Summary of recommendations

David Kenning’s main recommendations are set out below. They have been grouped under seven headings. For ease of reference they are given in bold, followed by the supporting argumentation and secondary recommendations.

(1) Communications Strategy

A strategic positioning for the Church of England is required urgently. This positioning should express the Church’s unique role in national life and a distinctly Christian perspective.

• The priority is to devise and implement a coherent and realistic communications strategy (preferably with professional assistance). A communications strategy should entail a ‘positioning’ for the Church that takes account of, say, three major features of its essential character and differentiates it from every other organisation in the country, for example;
  • its rich traditions and diversity
  • its unique role in relation to the people
  • as a source of good and the Christian perspective across the land
  
  A strategic positioning (encompassing something like the above) can then be used to develop a communications plan using appropriate Church good-news stories to express and amplify the strategy.


An important role of the Communications Unit will be to source such appropriate stories and ‘conversations’ within the national Church which can then be pulled up to the strategic level and communicated to the outside world. There must be some unifying themes and keep pushing – recycling - thoughts that have values and which support the strategic position. This is only the first step but will set the direction for all further aspects of national Church communications.


• …. The difficult part, the implementation, will only come when the Church is able to identify and harness its real talent and align that with its strategic positioning.”

(2) The Communications Panel of the Archbishops Council

The Communications Panel of the Archbishops Council needs to be reconfigured to increase its fire-power and mutual accountability between the NCIs

• The configuration of the Communications Panel holds the key both to enabling the communications strategy to work and to empower national Church communications as a whole. To date this Panel has been too remote, underpowered and insufficiently representative to do the job properly. It must draw together representatives from the major institutions and key individuals involved in communications. This will achieve two main objectives; firstly to make it more powerful in itself by drawing on a greater range and depth of resource, secondly, to tighten relationships and provide mutual accountability between the major power centres. It is essential that the various Church institutions act on the recommendations of this new Panel. I recommend a new, re-configured Panel should include the following:
  • Chaired by a media-literate senior bishop representing the House of Bishops with experience of national Church communications and who has a direct link to the Archbishops
  • A maximum of two lay members (communications experts) to be elected by Synod o One person elected from Diocesan Communicators’ Panel
  • Director of Communications
  • Senior Lambeth communications advisor
  • Senior Bishopthorpe communications advisor …”

(3) A culture of inclusivity and openness

The fortress mentality in the NCIs needs to be dismantled … An entire strategy and programme needs to be put in place to improve and monitor relationships with the national press and broadcast media.

• The Church must set about dismantling (the perception of) the ‘fortress’ mentality at Church House in particular, and to a lesser extent at Lambeth. The first and most important area to begin with is within the Communications Unit itself.” This will require a change of culture. One key challenge is to develop a new set of values and practices which can help the Church to achieve better working relationships with those it depends upon to get its messages across.”


• The Church must develop and implement a strategy to improve relations with all aspects of the media …” This will involve setting out clearly defined objectives in terms of placing messages and stories in support of the strategy (positioning)”. There will also need to be clear lines of responsibility for delivering the strategy and appraising progress in nurturing key external relationships.


• Appoint a Head of External Relations whose main functions would be to harmonise operational efficiency and output, optimise relations …. and take responsibility and oversight for the implementation of the media strategy, ensuring that Church news is proactively used to enhance and support the overall national strategic positioning … Spin, manipulation or attempts to impose control on press and media relationships” should not be pursued.


• Develop a database of authoritative apologists and their areas of expertise and send to all news editors, editors, religious correspondents, writers on social and public policy, lifestyle editors, etc.


• Hold regular communications masterclasses” for all Church communicators by experts in the Christian and religious media (the Church of England has a number of such people keen to play their part in this respect).


• Select, train and promote people who are expert in each medium – eg: TV, radio, print media (tabloid/broadsheet/magazines), Website etc.


• Use one of the newly appointed and experienced press officers a specific brief to manage the Church relationships with the tabloids.


• Begin revitalising Church relationships with key national journalists, columnists and journalists on a one-to-one basis. These (personal) relationships can only be improved where they are manifestly based on trust and openness. This should be done in the form of a weekly lobby – preferably held away from Church premises. It could also be supplemented by Church Advocates meeting with media contacts on a regular basis.


• Hold a separate Thursday lobby for the Sunday press.


• The Church must also develop better contacts with journalists working outside religion. Influential newspaper columnists need also be nurtured as must writers on social policy …”


• The national media operate from London. If we compare the Communications Units present resources relative to the number of newspapers and broadcast media centres in London, it is clearly an unequal task. Ensure that a sufficient number of Church Advocates are able to meet regularly in London when required.


• The media deal with events rather than processes. Much of the Church is involved with the latter. To help the media understand these better the Church may learn to punctuate its processes with milestone press conferences and by so doing create landmark events around its processes.” It is important to plan – calendarise if possible – Archbishops’ statements and ensure that national press journalists and the dioceses are briefed well in advance”. This would give the national Church a stronger sense of coherence, especially in relation to its Gospel messages”.

(4) Future of the Communications Unit

There needs to be an urgent injection of new professional expertise into the Church House Communications Unit …”

• The Communications Unit should invest in two additional professional journalists – one from the national press (preferably with tabloid experience) and one from national broadcasting (preferably also with national journalistic experience). This would increase the number of press officers from two to four (and) enable more proactive work to be done and ideally, an early shift that could complete the daily briefing by 09.00 when bishops’ offices are operational. The introduction of ‘new-blood’ would also sharpen-up the Unit and go some way towards closing the culture gap which is currently inhibiting the Church’s relations with the national press and media.”


• The Communications Unit’s internal and external communications functions need to be split and operate under new Heads of internal and external communications.


• The priority of the Communications Unit should be focused externally but it must also maintain a first-class internal communications function. Appoint a Head of Internal Communications who is responsible to the new Director of Communications for the quality, implementation and improvement of internal communications functions” and for devising, implementing and maintaining systems and processes for direct communications with the parishes where appropriate.”


• All those currently employed in the Communications Unit and who have any dealings with the press or media should be sent on secondment to a national newspaper or broadcast newsroom. This will assist them to understand the media angle on news stories and how better to make a story interesting – even if they are to work exclusively on internal communications.


• The Communications Unit needs to have the full backing of policy colleagues in Church House and be closely involved , within a relationship of trust, in their work so that presentational issues are considered upstream.


• The press-cutting service could be reduced and sub-contracted freeing up resources for identifying and placing … stories”.


• The training function needs to move up a gear if the Church is to implement the recommendation for new Church Advocates. Those who are given the highest profile portfolios as the new Church Advocates should be given training with the top broadcasters if they are not already covered by the bishops’ training scheme. This will involve the Training Unit taking a bigger role in preparing Church spokespersons for the task of communicating with the national press and broadcast media.”


• The Official Website requires full-time dedicated professional support with a recruited or outsourced full-time professional webmaster. Much more use could be made of an improved website (establishing an intranet) for more direct communications between the Unit and the dioceses and parishes. In this regard the dioceses must be kept up to date on a daily basis with Church communications at a national level. Intranet, as part of the official Website, should be created for internal communications purposes. This should allow the centre to keep the dioceses and parishes informed on a daily basis of what is happening at a national level.


• A careful balance needs to be maintained between the effort devoted respectively to the press and electronic media. The recommendations for the staffing requirements above reflect the optimum balance for each. The Internet has made enormous strides into the national consciousness over the past five years and the next decade could well see it overtaking the established media as a source of information. However, the conventional press and media must remain a priority for the foreseeable future. There is no reason, however, why Church Advocates should not be able to post their views on the internet via webcams and, on occasions, invite an interactive communication with the nation such as is often conducted by television networks.”

(5) Director of Communications

The national Church needs to appoint a new Director of Communications” with as much an ambassadorial” role as that of enabler and facilitator…”

• As the structures and bureaucracy of the Church are complex and difficult to manoeuvre around, the most effective way to accommodate them lies in appointing the right personality who can move between them with relative ease…”
• It is essential that the person appointed is able to develop trust and span the widest possible range of interests at national and diocesan levels. There will be a need for the person appointed to be an excellent networker demonstrating insight and awareness of people and communications opportunities and the ability to be influential rather than managerial. The importance of appointing a person who can look for consensus, diplomacy, apply persuasion and openness together with advocacy and leadership qualities cannot be overestimated.

The Church needs to abolish the Lead Bishop programme and appoint new Church Advocates drawn from across the national Church.” (see para 76-82 for details)

• Lead Bishops are an innovation approved by the House of Bishops in January 1998 and introduced formally in February 2000. The purpose of the Lead Bishop has been to provide a national figure who is a recognised (authoritative) advocate for the Church perspective on a given issue. Diocesan bishops recognised that it was helpful to have the views of their brother bishops known, and that expert opinion could assist their own pronouncements on issues where their own knowledge may be relatively limited.”


• David Kenning records that the original hopes have not been fulfilled. The original intention of creating support cells for each Lead Bishop, with key Communicators identified to each, has failed to arouse committed interest in all but a small number of highly specific areas. Operational difficulties were immediately apparent to both bishops and communications officers and the media continued to resort to their existing contacts.”


• As a result, he concludes that the programme should be discontinued. No one I spoke to, including Lead Bishops, thought that the role of Lead Bishop should be continued although this is not to say that Bishops should stand back from taking a lead on policy announcements.”


• Perhaps the single most compelling reason for abandoning the Lead Bishop programme is that the press and media in the dioceses want to know what their local bishop thinks about any given issue – not what some centrally appointed bishop at the other end of the country - no matter how erudite - thinks. Whilst it is helpful for the expertise and advice of bishops who are known to be experts in their particular field to be available, it is unfailingly to the local voice that the local media turn. At a county and regional level, it may be interesting to know what the national thinking of the Church is; but the voice that carries most weight is that of the local bishop because he is known by his people within the context of their daily lives. For that reason, most bishops find themselves as de facto Lead Bishops at a local level … For the message of the Church to relate to the society which it serves, it has become increasingly clear that the more remote the voice, the less effective it is.”


• This still leaves the question of how best the Church should organize itself to produce authoritative spokesmen and women for the national media. David Kenning notes that bishops will rightly continue to make policy announcements but questions whether they need invariably to lead in explaining the Church’s stance on all issues.


• He suggests that a solution would be to create a database of authoritative, media-friendly experts and interested parties – in a word, advocates. Among the vast number of members of the Church of England there are many experts and an enormous latent talent for communication among the laity. Advocates can, and must, be drawn from all sorts of people who belong to the Church – including Bishops. It is important for the Church to capitalise on the advantages of its democratic membership and allow the nation to see that its conversations are held just as much on the street” as in the recognised institutions. Clergy and congregations could be encouraged to identify those who are suitable spokespersons (including the possibility of 24 hour access and availability) in their parishes. The potential advocates’ competence could be evaluated by experienced media professionals and, where appropriate, training provided.”


• Such an initiative,” says David Kenning, would not be foolproof and nor will it prevent (nor attempt to prevent) the single-issue pressure groups within the Church from having their say, but it will serve to guide the press and media towards those influential and representative voices which characterise and express the Church’s policies and established positions on given issues. It will also help to put so-called dissenting voices in perspective.”

(7) Diocesan Communicators

The Diocesan Communicators need to be plugged in to the centre and allowed to contribute to strategic communications thinking.”

• The primary allegiance of the Diocesan Communicators is to their Bishops and any requests made of them in relation to the national communications function must be able to take this relationship into account. That said, in many respects, Diocesan Communicators are the life-blood of Church communications. The DCs need to be properly valued (and rewarded) and tied into the centre in terms of their powerful potential contribution to national Church communications. Most fundamentally, as the ‘troops on the ground’ they must be permitted to contribute to the national communications strategy.”


• Strengthen the mutual ties between the Communications Unit and individual and area groupings of Diocesan Communicators.”


• An on-going development programme for the Diocesan Communicators which would go a long way to reinforce the appreciation of the value of their role. This could include on-line training, mentoring, coaching and so forth.”


• Funds need to be identified, nationally or within dioceses, so that within the dioceses the vital role of Diocesan Communicators” is maintained.


• Create a formal role for the Diocesan Communicators’ Panel – link it in to the Communications Panel of the Archbishops’ Council by placing at least one representative from the DCs Panel on to the ACs Panel.”


• … Advance briefings are invaluable to the Diocesan Communicators and must become mandatory where at all possible if the Church is to achieve greater coherence.” Calendarisation can play a role.


• The communications efforts of the Unit at national and of the dioceses [are] both … critical to the overall reputation and development of Church communications. The national level is in most urgent need of attention and will seek to ensure that the national communications strategy is implemented … However, the Communications Unit should be resourced sufficiently to enable, support and empower all diocesan requirements at the same time as being resourced to help the Church implement a proactive mission-orientated media operation. The introduction of experienced ‘new blood’ can serve both the needs of the press and media and provide a link with the Diocesan Communicators should see to it that an appropriate balance between the two is arrived at.”


• Recruit a (possibly former) Diocesan Communicator to work in the Unit and serve the needs of the Diocesan Communicators. Diocesan Communicators need to be kept updated on national press and broadcast initiatives on a daily basis and a much more reliable and regular means of briefing the DCs needs to be initiated and maintained.”