The 2018 PRSA Southeast District Conference is full of new and innovative ideas to make your communications strategies more successful.

During one of the Thursday breakout sessions, R. Brian Bowman, MA. and J. Dean Farmer, Ph.D. of Campbell University discuss the power of positive deviance and its role in public relations.

Bowman guides the media and journalism content areas and teaches television and video production, public relations, converged media, photography, and media writing and at UNC-­‐Chapel Hill (where he taught public relations campaigns). He also serves as executive producer of Campbell NOW! TV, Campbell University’s campus television venture. He received a Master of Arts in Technology and Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. His master’s thesis highlighted the role of social media in successful efforts to attract businesses to downtown Raleigh and Durham.

Bowman shared a preview of the presentation:

What is positive deviance?

Positive deviance is an approach to creating or influencing change in which you find people or groups of people who are succeeding at something while their peers are struggling. They have no additional resources or short cuts, they’re just doing something different and making it work. The term is becoming common in medical and humanitarian circles, and we believe it has a place in public relations.

What role do communicators have in change management?

In my opinion, that depends on the way your organization is set up and managed. In some organizations, the communicator has an active role in gathering data, sharing it with managers and influencing next steps. In other organizations, they may be used more as mouthpieces to convey what management has decided to do. In either case, communicators have expertise in listening to their publics and conveying information in a way that can be easily received and understood.

Why do many change management strategies fail?

Strategies are only as good as their outcomes. Determine what success looks like early and find a way to measure it. If the strategy fails or succeeds, you have data that can help you for the next project. I’m a fan of numbers. Find a way to quantify your data before you execute your strategy, then create a visualization those numbers afterward. There are lots of free, simple tools available online to help you visualize trends.

What can conference attendees expect to learn from your presentation?

We hope to give them an additional way of looking for positive solutions. Instead of a top-down approach of communicating to our publics, we advocate looking for solutions that are already there. It’s simply a way to listen more effectively. Whatever your next campaign is, adding a positive deviance approach to the mix can help uncover solutions that will be more readily adopted by your publics because they had a part in creating them.

The PRSA Southeast District Conference takes place April 18-20, 2018, in Raleigh, N.C. For more information or to register, visit prsasummit.org.