By Rob Gershon

I’ve been considering what it means for me, Rob Gershon, social housing tenant and general troublemaker, to be an HQN associate. Not just recently, but across the whole 10-ish years that I’ve been involved with the Residents’ Network and occasionally (but not often enough) working with some of the other networks.

It’s not a double-edged sword but my use to the networks and their use to me are not intangible concepts. HQN have always welcomed my opinion pieces and sometimes more structured work and been happy to share them. Very occasionally I’m asked to alter something in a small way, because sometimes my tone can be a bit…much. But over the last decade, this has happened fewer times than I can count on one hand.

My role as an associate means I have access to stuff I wouldn’t have as just a tenant, and I have to wrangle with what that means in terms of my privilege and whether it alters how I talk and write about housing policy and practice and the pretty big list of topics around it. This has included attending ‘Chatham House Rules’ events, which means you’re not allowed to talk about what people said, on a number of occasions, and being an associate means I can use the title to get invited to things or grasp some modicum of respectability in a space where I’ve often been a bit antagonistic. I’d argue this deliberately challenging behaviour is to make things better across the sector, but I get how sometimes…the comms of it might seem.

So, when my HQN associate colleague, Jane Eyles, emailed me to ask if I wanted to co-present a session at the Comms Fest event, I wasn’t necessarily immediately keen – from arguing openly with comms teams on Twitter (currently X) to publicly being disappointed, if not astonished, at how some housing organisations have responded to some of the challenges they face over the last decade.

I’m referring particularly, but not exclusively, to how badly things have gone since Grenfell, Awaab Ishak, ITV, Kwajo Tweneboa and the crumbling mess of shared ownership, all set against the context of there still not being any kind of body to speak for tenants.

So, speaking to a group of people drawn from those I’ve arguably not engaged in the most reasonable way didn’t immediately make me want to say yes. But I did. Jane and I did our session and, while I haven’t seen the feedback yet, I haven’t been asked to leave and never darken HQN’s door again, so I’m hoping it went ok.

I also decided that I’d attend all the other sessions too, using that privilege I mentioned earlier. I found myself curious about the issues the other sessions were covering and more curious about what comms teams thought about them. I didn’t make notes and I haven’t asked for any transcripts so, as usual, this is just my opinion, but I hope, without betraying the circle of trust people understood they were talking within, to give a flavour of what happened.

As suggested, before the events I was a bit cynical about housing comms, but over the course of the ‘fest’, it was interesting to see some attendees and speakers at more than one, and sometimes nearly all of the events. They covered:

• Comms threats and risks (+crisis comms) – Amanda Coleman
• Managing the political landscape – Bobbie Hough
• The future of social media for housing comms – Hannah Fearn
• Improving relationships with local and regional media – Jeni Harvey, Sarah Booker-Lewis
• Communicating with residents – Jane Eyles and Rob Gershon (hi!)
• The importance of authentic communications – Tom Palmer
• Using storytelling techniques – Mario Ambrosi
• Communicating with people from diverse backgrounds – Roshan Roberts.

I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow review of each event, but I do want to talk about some of the recurring issues. There was a satisfying overlap, having attended all the sessions, in some of the themes and concerns that popped up. Some of the events were more interactive by nature – these were my favourites – and some had a lot of questions asked in advance (yes, I’m bragging, it was mine and Jane’s).

There were some events where I had plenty of time to ask Rob Gershon questions, but I did wish at times there had been a bit more, yes, communication from attendees about the presentations.

Anyway, the themes! My sense of it was that many comms teams are not, as I had presumed, well-funded, fully resourced departments staffed by young, carefree social media whizzkids who had the ears of their CEOs and misplaced confidence running through their veins. Indeed, across the sessions there was often some very considered discussion and debate about how to get things right.

For some teams, it became apparent that they’re expected to fill a completely artificial gap between leadership teams and the rest of the organisation, and between different internal teams and departments. In addition, they’re often expected to fill in between the organisation and residents and other stakeholders.

There’s also the unenviable task of getting news of the good works organisations do shared in a media environment that – perhaps not unfairly – recognises the value of stories of tenants trapped in damp, mouldy homes who’ve been ignored by some landlords. Even when individual organisations have a good record on difficult topics, the sector is experiencing something of a tarring by quite a wide-bristled brush.

For tenant activists and campaign groups and perfectly understandable critics of the sector – I include myself here – this feels like good news. It might not be kind, or entirely fair, but we’re not going to solve some of these structural, organisational culture problems until there’s better policy and an independent tenant body. But I digress, slightly.

What I’m trying to get at is that the comms teams themselves are all too aware of these issues, whether in their own organisations or not, and there’s a deep and wide understanding of the erosion or dismantling of trust that this causes with residents and communities. There’s a standout moment in Daniel Hewitt’s podcast, The Trapped, about the work ITV did in exposing squalor across the sector, where Dan tries to convey his disbelief that while he was reporting on families forced to live in unsuitable and inexcusable conditions, some organisations were trying to get him to “talk more about the good work we do”.

I had no sympathy for those teams at the time – and it was a terrible choice of response to the immediate issues, but what I’ve learned from Comms Fest is that it’s not the comms teams who make those brain-addled decisions. Often, they are trying to deploy their skills and expertise to dissuade messaging that’s going to land like a tonne of sh… something. But, as with teams working directly with tenants and residents, comms can easily be pushed aside by what the outgoing CEO of the regulator, Fiona MacGregor, recently described as “dominant individuals”.

In one of the later sessions, Mario Ambrosi made the point that not everyone can do comms effectively. That might sound like stating the obvious, but one of my other takeaways from the events is that comms teams are people trained with a particular set of skills that are sometimes constrained by how and when they’re allowed to use them. Some teams are working really effectively with other departments and, crucially, some have integrated residents into the work they do, or in a couple of cases the comms teams have been integrated into the ‘feedback loop’ that often contains tenants and the staff they work with.

For the sessions that talked about working with the media and restoring relationships with them, and the prospect of having to work with and try to inform and influence a whole raft of potential future politicians who do not know, or want to know, about the realities of housing and housing policy, there were also some great practical tips on what to do. If, like I did, you think the idea of these topics sounds a bit dry, they’re anything but. As a tenant, and not a comms professional, I know full and well the kind of outcomes we’re subjected to when the people who make policy don’t know what they’re talking about, and it’s interesting to share a bit of discomfort with the teams who are going to be expected to deal with more of that, too.

I do have some advice, if I may, before we finish. It’s not really to comms teams – it’s in recognition of some of the good work that some of them are doing, and it’s in the spirit of this spreading to other organisations too.

Involve your tenants in your comms teams

There’s nothing you can do about some input from tenants who are determined to be contrary, and you should welcome the challenge that you’ve picked the tenants you’ve worked with – it’s a hot topic, but many of the sessions focused on comms teams not being given the time, resources or sometimes permission to work with tenants. If you’re an exec, board member or budget-holder, don’t assume your organisation is getting this right, and if it isn’t, fix it.

Don’t tell comms teams how to do their jobs

Ok. So, if you’re the person who employs the comms teams and/or are in a managerial or leadership role, you might feel like it’s your prerogative to tell comms teams what to say, and how to say it. Honestly, as a tenant there are times I’d put them on a leash, too, but… I have a new appreciation after Comms Fest for the lack of freedom teams are often given to deploy the skills they have been trained in, and we have not. Don’t stifle their talents, do be mindful that less literal approaches can be good, but don’t stop them doing what you’ve ostensibly agreed to pay them for, and then wonder why your comms strategies don’t land.

Communication professionals are people too

I think this might just be me giving advice to myself, but everyone who presented, attended, commented, got into a conversation, shared what work they were doing, did care about normal stuff. They also cared about things far beyond organisational reputations, and often had reassuringly normal views about tenants, residents and communities that can get lost in the sheer volume of approved comms noise.

Rethink your statutory responsibilities

Roshan Roberts’ session talked a lot about specific examples of communicating better with “diverse communities”, but what really struck me was that many of the roadblocks to good communications by landlords was their assumption that the statutory and regulatory materials they MUST present have to be longform, boring and frankly off-putting. Many of the sessions talked about TikTok and YouTube and other ways of engaging with (nobody meant this) ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, and on reflection I think this is the way to present some of this stuff. Even if some of it’s going to be way, way too cringey to start with.