Communications is one of the four main levers of government,” says Alex Aiken, executive director for Government Communications. “A government can legislate; it can regulate; it can impose taxation; and it can communicate.” 

This sentiment was reflected two years ago when communications was recognised as one of 10 functional professions within the Civil Service – there are 25 professions in total – and the Government Communication Service (GCS) was founded, with Aiken at its head. 

The GCS’s role is to support communicators in delivering the government’s policy priorities, and their success is evaluated against the annual Communications Plan. 

Aiken takes evaluation very seriously. He is such a firm believer in its value that he describes it as “the foundation stone of the professional credibility that gives communicators a right to speak at the top decision-making level in an organisation”.  

While some may think of communications as a creative pursuit, Aiken’s focus on measurement manifests itself in his own, unique method of drilling home the importance of numbers.

One of the first things Aiken did when he took up his role two years ago was to ensure that every government department had a ‘performance hub’: a physical wall of data – printed on A3 paper – with outputs that run from the GCS’s performance framework. 

This framework incorporates strategic priorities and divides communications objectives into input, output, outtake and outcome metrics. These are made up of financial and non-financial data. 

The performance hubs display information ranging from media coverage (both quantity and sentiment), social media coverage and the progress of campaigns, as well as factors such as the number of people employed by the department and other management data. Aiken and his team at the Cabinet Office review their data at the beginning of each month, when the new numbers come in. 

Having it physically displayed, Aiken says, is a deliberate ploy to keep these measures front of mind. “I was at the Department for Transport earlier this week,” he adds, “and they have displayed their objectives so the team can see, every day, the big things they are doing over the year: the objectives writ large, literally, and the data on whether they are meeting them. It’s a nudge to prioritising data and evaluation.” 

Changing behaviour

Aiken says he has probably been influenced to use this ‘nudging’ behaviour by his involvement with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – also known as the Nudge Unit – which is now a social-purpose company partly owned by the Cabinet Office, employees, and innovation charity Nesta. 

BIT draws on ideas from behavioural science literature to work with government departments, public bodies and charities on making public services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use. 

It also works to improve outcomes by “introducing a more realistic model of human behaviour to policy” and “enabling people to make better choices for themselves”. 

The way this thinking is put to use ranges from the straightforward to the complicated, Aiken explains. 

“There are some very complex arguments that you can make around this, as well as some very simple ones. As agencies that do large amounts of correspondence – such as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) – have found that putting ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in letters and other correspondence ups the engagement rate, and gets you more answers that you need from the public. 

“On a one-million letter mail out, even if you only get a 2% response rather than a 1% response, that’s a large number of additional responses.” 

Back to Aiken’s walls of data. Since he put them in place – most departments have now had them for about 18 months – he has found, on his twice-yearly visits to each team, that some have moved them on, independently, to digital dashboards. 

The team at HMRC, he explains, has coded its own digital-reporting tool, while other teams have borrowed from the market to create real-time dashboards. 

He has championed these dashboards as part of his team’s strategy of “pushing forward on every front” and getting early adopters to encourage other teams. 

“I was always clear that we had to go to real-time digital dashboards rather than paper-based hubs, but I have been really encouraged by the way people have taken this on – on their own – and developed them,” Aiken says. 

Targeted campaigns

Other strands to this ‘pushing forward’ strategy include the creation of a government trading desk, at media buyers Carat, to enable programmatic buying. This is part of communicator Aiken’s desire to create more targeted campaigns based on people’s history and interests. And it all comes back to his determination to ensure both effectiveness and efficiency. 

“When you had £1bn to spend on government communications [the figure Aiken claims was spent in 2010 under the Labour government] you’d just buy a load of TV advertising and hope that some of it hit the audience. But when you have got £500m, you have to be more targeted.”

An example of the targeting the team has employed is a campaign aimed at recruiting Royal Naval Engineers. “We worked out that it was better to target students in universities with engineering faculties – preferably near the sea – with apps that allowed them to play games about being an engineer in the Royal Navy, than it is to use the adverts either side of the 10 o’clock news,” says Aiken.

“It’s common sense driven by fracturing audiences,” he adds. “There was a time when the 10 o’clock news was ‘it’ – and it still has many millions of viewers – but there was a time when it would have made sense to do broadsheet and television advertising. 

“Audiences are fracturing, so that’s a driver; money is less available than it was – that’s a driver, too; and the other is that tech is advancing so quickly. That’s where the government trading desk comes in, so we can target people more accurately.”

Another element of the focus on targeting – as revealed in the latest Government Communications Plan, released in July of this year – is the upcoming creation of a cross-government insight network. This is intended to share knowledge and ideas for communicating with specific audiences, and follows a dedicated audience insight function being established. The insight function helps to commission audience research and monitors communications trends to share best practice on audience insight. 

It was launched as part of the GCS Improvement Plan, a multi-phased programme that is currently in its third phase. 

Expert help

As part of his bid to ensure best practice, Aiken makes use of outside experts – ranging from eBay and Google to the The John Madejski Centre for Reputation at the Henley Business School (University of Reading), and Westminster Council – to maintain standards and keep developing communications. He chairs the Evaluation Council that brings in the experts to conduct communications capability reviews, to test the effectiveness and efficiency of communications in government departments and agencies. 

There have been 50 reviews, Aiken reveals, each with three reviewers, so a total of 150 external experts have been involved. 

“I firmly believe that it’s your government as well as my government, and bringing in external challenge has been critical to raising standards,” he says. 

A piece of GCS literature – 7 Trends in leading-edge communications – released in April of this year, features case studies from brands such as John Lewis and Birds Eye, as well as from government campaigns, to highlight how the private sector is addressing some of the key trends, including storytelling, shareable content and emotional connection. 

The value of this external influence is clear, but are civil servants subject to different pressures to prove the worth of communications spending, compared with those in the private sector? Aiken doesn’t believe so. 

“Being able to demonstrate the worth of any public spending is absolutely part of being a public servant. It’s professionally important to me as a government communicator.

“But the UK government spends £700bn a year and communications spend is £500m, which is a tiny part of that. I’d argue it’s an important part but, in a sense, public interest will be more on the cost of a £160m defence equipment budget, or the progress of big projects such as universal credit. So I’m sure there’s a degree of interest, but for me it’s more about our professional effectiveness.”

This constant striving for excellence and professionalism runs deep and his summation of what that entails is sage advice for anyone in the business. 

“It is a mixture of using best professional judgement, a canon of established knowledge about the practice of communications, and evidence – numbers – about what has worked and what has not worked.”