COMMUNICATIONS
enquiry funnel, and ensuring your brand is known and trusted before a family needs you. But there are other reasons: recruitment and
retention, you want the best people in your services, not your competitors; to demonstrate to commissioners the value and outcomes of your work, perhaps to support a funding request; or maybe you’re heading towards a financial transaction and need to demonstrate to potential investors that you have a high calibre leadership team. Once you’ve worked out the why you can then
better focus on the what. After all, opening a ‘pub’ in your care home may speak to the everyday experience of residents, but does it showcase the expertise of the C-suite? There’s nuance to consider too. Rolling out a new
tech system can both demonstrate the operational expertise of the organisation’s leaders and show why you’re a partner of choice for local commissioners – but you’d need to tell the same story differently, in different places, depending on whether you want to reach investors or commissioners.
Is it working? Once you’ve defined the why and the what, you can also better measure the impact of your activity against those goals. Doing this at the start helps you capture baselines, ensure your activity is targeting the right outcomes, and (I’m sure) will help your CFO better understand the return on
Public relations work is not marketing – there’s no instant cause and effect to measure when it comes to reputation building.
investment (ROI) of any outlay made. Remember that public relations work is not
marketing. There is no instant cause and effect to measure when it comes to reputation building. But you can look at things like a spike in web traffic following local media coverage, links to your homepage from your social media accounts or whether candidates speak in specific terms about your work based on what they’ve seen online. But whatever you do, avoid vanity metrics.
Advertising value equivalent (AVE) has long been discredited in the PR world, yet it is still included within even the biggest media monitoring platforms. Bin it and focus on what really matters to your organisation.
One narrative, many stories If you’re a multi-site group, it’s important to recognise that individual homes can and should have their own personalities. It’s a people business after all, and the manager sets the tone locally. But, there still has to be one central narrative that clearly explains what your organisation stands for, and what a family can reasonably assume is true in every home you run. Consistency is the first thing ad hoc
communications loses – of message, tone, framing and narrative. Without it your community hears several different things over a year and concludes nothing. They’ll certainly struggle to tell you apart from another provider down the road. You need to reinforce the message in everything you do. It also gives you a test for activity. Events can be
purely for residents, and that needs no justification. But if you want media or online attention, and you want it to shape your reputation, ask what the event says about you. Is the message simply that
20 THE CARE HOME INDUSTRY HANDBOOK 2027
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