How her PR experience in politics boosted her PR career!! Great guidance..

Welcome. This is the public relations review cost of programs to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors, and others. Now here is your host Peter Woolfolk,

Welcome to the public relations review podcast and to all listeners all across America and around the world. Now, several months ago, I was joined by two other PR professionals and we discussed how our professional careers were catapulted as a result of our grinding experiences in actual politics campaigns, or the offices of elected officials events. And more. Now my guest today has had the same career trajectory. She has a graduate of Washington state university with degrees in communications and political science. She has served as communications director for the Washington state Republican caucus to attorneys general, the employment security department, and the department of corrections sees also hel similar positions at Microsoft and the Washington state Grange, uh, rural association group. She is a member of the public relations society of America, national public affairs and government executive committee, and the college of fellows leadership team. She joined PRS college of fellows in 2017 and earned the Lloyd B Denis distinguished service award for national public affairs excellence that year. Now she was named PRS a Puget sound PR professional of the year in 2018. And then she went on to win the Hugh Smith community service award in 2019. Now the communications director for the building industry association of Washington, my guest Jenelle Guthrie joins us today from Olympia Washington, Janell. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Peter. It's great to join you. And it was so nice to meet you.

Well look, why don't you tell, uh, our listeners, because you've had some experience in politics about how your experience in politics help prepare you and help you exceed and really jump ahead of some people in line simply because you had a lot of this experience and how it benefited you, your communications career.

Oh, absolutely. You know, I look back in my time, especially in the Washington state Senate. So fondly, I mean, it was a time where we worked really hard sometimes late into the night for session, but at the same time, we really honed our skills as public relations professionals. So in Washington state caucus, staff or Republicans and Democrats are paid by the state legislature. We have staff that does policy. We have staff that does political, uh, public relations and we respect each other. So back in the day when I worked there, we would obviously work opposing sides of issues, but we also had an ethics board at the state legislature that how does accountable as well. And so I think what really three things I learned from working in the state Senate and then the attorney General's office and, uh, working on campaigns is that number one, you have to really be truthful. It's important to have a robust debate over your issues, but you have to make sure you have your facts straight. You have to make sure you can back them up. And you have to make sure that you're telling the truth because you will be held accountable. Number two, I think is that you really have to play fair. It's one thing to really go at it and have a robust debate over an issue that you feel strongly about, but you have to play fair because the next day you could be working on an issue together and you don't want to burn those bridges down the road. And then I think number three is really just kind of being a thoughtful advocate on issues and looking for ways that you can find common ground while also recognizing that you have differences. And so what that taught me working in the state legislature and then working for the attorney generals, I think was that you can work quickly, you can work truthfully. And that really puts you ahead of other people when you're working in other arenas, say state agencies or now working for the building industry association of Washington.

Well, I think it's really important to how you talked about the fact that you want to be accurate and truthful in presenting information to the public. But also one of the things that I found when I worked on Capitol hill in Washington, there's that, uh, sometimes you don't have a lot of time, you know, it depends upon how tight the schedule is and you run to a lot of pressure to, uh, to get it done within that timeframe. And it all has to be accurate. Did you find that same, uh, same experience there?

Absolutely. Yeah. So you sometimes would have a little bit of lead up on an issue, but other times one of my senators might have met with an advocacy group and come back with an issue that they wanted to move forward. And so it really did require working closely with the policy team and also, you know, doing as much fact checking as you can ahead of time, making sure you have your sources cited so that you can point back to them. But yeah, definitely. I think what I learned at the most working in politics is that opportunities present themselves on a moment's notice and you have to be prepared to, to act and to fact-check things quickly. I mean, it's all about speed. And then also being able to write quickly. I think that was one of the things I really learned in working in politics was the ability to write clearly and concisely and quickly because those moments they open up and then they closed. You

Know, one of the other things that came out of that too, is not when you're working with a piece of legislation and my being a press secretary on Congress, and you're dealing with the media. I recognize that I did not have to know each and everything about every detail in that legislation. Maybe the high points that I could talk to a reporter about, but if they really needed to drill down, maybe there was an issue that they're familiar with. Then I can bring in what I call the resource person, the person who actually wrote the legislation they add in all the actual details. Did you have a similar experience?

Exactly. Yes, yes, we could. We could do that. And I think we, it was also really important to be able to call on the advocates or lobbyists that knew, um, the nuts and bolts of the issue. And so that's where that ties into my work here. Now at the building industry association, we have a really strong team of respected lobbyists and a government affairs team in house. And both of those people have expertise and knowledge that we can draw from. And then the final piece of it is being able to work with people who are affected by the legislation and call them up when we have questions. So for example, recently there was an issue with our energy code here in Washington state and supply chain, disruption and costs going up on housing. So as somebody who is charged with knowing the high points and being able to talk about maybe the top three reasons why we believe housing prices are rising so quickly, I could then go, uh, working with our government affairs team, to our members who are on the ground, building homes every day and ask them. So what does this mean when I say the supply chain disruption is causing housing prices to increase, can you give me a couple of concrete examples? And then they were able to give me examples of electrical panels and having to reconfigure electrical panels to carry that added load of electricity as the energy code is requiring less reliance on gas, or for example, new energy, efficient heat pumps and how the suppliers are working to build those out, but they're not able to get them to our home builders as quickly. So that means delays for the person who's waiting for their house to get built. So being able to provide those concrete examples and kind of paint the picture is really valuable as well.

You know, I think the other part of that too, as, uh, as you mentioned, because the legislation law, a lot of times, it's pretty big and Congress, it could be several hundred pages. So there are different groups that you need to explain parts of it to them differently than you would other groups involved in the same legislation. How did you, how did you manage that? Because I know you mentioned the consumer, uh, you know, perhaps even builders, corporations, how did you manage to fair it out? What was appropriate for which group

Talk about that? It makes me think of attorney general, Rob McKenna, who I worked for. And I would always talk to him about trying to select like his three key issue areas to focus on as a leader. And then he came back and said, yes, but those three key issue areas don't matter the same to everyone. So senior citizens might be concerned about this or families. The children would be interested about something different. So it is important to, you know, what we landed on is we did have three overarching areas that we focused on for him with regard to consumer protection and fighting addictions, and also working on human trafficking. But depending on which audience you were speaking to, you talked about the issue that mattered to them. And that also requires some research and some connection with the group that you're working with. So before my attorneys general, both attorney general, Rob McKenna, who was a Republican and attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who was a Democrat before they spoke to a group, we were tasked with reaching out to that group, identifying who was going to be in the audience, what some of their key issues were all the way down to who was going to be introducing them, who might be sitting at the table with them so that they were prepared to provide the most value when they came to speak to that group, nothing worse than going to a group cold with a topic that you're clearly not connecting with your audience on it. Sadly, I mean, it looks a little disrespectful to the group that you're talking to. It looks like you didn't care enough to do the research. And then it also puts your, your, uh, elected official in a bad situation because they're sitting there speaking about something and you can see in the audience that it's not resonating with them. It's really important to do that groundwork. And I think that's why I found politics and working for elected officials. So interesting.

You know, I'm very, very glad you mentioned that because that is so key, you know, knowing your audience and checking with somebody who knows the audience ahead of time to be prepared can recall when I was on Capitol hill, this was some years ago, but the us was preparing to build what was going to be called the superconducting supercollider. Now this was a huge, huge undertaking in, I guess, briefly I would explain it as they were going to whirl Adams around some big underground, a circumference around like a donut thing, uh, at tremendous speeds, somewhere down in Texas, you know, multimillion dollar operation. And it has some sort of benefits to the public. Well, what happened was the builders, uh, decided to send out a scientist to talk about what this is going to be? Well, unfortunately, the scientists spoken scientific terms and far too many people didn't understand the benefits. Some of those people were the people on this budget committee. And actually, so when it came before we got to cut something, because we know we've got this deficit, the superconducting supercollider got the ax now, believe it or not, it just survived, but it survived overseas because the Europeans knew the benefit of it. And they took advantage of it somewhere else in Switzerland, I think, and they got it up and running there, but the point simply being to support what you've said, that you've got to know your audience, know what it is that they need to hear and the wine, the bed, the pros and cons of what happens and how it impacts them is hugely, hugely important to PR professionals to understand that how important that is.

Absolutely. And I can say there's two, two speakers that I listened to frequently. And actually throughout my career, number one is Anne Wiley. She has a writing coach. She does a number of seminars for the public relations society of America. So if you're a member, you can get those little one hour seminars for free, but she teaches you not to say things like the 100 gallon tank of whatever holds, you know this. So when I worked at the attorney General's office, for example, we were talking about these huge tanks of nuclear waste that needed to be processed and how we were suing the federal government, because they weren't processing this nuclear waste as quickly as they should. And instead of talking about 500 million gallons of nuclear waste, you would say that, and then say, that's the equivalent of X number of swimming pools, or, you know, something that kind of helps people understand, like what does 500 gallons look like? And that's not an a one-to-one that's not accurate, but I found myself looking things up like, okay, so how many gallons is that? Or what does that look like when you think of 500 gallons of something? What is, what is that? And then Michael smart also talks about, if you have particularly hard to explain or award that, that people haven't heard, like your scientific words that you were talking about, if you can get the scientists to describe what that might be in an analogy, then it helps people. Oh, okay. I can connect to that. I don't know what this superconductor is, but I can relate to this other thing. And then you use that word. You say, it's, it's really a wise way of coming at it because it helps people process information in their brain and then they make a connection.

Now, have you had any experiences let's say that, that you had to recover from maybe before you knew what to do and how to go about making these things relatable to your audiences? Have you had some, some snafoos in your career that you had to recover from at all? Oh,

Definitely. Definitely. Your career. There's always things that, you know, can be, you know, make a misstep and then you have to correct. I think, you know, I had an example when I was working on a campaign for example, and it was a gubernatorial campaign. And the person that I worked for was in commercial real estate. And we had on his website called him a commercial real estate broker. You know, we're a bunch of young campaign staffers dot, knowing the difference between a commercial real estate broker, a commercial real estate agent. And so I had editorial board editor who I'd made a relationship with over the years, call me and say, Hey, Janell, is he really a broker? And sure enough, he came in that day and said, Hey, are you a broker? And he's like, no, I'm an agent. So we had to change it because there's a significant difference between being a commercial real estate agent on being a broker there's education. There's I think there's testing, you know, it's the next step up. And so we needed to correct that. We corrected it on the website and we sent a little notice out to media and people that we'd worked with to let them know that we had made this mistake on the campaign and, and it fixed it. But had we not taken that step to own up to our mistake, it could have been resume boosting. You know what I mean? It can be one of those fake resumes stories. There's all kinds of things that could've gone sideways with that, but thankfully we quickly address the problem and, and fix it. And, you know, there's been situations like that, that you make mistakes. And that's what I'm saying about being truthful. If you have a reputation of being truthful and having integrity, when you make a mistake, people are more likely to, to let you apologize and own up to your mistake rather than coming at you as a liar, which is, you know, it's always nice to have that kind of relationship with people.

You know, one of the things that, uh, helped me call you talked to my, having relationships with immediate good relationship with the media was very, very important to me again, when I was on Capitol hill again, several years ago, issue came out where they found out that some members of Congress are floating checks in that simply means they didn't have the money in the checking accounts, the

Covenants, that sort of thing.

Well, what's the problem was, was that the ethics committee had let these people know on a, on, on a memo and said that, Hey, if you can prove that this is in era, let us know. We'll take your name off the list. Well, unfortunately has a lot of things do in Congress, the list got leaked. Well, the leak, the leak happened on a Friday evening and I get a call from the, uh, Porter of my member worked in New York city. Saturday morning, everything was shut down. So having a relationship, I had said, well fine, just hold on. I will get the information for you. Probably can't do it until Monday, but let me find out what this is all about. And basically what happened was the member had transferred or wired the money into the account earlier. But somehow, because there was not an actual bank on Capitol hill, but some staff was having things like that. They entered it late, so it didn't show up as it was supposed to be. But then what we did is we call all the reporters involved in New York city as a huge media market. So the New York times and Washington, Washington post AP LA times, all those folks, I called them up and let them know we were going to have a press conference. We're going to fly in the people from New York. We're going to bring in the paperwork to demonstrate that we never should have been on the list in the first place. And they all agreed that they would be there. And you know, if they're happy with it, they put a retraction in the paper and thank goodness, that's exactly what they did now. Now the problem is that they wrote the retraction, but it didn't get the same exposure on the front page.

And that's always the frustration. I mean, that's why I always tell folks that I'm working for, you know, when the media calls, we try to get them a response as quickly as possible if we can, but in your situation, it sounds like the story was already out before you had an opportunity to respond, but it is frustrating. Cause the headline comes out, the bad headline comes out and then the retraction shows up on page 10 or something. And you know,

That's the other thing I was talking about in terms of the politics, you need to be able to respond to emergencies and doing it correctly. I mean, putting out in inaccurate information, uh, just to talk to the media is a bad news thing. And if you've got good relations, you said fine. I don't have the information now, but give me accidentally know a couple of hours or whatever. And I'll get back to you with a correction depending upon their deadlines. A lot of them are willing to wait because you have that relationship.

Exactly. But I think what you hit on is just the most important thing is responding to the media when they call and saying, I'm still working on getting that information. Or here's what I know, because I think a lot of times, um, public relations, professionals, communications, media relations, people, they have this sense that they have to have the whole story before they can respond to the press and not responding in any way, shape or form makes it look like you're hiding something. So if you call them up and say, boy, you know, this is an evolving situation. We are really trying to get this under control. But as soon as I have anything I can share, I will share it. And so at that point, you're acknowledging that there is a situation and recognizing too, that the media doesn't need the entire story either. They just need to be able to report. I've talked to Janell Guthrie at X, Y, Z. Um, this is an evolving situation she's promised. She'll get back to me. And then you've given them something that they can run with on TV. It's mainly TV. Usually TV is really pressing, but now, you know, the print journals everybody's on Twitter. So they're all kind of waiting with, if they know something's going on and you're not responding, it's test is so critical that you respond and give them something and let them know that you do know they want information and you are trying to get back to them. I've even gone so far as to put a voicemail or you can put something on your website that says, you know, there's an evolving situation, more information to come, come here. Cause it can't always, if you've got a hundred reporters calling you, you can't individually call them all back, but you may be able to, to find ways to get that message out. Or for example, on Twitter or wherever, you can find a way to let people know you are aware that they're asking a question and you are aware that they know there's a crisis and you're trying to get the most accurate information as soon as you can. I think that's just really important. The,

The other thing that's happened sometimes is people reporters using a particular place as a reference point. And when they, we have nothing to do with it, I worked at a university here in, uh, here in Nashville and there was some sort of a incident near the university, but the university had nothing to do with it. Somebody went on to the university to get some help. And, uh, the reporter said that this incident, I think it might've been a major car accident. Somebody ran away from it near Fisk university. You know, we didn't want it to use as a reference point because it makes us sound like we had something to do with it. Uh, not only that, as a matter of fact, the, the TV truck went up on the canvas and the, and the, uh, the microwave's thing went up too. So I had to call him and ask him to take it off the campus because we had nothing to do with that. Why don't you just reference it, the clearest intersection as compared to the university, because, you know, we just don't want to be in that story. And, you know, you have to have to take those steps sometimes to clean it up as well.

And it found, again, it goes back to what you're talking about, having relationships with the media, touching base with them, even if you don't have a story that you're pitching, uh, responding to their calls when they call you and trying to be prompt and helpful so that they can get their stories done. It's, you know, it's a lifelong relationship and it all goes back to those conversations. We had early in this podcast about being honest, being, having integrity, being fair, all of those things help build your, your reputation so that you can continue to have those good relationships with reporters. And I think that's important even today when we have people developing their own content on social media and, you know, there's so much misinformation out there. I still think we can count on working with our friends in journalism to make sure that we're trying to be as truthful and getting the true facts out to people.

It was all very well said. Well, Janell, you provided an awful lot of information today. Is there anything you think that we've missed that perhaps other listeners should know? I

Would just really encourage people. I know you're a member of the public relations society of America. I was a journalism, major political science, but what I really learned about our craft I've completely learned through PRS. They taught me about ethics. They taught me how to do the nuts and bolts. They taught me about strategic planning. So I would just say, you know, I'm not getting paid for this, this commercial people to take advantage of membership in the public relations society of America, because it will really help their career.

Well, I, uh, I certainly support that. I've gotten a lot of benefit from being a member as well. So, but let me say this. I really want to thank my guest today. Janell Guthrie, she's with the building industry association of Washington. That's the state of Washington and religion. L thank you so very, very much, and, you know, appreciate your taking the time to come on and share your wisdom with our listeners.

Oh, thank you so much, Peter. I'm looking forward to listening to more of your podcast. I think you're doing a great job and I really appreciate your work in this area

And to our listeners. We certainly appreciate your listening to, to the podcast. And of course, if you've enjoyed the show, we'd, we'd really like to get overall a review from you. So thank you again so much for listening and be sure to listen to the next edition of the public relations review podcast.

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