PIO ToolkitLighthouse for Public Safety
Intro
3 hours

Setting Up a PIO Office from Scratch

Setting Up a PIO Office from Scratch
$69USD

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About this course

A practical, self-paced course for the communicator who has been asked to build a communications function where none really existed, and to make it last.

Someone has to go first. It might be a first-ever communications role, a restructured office, or a job that used to be a line in someone else's job description. Either way, you arrive to find that communication has been happening all along without anyone steering it: a city manager posting updates on a personal page, a team running its own account, a front desk fielding reporters' calls. There are no templates, no contact list, no approval process and, most likely, no budget.

Starting from scratch is harder than inheriting an established operation, and in some ways more interesting. You have no bad habits to undo, but you also have no relationships, no systems and no track record. This course takes you through the work in the order it actually needs doing: an honest assessment of what exists and what's missing, the infrastructure that lets you act quickly on a bad night, clear written authority, a first strategy that leadership owns, media and community relationships built before you need them, and the documentation and reporting that let the function survive your absence.

Each lesson draws on real cases, from a small Alabama city that lost control of its own Facebook page to the public communications failures documented in the federal review of the Uvalde response and the first communications plan of California's newest city. Each one ends with something practical to do in your own organization that week.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Communicators hired into a brand-new or newly formalized communications role
  • Staff who have been handed communications on top of another job and want to put it on a proper footing
  • Solo communicators who need to build systems that don't depend entirely on them
  • Leaders setting up a communications function who want to understand what it should look like in its first year

Read a sample from this course

Communications is already happening without you

Your first week goes something like this. The city manager has a Facebook page where he posts updates about road closures alongside photos of his dog. A fire captain has been taking calls from the local TV station for years because he's good at it and nobody told him to stop. The parks team runs its own Instagram account, and nobody's quite sure who still has the password. The receptionist has a sticky note by the phone that says "Media: take a message." And leadership, who hired you, is already asking when the first newsletter goes out.

Starting from scratch is a specific professional challenge that almost no training addresses. Most professional development assumes you're inheriting something: relationships, systems, channels, a communications history. When you're building from zero, the standard advice often doesn't fit, because the standard advice assumes somebody already built the foundations.

Here's the first thing worth understanding. An organization without a communications function is never actually silent. Communication has been happening all along, informally, inconsistently, and without anyone steering it. People have been answering reporters, posting updates, responding to angry residents and writing letters to the editor on the organization's behalf. Some of that work has been quite good. Some of it has been quietly creating problems that will land on your desk.

So your starting assessment is not an audit of a communications office, because there isn't one. It's a map of what exists informally, what doesn't exist at all, and what that gap is costing the organization. That last part matters more than anything else in this lesson. The gap you document in your first month becomes the argument for everything you build afterwards: the budget request, the approval process, the strategy, the case for a second staff member three years from now.

This lesson walks through how to do that assessment properly, what informal communication tends to look like up close, how one brand-new city approached the same job, and how to turn what you find into a one-page memo that sets your direction for the next 90 days.

Keep reading — this course continues with 5 more lessons and 47 more sections.

What you'll learn

Assess what your organization already does informally, what's missing, and what each gap is costing, and turn that into a one-page memo that sets your direction.
Take control of the organization's accounts, contacts and records so that no single departure can lock you out of your own channels.
Build a working approval process, a template library and go-kit, and a monitoring routine that includes a weekly note to leadership.
Define your authority in writing, including who speaks and who approves in an emergency when the usual chain isn't available.
Write a short first communication strategy with outcome-based objectives, baselines and a defined scope, and get leadership to own it.
Build media and community relationships from zero, and set up an accessible online newsroom that works when you're not there.
6 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.Communications is already happening without you
  2. 2.Listen first, even when everyone wants output
  3. 3.Five areas worth mapping
  4. 4.What informal communication looks like up close
  5. 5.How a brand-new city did its homework
  6. 6.Try this: write the honest assessment memo
  7. 7.The gap is the argument
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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