Why everybody hates the National Trust

Celia Richardson, Director Of Communications and Audience Insight at the National Trust, talks to Daisy about navigating through political strife, putting audience at the heart of a comms plan, and tips for a successful career in communications.

Key takeaways include: 

• Being a big name, a national institution, isn't all roses and rainbows: yes, the press might take your call but they love to take a big name down a peg. It's also harder to please a niche group than everyone.
• Keep a close eye on your key numbers: they will guide you when the news is bad or the critics won't shut up. 
• Not all bad publicity is as terrible as it feels at the time, it may articulate an important part of your story.
• Just because your job title doesn't change, doesn't mean you aren't growing and developing your skills.
• Relationships are key, whether that is building links with your colleagues or reaching out to the audience.

Find all of our episodes - and full transcripts for each one - at https://www.buzzsprout.com/1121639

Transcript

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

Welcome to Why Everybody Hates You, an audio support group for reputation professionals. If you have any responsibility for how people talk, think and feel about your organization than you are in the right place. I'm your host, reputation coach Daisy Powell-Chandler. 

Today I'm speaking to Celia Richardson, whose career in the not-for-profit sector has spanned mental health, social enterprise, and massive cultural institutions. Most recently, as Director of Communications and audience insight at the National Trust. I started by asking her how charities can stay true to their legal obligations to remain politically neutral when politicians seem intent on dragging them into the fray.

CELIA RICHARDSON

One of the things that you know if you walk through the doors of the National Trust, it's that politics are just not really discussed. As you say, we have to be apolitical as a charity. But nobody tell politics that and I think one of the things that's happened to us is that, in a time we're living in quite a fractious time (I'm sure every generation says that) but we have had some … oh, let's see, we the culture wars is a phrase that hadn't even been mentioned here more than a couple of times, until about two or three years ago. And arguing about culture has become much more common than it might have been five or 10 years ago when we might have been arguing about services, public services, business economic policy. We're much more likely to be debating culture in a political context now.

So that's why we're at the center of some of this. So we're a big institution, we're well recognized, there are fairly fixed ideas about who we're for, and what we're for and obviously everyone has their own view. But it's very, very clear in our founding articles that we are here for the benefit of the whole of society. And obviously, society is evolving - we can't please all the people all the time - but sometimes when we are trying to… You can walk into a National Trust property, 400 or 500 National Trust places on any given day and we'll be doing loads of different things. But it's easy to pick up one or two and characterize them as in some way trendy, trying to augment, trying to bend too much to young people, or we're trying to be too left wing, or perhaps this is too conservative and stuffy. So take your pick and you can find a way of characterizing us as the ‘other.’ 

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

Do you think that is the inevitable consequence of having such a large stakeholder group? I suspect if you were a more niche organization that was appealing to one small stakeholder group, it might be easier to keep everyone happy, because everyone is a much smaller group.

CELIA RICHARDSON

Undoubtedly. 

But I think if I'm honest, I keep a really close eye on number of a few different numbers: I'm looking at public trust, I'm looking at relevance, I'm looking at likelihood to donate to the National Trust. So the top line indicators. I'm looking at our net promoter score. And, honestly, a lot of the time what we're finding is that when we are getting headlines we're not really hearing it from our members. There are some days, you know, if you're having a really bad day and you're feeling a little bit miserable about the world, the thing you want to do is you want to go and look at the Director General's postbag because it's full of lovely stuff. You know, “I had a wonderful visit here.” A couple of weeks ago I got some examples where one of our people had opened up a property that was closed for a family member, a family with a terminally ill family member and the property was closed but they wanted this person to see it within a very short timeframe.

We often get really lovely stories with lots of people saying why they love the Trust, how glad they were to go to the Lake District, how well this site was kept, what a pleasurable time they've had walking the Devon coastal paths. Occasionally, occasionally you get those days where the Director General's postbag is dreadful. Sometimes it's a lot of legitimate complaints, because sometimes people are upset or there's something that they dislike. But sometimes we're a lightning rod for prejudice and hate because we're a national institution and sometimes that that does come your way. 

We are trying to satisfy a lot of people and on the whole I think we're pretty good at it. Our numbers that I look at (as I said, trust, relevance, whether people are willing to promote us etc.) those numbers are good. But sometimes we get snared in a political and media environment, and there's always a proportion of our members who are going to agree with something in the newspapers. So I suppose what I'm saying is, yes, we've got a lot of people to please. It's not that difficult, really, to keep the ship sailing and to keep everyone broadly satisfied. It is difficult not to be characterized as doing something very wrong, when you've probably made a mistake that isn't catastrophic, because most of what we do is looking after beautiful places, running tea rooms, you know, employing volunteers to help people have a lovely day out.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

How do you differentiate then? How do you tell the difference between something that comes in and you think that that might be something important, that's something we really need to get on top of, and the other things where you think, I think they might be making a mountain out of a molehill here. 

CELIA RICHARDSON

Well, a lot of it goes back to the Director General's postbag, or our caller service center. So on any given day, we'll have hundreds of calls into our into our supporter service center. They might be trying to renew their membership, they might be trying to get somewhere and they can't find the map online. I mean, we get all sorts of inquiries. And some days you'll find a lot of calls come in to the supporter service center and that's when people are genuinely worried about something or upset about something. And they are our members, and they are our supporters. They're not just sending unpleasant emails and just choosing random addresses off the website and guessing what the Director General's email is. Things that are concerning really are when you have an awful lot of people getting in touch to say they're concerned. Rarely do we see something that makes people really cancel their memberships. 

There's a habit now online in the culture wars, where you're trying to say, ‘the National Trust, or this organization, is losing members and supporters because it's done something that we disagree with.’ We haven’t seen that. For example, we had a lot of claims that we were losing members back in 2020 and 2021 over a piece of work we did researching the links between slavery and colonialism and our properties. We were not seeing members cancelling over that. However, when we were closed due to COVID we were seeing members cancelling over that - it was much more practical. People were trying to think about how long this would last, what their lifestyle was going to look like and they weren't thinking about whether or not we'd done our piece of work on slavery and colonialism.

I think you'd have to take it seriously, though, when people are feeling genuinely upset and alienated by what they're reading and they feel as if your organization no longer cares about them and their concerns. If you see an awful lot of complaints look like that, then either you've done something wrong, or a narrative that somebody else is putting out there is cutting through and you need to do something about that.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

Those process stories when the newspapers printed ‘the National Trust is losing members stories,’ do you lose sleep over those? Or is that more for them?

CELIA RICHARDSON

Well, I'm a comms person. I'm always alert and I lose quite a lot of sleep. You know, stories come in late at night and I'll see something, I'll wake up in the night and see something heavy on Twitter or something. So I do lose sleep and I take everything seriously when I first see it, and then I take a little while to mull over it and see whether or not I think it is a big deal. There are some things that are painful in the short term, they can cause disruption to your organization, they can be very difficult, but you can make long term gains from them. So we've had all sorts of things where we've had to make a decision and one community has been unhappy, and it has been painful in the short term but we've made the decision for long term gain.

And it’s the same with reputation. There was a big row about five years ago now. There was a story that we forced volunteers to wear rainbow lanyards at a property in Norfolk to celebrate the partial decriminalization of homosexuality. It caused a lot of newspapers writing about this … oh it had legs that story! And that's what I mean when I say stories about the National Trust can sometimes take off because sometimes they are about Britishness and how we're evolving and ‘is the country changing?’ Not unlike stories at the end of the year where you see what new words are in the Oxford English Dictionary. Something about the National Trust being so center that if it appears to move towards young or old, towards left or right then sometimes you get stories about it. So that was a story that had a lot of attention and in the short term it obviously made the organization think about how the story happened and was it was it true? A lot of the stuff that was said at that point was not true. In the long term, we have a lot of people who will tell us they joined the organization, because they heard that we were doing this piece of work. That row caused them to think that perhaps this is an organization that is interested in LGBTQ history. 

So another example, is that my husband used to work in medical research for the NHS and there was a clinical trial that went wrong. And a lot of it was in the newspapers, and some people had got serious health problems from it. Obviously, there was an awful lot of serious concern, lots of things for the organization to do. It was a privately funded clinical trial. But actually, when the NHS went out and spoke about the point of clinical trials (why they have them, the fact that some people volunteer, some people get paid) they actually got a load of people wanting to take part in clinical trials. So, I don't believe that no publicity is bad publicity, but all of it has an impact and it moves your business along. And sadly, if a particular journalist or commentator firmly believes that you are not for their readers, and continues to tell their readers that you're not for them, it can in the long term have an impact and their readers will leave the organization and we try to stop that. I think if we were a commercial business, we'd say ‘Okay, we're not going to win with those people, let's try these people.’ You can't do that when you're a national institution and your job is to serve everyone. And our job is to unify, our job is to give people safe spaces away from rows and politics and stuff like that. So we really have to work hard to make sure that we don't lose anyone. But we do gain people whenever there's a big story about us. It's going to have a number of different impacts and one of them is that we may gain more supporters in a new community. 

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

But I think what that throws a light on is, again, this point about size. I suspect a lot of people working in smaller organizations would give their eyeteeth to have the access to those journalists that you probably could pick up the phone to anytime you fancied - but it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to print something that you want them to. How does that balance trade off? 

CELIA RICHARDSON

Well, it depends on what journalists want. So yes, I used to do some consulting for a group and I remember, when I was young, phoning people explaining not only what the name of the organization was but then what it was for and then what the concept was. Once you've got to your fifth sentence, the journalists gone ‘I'm sorry, I'm really busy.’ So of course our press team have the luxury of phoning and saying ‘hello from the National Trust’ which gets you past the first three fences with a journalist if we're thinking about press.

But then of course, the journalist things ‘Ah!’ You know, we are a big organization and we're successful. I hate to say that, that doesn't sound very British does it saying we're successful! But we're an organization that's grown and grown and is currently the second biggest membership organization in the UK, and we're on a trajectory to be the biggest. It's human nature. People aren't going to want to write ‘big successful organization does nice thing, and everyone likes them.’ That's not how the media works. They're often looking for the rub, they're looking for the stuff, the disagreement. And most people have an opinion on us. 

Some people don't have a strong opinion about us, they just think we make nice coffee and walnut cake, or they really enjoy our tapestries. But if you get into people with a particular political viewpoint, and obviously the media has lots of those, they will have the ‘Yes, but you are very stuffy and tweedy and elitist,’ or ‘you're very woke and overreaching, and you don't care about traditional supporters, you're always trying to go for new urban audiences.’ So yes, there is a benefit to being a big, well recognized brand but, yes, when you're a big institution you're constantly having to answer for your actions. Which is right - big institutions need public scrutiny, but what they don't need is misinformation and disinformation about what they're doing. And that's some of what we've had recently.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

Yes, which is frustrating whatever size organization you are, I suspect. 

CELIA RICHARDSON

It is but also if you’re a greengrocer and I am suffering from disinformation, then that might destroy my business and that is dreadful. If I am a major national institution and I'm suffering from disinformation, then there's a wedge being driven between members of the public, between groups of people who are pro and people who are anti. That's the story of what sometimes happens with national institutions – ‘I like that institution’ and ‘Well, I must hate it’ and vice versa. So there's something really important about national institutions as lightning rods, as spaces onto which you can project your thing and sometimes people are going to want to weaponize the big named organizations. Not weaponize them, you know, but sometimes we will inadvertently turn into battlegrounds. That's a serious issue because we are here to serve everyone and once some people believes that we've been taken from them or turned in some way, then that can be quite a serious thing at a broader level. 

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

There's a lesson in there about the importance of articulating who you are for and what the purpose of the organization is. How do you make sure that pervades all of your communications?

CELIA RICHARDSON

Well, first of all, we've got a good marketing team. So we never forget what the basics are and what we need to do. That goes across all of the collateral that we produce - everything. We did a piece of work about four years ago where we really clarified what you might call a proposition, which most people at the National Trust can repeat – ‘We're nature, beauty, history, for everyone, forever.’ That's how we distilled it. That’s how many words? Seven. And that for everyone holds us in good stead. It might sound a bit mad to some sorts of organizations and there have been organizations in the past where that would have looked like a nightmare and you've got to be able to segment and stratify your audience, you've got to know whether you're predominantly for these people or these people. 

And obviously, the National Trust, we're for everyone. And actually that’s really helpful when we do get into skirmishes because somebody doesn't like something we've done at a local level. Yes, we've got to be good neighbours and that's really important to the running of the National Trust, but we have to remember that we're for everyone. And again if someone's saying… I think two years ago we were told we were too left wing because of our work on slavery, and just remembering that sometimes I think institutions can get into a pickle when they keep trying to manoeuvre themselves. Emily Maitlis said it better than anyone else. She said, “You end up acting politically, because left or right are telling you that you're being political. So you act in a political way to prove your neutrality.” So there's something really important just about making sure that you are absolutely clear what your core purpose is, what your core values are. I think for Comms Directors what's massively underestimated for people in my role is looking closely at your founding articles, and keeping a sense with the colleagues around you about ‘are we staying true to our purpose, are we staying true to our purpose?’ That's going to keep you on the straight and narrow rather than, ‘are we being current, are we being relevant, are we responding appropriately to the criticism that we're hearing?’ All of which are important questions, but nothing trumps ‘what's our purpose, what are we here for?’

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

You've effectively had the same job title, you've moved jobs several times, but you've had the same job title as Director of Communications for, I think, two decades now. Is that right? 

CELIA RICHARDSON

Yes.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

How has that evolved from organization to organization? How do you keep interested and motivated and growing in that situation?

CELIA RICHARDSON

Well, I'm interested in issues and interested in causes. Professionally, I like incredibly well-honed skills. I started out, I suppose more as a press person. Well, I started out as a fundraiser, then I became a press person. Then I took over marketing and added digital, all those things in until I had a Communications Directorate, got my first job as Director of Communications at the end of my 20s and loved it. I suppose it’s partly a generational thing. There was no such thing as a Director of Communications until probably the 90s, and then you had the West Wing and Alastair Campbell had emerged in the UK and it suited me. I like the job, I understand how to do it, I feel as if I'm properly grounded in the professional skills. Once you're properly grounded in the professional and technical skills of the job that you're in, then you can start to move cause, you can start to look further upward and outward. 

But I like to feel as if I know what I'm talking about, from a professional perspective, even though sometimes I walk into a room… I mean, at the National Trust, it's ridiculous. I can walk into the room and someone's trying to talk to me about a particular breed of cow and then somebody else wants to talk about cake. It usually comes back to cake. You can deal with any subject once you've really got yourself a good grounding. I learned quite early how to build a story, hone a story, get other people involved in a story. Then I learned about bringing the public in and doing public engagements. You're building a big story together. Those skills are incredibly transferable. I like being a Director of Communications. I can't imagine wanting to do anything else really. 

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

Well, that seems like a great place to be in enjoying your career so much. Are there any tips you would offer to other people who are just beginning their careers in communications?

CELIA RICHARDSON

Yes, I would usually say the same thing to people in in the early stages of their career. There are three magic ingredients. One is growing a bit of confidence and self belief. So I said just a couple of minutes ago about the importance to me of honing my professional skills, I could walk into a press offices change (when I first started in a press office, we used to peg the newspapers out on a washing line, and we had fax machines and a bank of tellies and an ashtray would you believe! Always an ashtray in a press office which was maybe what drew me to them in the first place!) and I could walk into a press office anywhere and hold my own. It doesn’t matter the subject. I think I could become unstick on a subject matter pretty quickly but I think I’d be able to get through the day. In fact, I have been metaphorically parachuted into another country, didn't speak the language to set up and run a field press office. And that's something I felt like I could do. So number one, I think, grow a good skill base at the start, have one thing that you know and that you can do really well. 

Number two, develop some self belief, you know, we've all got impostor syndrome. I know that's a cliche, but we really do all have impostor syndrome. So growing in self belief. And relationships. Work always works better if people know that you're on their side, you're working on the same cause. You’ve always got to be thinking for the audience, and for your colleagues, how can you help. Not ‘Ooh your things not as good as my thing’ or ‘I want this space.’ And that's often difficult in a big organization. We've got 57 competing stories in a day. Somebody's trying to land their story, and somebody's trying to land their story and then there's a lot of negotiating involved. So it's a cliche to talk about relationships, but really good negotiation and collaboration skills. There are really good courses about negotiation skills, about collaboration, about win-win situations and how you build those.

And the third thing for me is that you can always kill at least 20 birds with one stone. Often in organizations we do think we've got competition but if we're smart we can usually find ways around 20 problems. Trying to simplify what we're trying to do is always helpful. But most importantly, having a skill, growing self belief, looking at relationships, and really praising your relationships with other people. You get what you give in relationships, basically. So always trying to thank people when they help you, always trying to acknowledge it when somebody does something that you admire, just small things that we don't think matter, but build them into your everyday habits. Because they do matter a lot and you will need people in your career. Occasionally you’ll find yourself in a corner.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

Something that you mentioned there around negotiation, and finding win-wins really piqued my interest. What structure do you use at the National Trust, to unite all those competing interests and try and find those win-wins? 

CELIA RICHARDSON

What we do is, I mean it’s obviously very old fashioned, but we have a grid. It's an enormous grid. We always know what people are trying to get out of the door, what people need audience attention for on any given day, and we have a really, really good central planning team that just helps to build those collaborations. Sometimes we'll need to drive more visits but we also want to engage people with autumn where they are. So we think these are two competing things - are we talking to the general public or are we talking to our members and trying to get them to visit this autumn. We had a really good campaign, which gave out free vouchers to everybody so our members could bring their friends and family for free and non-members could have a taste of the National Trust. The billboards were actually advertising beautiful autumn scenes, like murmuration’s of starlings, which can take place anywhere and what we were saying was ‘notice the autumn, it's a beautiful, wonderful thing.’ The campaign went like clockwork and it was brilliant and it hit a load of targets that I thought it couldn't hit. You know, I'm an old fashioned comms person - one objective and what's the audience? It hit multiple objectives because it thought about the audience and ‘what does each different person want from us this autumn?’

The thing that I've learned again and again in my career, is  that you always, always have got to let the audience, the public, your customer base speak for you. And obviously our industry is getting more and more sophisticated at that. But you aren't in charge of your own reputation, somebody else is in charge of your reputation. There's the Jeff Bezos quote which is what people say about you weren't you weren't in the room. But allow it and have the confidence in your customers, your audience to do the talking for you. They're the experts in your product or your service. This is something that I try to apply wherever I go. Just starting and some public engagement projects at the National Trust, but critically important to ensure that you're not broadcasting at your audience but you're making sure that they have an ‘in’ and they have the ability to talk to you and for you. That you celebrate that and you don’t try and shut them up.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

And do you think of that as a very multi-channel thing? Or are we talking specifically here about audience insight.

CELIA RICHARDSON

No I'm thinking multi channels. There was a time three or four years ago, when all of the billboards that we advertised on (because billboards out of home advertising still works for us to a large degree), there was a time when you would see beautiful photographic images that had been commissioned for that campaign. We don't do that anymore. For our spring campaign we did blossom watch. Two or three years ago, we would have taken beautiful images of blossom and then we would have shown it and said ‘Sissinghurst visit.’ And what we did instead was we had members of the public to take their own pictures in blossom season, iconic sites, places they loved, and we had a beautiful one of Birmingham town hall in the blossom, and we made them hyper local. That was really lovely because the people who had taken the pictures, we made sure that they were credited and they got to then do a dedication. Often when people take part in our blossom watch it is at the time of year when COVID came, so it's become a bit of a commemorative thing. People were dedicating their beautiful images, and then we were putting them up on big motorway, billboards, town billboards, city centers. That was a bit of an event because they would go with their families the billboard would have a big thing saying ‘this person has taken this image and they're dedicating it to… their family or friends or whoever.’ You know, lots of people wanted to share beautiful blossom images and dedicate them to people of Ukraine. So you get a lot of voices coming through. 

We can afford the platform, we can afford the space and that's what we're doing to try to ensure that we're attracting the visitors that we rely on. You're putting somebody else at the forefront of that and saying, ‘this is how these people see the world, this is what they think is beautiful or worth capturing.’ So we've been experimenting with that for a while. No more do you get us buying-in agencies to do very high-end shoots for blossom, that's all done by the public.

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

That does sound delightful and responsive and genuinely really lovely. But it also sounds like it requires quite a different skill set, particularly from your social media teams I would expect, to be responding to that level of material coming through in quite a different way.

CELIA RICHARDSON

Oh well I think it actually plays very much to the strengths of social media, which is why it's so scalable. You don't need to have the ability to buy billboards in city centers to make sure that you're putting users at the front center of your content, your output. In fact, ‘blossom watch’ actually began with people simply sharing images on social media in 2020. We had that beautiful spring, the blossom was extraordinary and lots of people were noticing it. So we started a thing called ‘blossom watch’ and people started sharing their images. It actually was quite organic. It ended up in our magazine and it ends up wherever we are. 

You don't have to have a canvas that big to play on - you're saying ‘this is from a customer, this is what they have seen or witnessed or heard that they want to share, here's our platform, we're going to share it.’ Lots of businesses want to show that they are a community, and they are often communities but they can sometimes get it wrong by staging these community interventions rather than making them a bit more spontaneous.

Obviously in all organizations you've got to lead a little bit, but often we're following the audience. That's when we're at our best I think, when we're helping to facilitate people's experiences rather than trying to curate them and say, ‘come and do it exactly like this.’ 

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

It sounds a bit like a National Trust property visit. 

CELIA RICHARDSON

It is, but you should be able to benefit from nature, beauty and history wherever you are. Sometimes we help people notice it around them with plant spotting or things like that, as part of our job as a culture and nature organization. But also, we have some of the world's treasures and you should be able to experience them online more immersively. We've got some plans for that. It's about making sure that, again, ‘for everyone forever’ - you've got to think about where everyone is and make sure that you're serving people who could use your stuff but may not be able to get to properties and that's increasingly a thing that I’m thinking about. 

DAISY POWELL-CHANDLER

That's everything from us. A big thank you to my guests Celia Richardson from the National Trust for talking to me about everything from politics, to the role of a Director of Communications and some great tips for communicators at all levels of their career. I would love to hear from you which lessons particularly stood out from this conversation and, if you've enjoyed this episode, I hope you'll tell your colleagues and perhaps write us a review on your usual podcasting app. It really does help new listeners to find the show. Thank you as always for listening to Why Everybody Hates You, and remember, you are not alone.