The Adobe Public Sector Digital Media team hosted its inaugural Public Affairs Workshop on November 12, 2024, at the Adobe McLean, Virginia office. This six-hour event brought together senior public affairs officers and their teams for an interactive session focused on addressing critical challenges faced by federal communicators. Participants exchanged best practices and learned from peers.
MISSION
- Build trust and develop long-term relationships with Adobe's key public sector clients.
- Cultivate a collaborative environment of information sharing, and networking among attendees.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the daily challenges faced by government public affairs and communications teams to offer more targeted digital media and document cloud solutions.
Profiles from the Field
Matt Gowan
Veteran Affairs, Chief Communications Officer, VISN 16
"Accelerating Content Creation Through Partnerships"
Key Points:
- Build and Enable Your Team's Passion with Tools and Subject Matter
- Leverage Your Partnership with Adobe through CoLabs and Workshops
- Provide Your Team's Story and Process to Leadership to Better Equip Your Team with the Tools to Optimize the Team to Accomplish Mission
BREAKOUT CONVERSATIONS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
One primary challenge for government entities from dispersed geo locations is achieving one common operational environment where all participants can provide unfettered input and concurrent review and approval processes
Internal barriers impede success: security approvals and procurement cycles
Lean workforce: HUGE need for Gen AI capabilities to accelerate work and magnify resources
Gen AI fears exist across government: threat of disinformation, possible for users creating unethical content and a unified content authenticity approach
Siloed teams slow collaboration, approvals and delivery: content creation teams not communicating with publishing teams
Team bandwidth, length of time to approve, cross-departmental collaboration, secure vs non-secure systems, legal bureaucracy in the approval process and no clear delineation of authority
Power of emotion in telling a story - and sometimes emotion and truth are in conflict with one another, how to best use public affairs and media as a weapon to combat disinformation.
POTENT QUOTABLES
"I wish there was a one button click that will apply our style, our brand that is controlled by our comms team and allow for the subject matter experts replace their expertise into branded templates"
"80% of our information cycle and content creation is tied up in the review and release phase of the process because of the multiple systems and siloed communication efforts"
"Imagine that we, as communicators, are the worst at internal communication!"
"We need outlets like this event to make us feel heard and seen. We also need this space to see if anyone else who has dealt with or solved the issue we’re going through."
Credits:
Steven Lewis