There’s lots to cover this month: it’s dates a-go-go for those who live and die by the calendar, as so many of us do in PR and communications. Monday 8 March was International Women’s Day. Last Friday I attended a virtual conference for women in business, run by the FSB, which has led me to #choosetochallenge perceptions of women in business and women working from home.
In the words of Deborah Turner, property consultant and FSB champion for women in business, “If you can see it you can be it” – we need to act as role models for others, including our daughters. Deborah reported that just 27% of FSB members are women-led businesses so there is a long way to go, but that figure is 3.5% higher than it was four years previously. Women-owned businesses contribute £105m to the UK economy – so, as we know, women have huge potential to contribute economically, never mind the benefits of a more empathetic, kind, sustainable way of doing business which might be simplistically defined as more ‘female’.
One silver lining of the pandemic is the huge boost it has given to flexible working, working from home (or anywhere) and the importance of maintaining a healthy work/life balance. Things have come a very long way from the days in the early 2000s when I worked as a freelance journalist from home and went to extreme lengths to disguise the fact I was also juggling motherhood of a newborn, then a toddler, then two young children.
We’ve got Mothers’ Day coming up on Sunday 14 March which, as my grandmother told me, is actually Mothering Sunday, a day of worship during Lent when people return to their ‘mother’ church for a special service. According to UKTV’s Yesterday website, this pilgrimage was referred to as ‘going a-mothering’ and became a holiday, especially for domestic servants. Mothers’ Day came later, in the US, as a day to celebrate mothers, signed into existence by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.
Looking slightly ahead, the clocks go forward by one hour on Sunday 28 March as we spring forward into British Summer Time – lighter evenings, yippee! Time to start planning some evening runs.
And, of course, it’s Good Friday on 2 April and Easter Sunday on 4 April, followed by Easter Monday. Which means it’s also a two-week Easter holiday from school and, boy, how I love the school timetable which gives us time for a breather every six to eight weeks or so.
Yes, school restarted from Monday 8 March for my two teenagers as well as for millions of others across the UK. It’s been quite fraught but I’m learning that expectation has a massive part to play and, in the words of someone very wise who I’ve recently reconnected with, instead of expectation we should be creating a sense of possibility for young people to live into.
PR disaster of the month? The government saying they would only give nurses a 1% pay rise after all nurses have done for the nation during the pandemic. This exposes the hypocrisy behind the clap for carers that many people felt at the time – the prime minister and others were out on their doorsteps last year clapping along with others. Some observers were quick to point out that, rather than clapping or as well as clapping, the way to support nurses and other key workers is to vote for a government that will properly fund public services.
I’m not going to write too much about the other massive PR story of the month – Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, broadcast to almost 13 million in the UK on ITV on 8 March, simply because so much has been written about it elsewhere. Quite apart from attitudes of some in the royal household, the focus has turned to racist attitudes and prejudices in the British media. I’d like to think the British media isn’t institutionally racist – I’d say it’s too broad a group for that to be true across the board. But there can be little doubt that some of Meghan’s treatment by some of the British media has been racist. At least Piers Morgan has lost his soapbox on ITV’s Good Morning Britain as a result of the row that is still unfolding in the wake of the interview.
Finally, I thought I’d tell you the story behind the Lucecannon name. I was tweeted by a writer and tech comms person who said, I hope unironically, that he ADORES the way my name is “casually incongruous” with the look and feel of my website – which I’m taking as a huge compliment. My name sounds casual. My website shows I’m anything but.
Lucecannon was originally the domain name for a blog I started in 2008 when blogs were all the rage and where I reviewed TV programmes and occasionally ranted about the things that were going on in my life, such as staying up late to prepare party bags for my children only to be woken at a god-forsaken hour because they were so excited about the impending party. (I was not so excited, at 4 o’clock in the morning, and may well have expressed this in forceful terms, using expletives that are inappropriate for an 8- and 6-year-old.)
Some of the names on the list for the original blog were letluce (too much like a misspelling of lettuce, with all respect to dyslexics); lucegazette; the daily luce; lucebulletin; lucecannon; luceoftheworld. I think Lucecannon had it by a mile and I’ll be forever grateful to my friend Martin who came up with the name and who was my first web host.
The reaction to my business name has been almost universally positive, which says something about the power of branding and cut through in a crowded marketplace. It’s that sort of positioning, messaging and sense of a target audience that effective PR and marketing can bring to your organisation.
So there you have it. March in a nutshell. If I can help in any way, please do get in touch either by email or via the Calendly widget on my website.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 