only pursued this action because WYSA refused to meet. GCWCC says it has asked for meetings with WYSA numerous times only to have their requests rebuffed or the meetings cancelled.

WYSA was turning turtle, pulling itself in to its shell and refusing to discuss legitimate concerns of a major stakeholder group. After all, a large portion of WYSA’s revenue comes from community centres and - as a soccer convenor for Lord Roberts Community Centre, I know they do have some legitimate concerns.

1. WYSA is worthy of its reputation for high-handed arrogance, running a cumbersome bureaucracy that needlessly wastes volunteer time, and which focuses more on premier programs while virtually ignoring rec league soccer.

2. The district soccer clubs (such as Winnipeg South End United) run great premier soccer programs, but they do so at the expense of recreational soccer leagues. District clubs such as WSEU annually decimate rec leagues by recruiting community centre players to fill their developmental leagues.  That practice is commonly (and rightly) viewed by convenors and parents in the south district as nothing but a charade designed to drive revenues to pay for premier programs.

3. Soccer fees have risen steadily over the past few years. When challenged about fees, WYSA and the district clubs appear reluctant to offer clear explanations for the increases or for where all the money is going in the first place. (I`m always sceptical of budget line items labelled `miscellaneous.`)

Not talking about these things won’t make them go away.But then GCWCC is no better. In fact, they took their strategy from the same playbook: plot in secret for years about how to get even with WYSA, don’t bother to consult with your own stakeholders, don’t do any substantive research… just bluster your way into setting up a new league. That’ll teach ‘em. Now they’ll have to talk, eh, what?

As it was presented to the Manitoba Soccer Association annual general meeting on Saturday, GCWCC says its new league will be cheaper and will somehow bring hundreds of new players into the fold (though they were shockingly spare on details on this score). The folks at GCWCC freely admit that they want to return to the good old days when community centres ran youth sports in this town (without asking why they deservedly lost that role to more specialized organizations over the last 30 years).

If I wasn’t involved in the soccer world myself, and if I didn’t love the game and want my kids to play it, I’d probably just laugh.It’s shockingly bad planning that community centres - who take their power from the people - didn’t bother to consult with anyone outside of an inner circle. There was no attempt to canvass parents, players, soccer convenors, etc. for ideas on how to improve the game. As a result, the new league will have a hard time claiming legitimacy.

The biggest problem in Winnipeg soccer is that there are too many competing fiefdoms, each trying to build themselves into empires on the backs of a shrinking pool of players. The GCWCC proposal is nothing more than a power play to try to wrest control over soccer from other organizations and, at the same time, drive more revenues into community centres.

On the other side, WYSA’s ‘my way or the highway’ attitude suffers from the same delusion of power. They want to run soccer without the hassle or inconvenience of being questioned about their decisions.

The real story is the one being lost as adults fight so hard to protect their turf: the kids are being ignored as everyone wrestles for bigger slices of their parents’ cheques. I believe that we need a great simplification of soccer. We should forget about who ‘controls’ the league and worry about how to get a better one.

GCWCC is right about one thing – we should encourage a bigger, less expensive rec league – but we don’t need a new, rival league to get this done. (All that will do is drain more volunteer time, goodwill and trust out of the system.) We need WYSA to climb down off its high horse and make it happen. Reduce player fees and administration and embrace the notion that we’re all working for the common good of a single pool of players.

We also need a system that requires less volunteer power to run. That means doing more to centralize and streamline registration, team building and player development in each district. For that, the community centres need to recognize that they are just as guilty of abusing volunteer time. The current system is wildly convoluted, creating an unnecessary workload on convenors, treasurers and community centre managers as they swap and transfer players around the city (and we won`t even touch on the issue of fields in this city). The only reason for this system`s existence is because that’s the way things have always been done in Winnipeg … a terrible justification of a stupid system.

Finally, soccer should follow the lead of hockey with its widely accepted tiering system for players. Only the top players make the premier teams, all others are placed according to their abilities, with the large majority playing in the lower tiers. This will go a long way to improving the players’ enjoyment of the game as it decreases the potential for lopsided contests that leave players dejected and looking for a way out of the sport.

I was shocked and dismayed at the cavalier disregard GCWCC and WYSA seem to be treating the kids they purport to serve. GCWCC has made matters worse with its new league. The only silver lining is that this may force WYSA to reform its ways. The alternative is a rapid and sad degeneration of soccer here just as it enjoys massive popularity everywhere else in the world. A pox on both their houses, I say.

If either side employed good communications strategies, none of this would have happened and we’d all be happily planning for another season instead of trying to clean up a nasty mess.

Dooley Communications was busy again this year setting up UNICEF Canada’s annual pumpkin carving contest yesterday at Kildonan Place. We’re pleased to report the event was even more successful than last year by every measure: we have more teams, more media coverage, bigger crowds and more money raised.

Here are a few clippings of the event:

Fish Find Glory as New Pumpkin Kings, Winnipeg Free Press, October 28, 2009

I’m Not Out of My Gourd, Winnipeg Free Press, October 27, 2009

2nd Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest, Chrisd.ca, October 28, 2009

Billie Jo Ross’ blog, Clear 102.3 FM, October 28, 2009

We were also pleased to see CBC TV, Global TV, CTV, CITY TV and SHAW TV all out to cover the event.

Here are a few more photos of the event. 

Glad to see everyone had fun.

This is the time of year we get very busy with UNICEF Canada activities. As public relations consultants Manitoba and Saskatchewan, we help organize all the media relation activities for the annual Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF campaign.

We help coordinate campaign launch events in multiple cities, set up interviews with radio, television and print reporters across both provinces, and work with UNICEF’s national office to ensure it’s all working in concert with the national campaign.

Among our various October projects for UNICEF, this is the second year we’re organizing a Celebrity Pumpkin Carving contest. We’re currently locking in our guest carvers and sourcing our pumpkins for the big showdown Tuesday, October 27 from 11:45 to 1:15 at Kildonan Place Shopping Centre. So far, it looks as though we’ll have more carving teams than last year with organizations such as CTV, CBC, Winnipeg Free Press, Winnipeg Police Service, Hot 103 and the Winnipeg Goldeyes attending.

Events like this are a great way to get some attention for your organization. This one works well because it has several really good elements including notable contestants from media, business, arts and other walks of life. It also has good visuals: cameras like this whether they’re shooting for a television station, a paper or a website. It ties in to a major cultural event: Halloween. And it supports a good cause in UNICEF.

Grand Chief David Harper sure made the most of things this week. He’s the one who led the symbolic protest against Health Canada over the body bag fiasco.

Health Canada apparently sent shipments to some remote Manitoba reserves that contained body bags in addition to hand sanitizer and other items. Harper found out about it and decided to make the most of the situation. He brought the body bags to the Health Canada office in Winnipeg and marked the boxes “return to sender.”

He told Canada AM that the reserves in question have been awaiting emergency preparedness kits in anticipation of more H1N1 flu cases, but have yet to receive them. Instead, they got body bags.

The emotional and political impact of this story was immediate. Opposition leaders postured that the government was betraying its callousness. The Minister of Health apologized and promised an immediate investigation. The story has led the national news cycle replacing the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington and Parliament’s avoidance of a fall election.

The entire episode is an example of why ongoing, open communications with stakeholders is vitally important.

I have no way of knowing why Health Canada has apparently been slow in delivering the kits Chief Harper referenced. I suspect that body bags may well be an appropriate item to deliver to communities that are expected to face a higher than average incidence of severe flu this fall. Preparedness isn’t always sunshine and light. The problem, I believe, was less in the delivery than in the surprise.

Communicate clearly with your stakeholder groups. Tell them what’s coming, listen to their response, remind them what’s coming and what you heard… and then, once done, tell them what you just did.

Health Canada deserves the headache it’s getting. Harper had every right to exploit this situation. His aggressive use of the media here will help his communities get the medical supplies they need sooner.

I recommend that Health Canada start its investigation with its communications protocols.