PIO ToolkitLighthouse for Public Safety
Intermediate
2.5 hours

The Solo PIO: Systems, Survival, and Making Your Case

The Solo PIO: Systems, Survival, and Making Your Case
$69USD

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About this course

You are more common than you think. More than a third of government communicators work completely alone — handling everything from media relations and social media to crisis response and community engagement, with no one to hand anything to when it gets too heavy.

Most professional development assumes you have a team. This course doesn't. It's built specifically for the solo or near-solo communicator who needs practical systems, honest strategies, and someone who understands the reality of doing this job without backup.

It covers the infrastructure you need to build, the limits you need to document, the network that replaces the colleagues you don't have, and how to sustain yourself in a role that rarely gives you a break.

Read a sample from this course

Nobody else is coming

Picture a Tuesday that starts like most of them. A reporter emails at 7:10 asking about a water main break you heard about on the radio on the way in. The city manager wants a social post about the new trash pickup schedule before noon. A council member forwards a resident's angry Facebook comment with the single word "thoughts?" The parks team needs a flyer by Thursday. And somewhere in your inbox is a request from HR to "help with some internal messaging" about a change nobody has explained to you yet.

None of that is a crisis. All of it is yours. There is no colleague to hand the reporter to, no designer to take the flyer, nobody to glance over the post before it goes out. If you step away for an hour, the work doesn't move. If you're off sick for a week, most of it simply doesn't happen.

That is the daily reality for a large share of government communicators: one person covering media relations, social media, crisis response, community engagement, internal communications, content creation, and anything else that gets filed under "communications." Often at the same time, with no backup, and with a leadership team that has only a limited sense of what doing the job properly actually takes.

Most professional development, most crisis training, and most communications strategy guidance quietly assumes you have colleagues. The crisis plan template has a box for the "social media lead" and a separate box for the "media lead." The training scenario hands out roles around the table. This course makes no such assumption. It is built for the reality of solo work: the specific pressures, the specific risks, and the specific systems that let you run an effective, sustainable communications operation as a team of one.

The six lessons follow the order the work tends to happen in. This one takes an honest look at what you're working with. Lesson 2 builds the systems that cover for you. Lesson 3 gets you ready for a crisis without a team around you. Lesson 4 builds the network that stands in for colleagues. Lesson 5 makes the case for more resources, and Lesson 6 is about lasting long enough in the role to do it well.

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

What you'll learn

Assess your current communications operation honestly, including the single points of failure that exist because the function depends on one person.
Set up the five core systems a solo communicator needs: a shared media contact list, organization-owned account access, a template library, sustainable monitoring, and documentation that passes the 48-hour test.
Prepare for a crisis as a team of one with a written triage order, pre-approved holding statements, a solo crisis kit, and a briefed backup who has rehearsed the first hour.
Define after-hours and on-call expectations in writing with leadership, including what your backup may release without you.
Build a working network of professional associations, regional public information networks and peer reviewers that can stand in for the colleagues you don't have.
Gather two to four weeks of capacity evidence and turn it into a one-page resource case framed around organizational risk, with costed options.
6 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.Nobody else is coming
  2. 2.You're more common than the training assumes
  3. 3.Four vulnerabilities that come with the role
  4. 4.What solo work builds in you
  5. 5.The control problem
  6. 6.Try this: a starting assessment
  7. 7.The job is the system, not the person
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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