BLOG: Parents hold the key to good PR

The more skilled among you will have a strategy for getting the hormone-raddled, spotty little Herbert back on side and listening to what you want to say. It may involve backing off for a while and returning via a different tack, or else your verbal dexterity may win out there and then. Then again, you may just want to strangle the intransigent little scrote.
Put another way, trying to communicate with an audience that is only in 'send' mode, rather than 'receive', can be frustrating in the extreme.
For communications professionals this is just as great a test of ingenuity as it is for parents. It can be made harder if your organisation has well organised opponents who start from a more sympathetic standpoint as far as your shared audience is concerned.
For you it's "I ain't listening, innit", whilst for them it's "tell me more, man."
I'm thinking, in particular, about an organisation of which I'm a member: BASC. It boasts more than 130,000 supporters who pay more than £50 a year to join and has a formidable lobbying function that maintains a balance between the anti-libertarian, nanny-state instincts of our government and the legitimate interests of its membership. Would that its PR function matched its public affairs skills, however.
BASC, you see, stands for the British Association of Shooting and Conservation and its faces the massed ranks of the RSPB, the National Trust and English Nature, as well as various less salubrious groupings at the more extreme end of the scale.
And, as far as I can see as an interested third party, those cuddly, avuncular types against whom it is ranged run rings around it in PR terms. Whilst BASC preaches to the converted among the readership of Shooting Times and Sporting Gun, the opposition seem to have a free run of the mainstream media.
The problem as far as I can divine - and this is nothing more than empirical evidence - is twofold.
First, the mainstream media goes happily in to receive mode when it's contacted by the likes of the RSPB on a shooting matter, but takes a much more questioning approach when presented with the opposing facts. More often than not, the RSPB's versions of 'facts' go unchallenged as far as the reader or viewer is concerned.
Second, BASC's own PR programme seems to be tactically narrow and fails to utilise many of the 30-odd tricks of the trade that we use to unlock positive coverage for our clients.
The result is a one-sided debate that the wider public are happy to consume. Are there no parents among BASC's PR team?

Dougal Paver is managing director of Paver Smith in Liverpool