This week I make an exception to my usual practice of putting profiles behind the, very cheap, paywall! I interviewed Simon Baugh shortly before he stepped down as chief executive, UK Government Communications, after four years. There were so many gems within our conversation that, in commemoration of World Communication Week, I am sharing with all.
It was either that or lingo bingo, but at the EOD I just couldn’t think outside the box to create a deliverable that leveraged all my ideations. Six seven.

When Simon Baugh started in communications 25 years ago, his predecessor proffered a notebook containing journalists’ contact details, inviting him to copy them down. As Baugh explains: ‘They really were the gatekeepers. If you were doing comms, your ability to change somebody’s attitude or behaviour depended on your ability to convince a journalist of your message, and then them communicating to the audience.’

Today, as Baugh steps down as chief executive, UK Government Communications (GCS), the power of journalism has waned to the point that, for some audiences, they no longer are the appropriate conduit.

Instead communicators now have myriad channels, platforms and tools to reach and understand audiences in ways that were inconceivable just a decade ago, but rather than making the job easier, it has become more complex and challenging.

‘Everybody who does a communications role today probably feels, at this moment, that they are in danger of getting overwhelmed,’ he observes. ‘In some ways, AI will help. But in other ways, it is another level of complication where you feel that, just as soon as you’re across the latest technology, the next model has come out.’

For Baugh, the solution was to focus on doing three areas at a strategic level – collaboration, innovation and skills – which he viewed as crucial to respond to the changing environment, and doing them really well.

He explains: ‘Collaboration is important because however big you are, even if you’re a UK Government, you need to work with others who share your goals and interests, to be able to reach audiences effectively. Innovation is important because things are changing quickly and you need a cockpit where people are thinking constantly about how to experiment, test, learn… to identify the innovation that is going to be most relevant. And skills are important because everything is changing so quickly.’

Baugh outlines the evolution of the media landscape that has framed his thinking. Inevitably, it starts with the internet, but he believes that the arrival of Google, which brought the ability to access information from multiple sources, precipitated the decline in traditional media’s power.

It was also the first time that communicators needed some understanding of technology. The arrival of social media allowed anybody to publish to a mass audience, bypassing traditional media. The iPhone brought scrolling, which necessitated short, visual, arresting content to catch people’s attention.

And then Facebook introduced algorithmic newsfeed, leading to personalised news content and ultimately fragmented echo chambers.

‘We moved away from a shared, national conversation, but people also started to see information that turned out not to be true, leading to an overall decline in trust in traditional institutions,’ explains Baugh.

‘And finally, you’ve got the rise of AI capable of generating content. We move from communicators needing to have good relationships with journalists to work in which communications is decentralised, fast-moving and emotionally charged, where there is low trust among the public and where control have moved from institutions to algorithms and machines.’

He adds: ‘For communicators, your success depends on how quickly you can move an in-house team to deliver a data-led, strategic, audience-led plan that is built for the modern media landscape. And that means being able to interact with the right platforms at the right time to reach your audiences.’

But what was the correct platform for government communications? Baugh’s team analysed around 200,000 social posts over the past few years to understand which had resonated. Its hypothesis: people preferred hyper-local, relevant and useful non-political content that showed the government being helpful to them. ‘

The government is rolling out new community diagnostic centres to help people get tests quickly rather than having to go to a hospital,’ Baugh says, by way of example. ‘Typically, the standard government comms content would be to have a post on the Department of Health’s social media feed from the Secretary of State for Health saying We’re delivering 100 new community diagnostic centres. All our research showed people switch off immediately. If it’s a politician, they switch off in the first three seconds. You never get your message across.’

Collaboration

A new media unit was created a year ago to act on these insights, and bring the collaboration leg of Baugh’s strategy to life. For example, to promote the new Lincoln Community Diagnostic Centre, it developed geo-targeted content fronted by a sonographer or nurse working there, which included patient testimonials and useful information, such as how to get a referral and opening hours.

‘We found that when you produce really useful, relevant, tangible content, it does have a real impact,’ he explains. ‘We measure engagement, but we have also developed a trust metric. We looked at previous social media content, which platforms are the ones which generate higher levels of trust in terms of people positively sharing, which has given us a benchmark for this content: we can measure if it is more effective.

‘The Lincoln example was between [up to] 90% more effective at building trust in the ability of the government to deliver. Our hypothesis was that we could do this across a range of things people care about, like crime by introducing people to their new neighbourhood police officer or education by helping people access breakfast clubs.

‘Obviously, it only works if it also reflects people’s lives and is accompanied by genuine delivery. This is just as relevant for private sector organisations where, we believe, they can win back trust by showing not telling.’

But Baugh also believes that there is an opportunity for organisations to ‘borrow trust’, which is why the new media unit now works with influencers, or, as he prefers to call them, content creators. ‘We work out who are the people that our target audiences already trust and have confidence in, where we also have shared goals and values,’ he explains. ‘There are lots of content creators who are happy to help with some of the things we were doing, like encouraging people to get into teaching, but it is also important to pay them if they have a product that helps us reach an audience.’

Perhaps understandably, ministers initially balked at the idea of involving content creators, wrongly perceiving them as reality show stars. But there were also concerns that the individuals might have been critical of the government in the past, or could do so in the future.

Baugh countered such concerns by pointing out that media outlets, such as Global Radio or The Sun, were, in effect, content creators that the government already paid to carry advertising, who were also often critical. The winning argument: these traditional outlets are ‘not as able to reach the audience, are less trusted by the audience and will probably cost the tax payer twice as much’.

One successful partnership involved a parenting influencer, who raised awareness of changes to the eligibility criteria for access to breakfast clubs. When highlighted on the Department of Education’s channels, with the Secretary of State for Education, the ensuing comments were cynical and, almost, abusive. The same content on the parenting influencer’s channels prompted ‘genuine conversations’, where they engaged with followers to help them understand the benefit.

‘These content creators are trusted because they have built a relationship with their audience. Their messaging is authentic. They produce the content themselves because they have a better idea than us of how to reach their audience,’ explains Baugh. ‘This means you need to give away some control, but when working with traditional journalists, nobody [expects] copy edit privileges.’

Another successful collaboration involved NHS Blood and Transplant and Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever series, which encouraged people of Black heritage to become blood donors to meet increasing demand to treat conditions, such as sickle cell.

Recognising that some people were deterred by the time involved, Baugh’s team deployed behavioural science to make it easy, using adverts on bus shelters to highlight the availability of appointments in, say, 30 minutes at a local venue. The campaign led to an additional 7,000 life saving transfusions within three months.

Baugh believes initiatives such as these demonstrate that a focus on ‘collaboration and innovation can have real practical impacts’.  

But collaboration across government is also important. In the four years Baugh led GCS, his department reduced the money spent on campaigns by 20%, simply by coordinating efforts across departments.

The Department of Health had a campaign on obesity. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport had a campaign encouraging people to get involved in sport. The Department for Transport had a campaign to get people out of their car, to cycle or walk the first mile of any journey.

‘They were all targeting the same audience with a variation of the same message. By bringing the budgets together for cross-government mission campaigns, we’ve been able to say Look, we could have more impact at a lower cost if we joined some of these things up and worked together.’ But, in order to make that claim, it was necessary to spend time understanding why some initiatives didn’t work, to be able to identify what needed to be done to achieve success.

Innovation

As in so many large organisations, the old ‘we’ve always done it this way’ approach can act as an impediment. In government communications, if the cost of a proposed campaign exceeded £100,000 then a long-standing rule required the use of proven techniques that had, in the past, driven successful outcomes.

‘It sounds great, but actually if you have that rule in place for ten years, then nobody is ever trying anything new,’ Baugh points out.

Innovative private sector organisations, he discovered, set aside some campaign budget for experimentation. ‘We changed the rule to say that we expect around 10% of any campaign budget to be spent on trying something new. Use the money to test it, trial it and, if it works, we will scale it across GCS.

‘We still expect 90% of the budget to be efficient and effective, but there will be no consequences for doing something that doesn’t work, as long as it’s something we learn from.’

Shortly after Baugh announced innovation as a cornerstone of his three-pronged strategy in 2022, the department produced Responsible Innovation, a publication looking at emergent technologies and their likely impact on GCS.

Consequently, the innovation team analysed the first publicly available ChatGPT version, recognising early that creating a custom government communication service large language model, trained on its own data and best practice, could boost productivity and efficiencies.

The first alpha version, Assist, was ready by March 2023. ‘We realised that you can’t develop your own large language model. We started with How do you write really good prompts to get good answers? We then developed a user interface that meant people didn’t need to write the prompts themselves, and trained the model in our best practice and standards,’ he explains.

Assist’s home page asks users which task they wish to perform, and its initial response follows accepted GCS practices and methodology.

‘If you put in a government policy document and ask for a communications strategy, it will always use our OASIS five-step framework,’ explains Baugh. ‘We’d trained people in using the Krebs methodology in a crisis, but they didn’t need to remember that anymore because if they use Assist, it will automatically put messaging in that order.

‘As people were using it, we found it saved them time but also that the quality was first draft quality about 7% of the time.’

In March 2024, after developing Assist for about a year, it became the first AI model to be approved for roll out across government. Baugh set a target for training half GCS staff, about 3,500 people, in using the tool within 12 months.

Behavioural scientists on his team recognised that it was not the technology that would be a barrier to this, but people. ‘We treated it as a communications campaign that was about behavioural change. It was about building people’s confidence in using Assist [with high quality training and clear and transparent ethical principles and safeguards], and seeing that it was there to help them do their jobs better, not to replace them.’

Within one month, 1,500 people were using Assist on a regular basis, generating 17,600 queries a week, and by the end of the year, 6,200 people across 230 organisations had dabbled at least once.

Skills

Training GCS colleagues in using AI is just one of the ways in which Baugh championed upskilling government communications professionals. Its bespoke Advance learning and development programme offers three levels of training, from apprenticeship right through to masters level, offering a postgraduate diploma in strategic communication leadership.

Since its launch in September 2023, more than 3,500 participants have undertaken the programme, which is also focused on non-traditional communications techniques, such as AI, digital and insight.

‘In an early speech in this role, I said that [in today’s environment] you need people who can combine data science, with the thinking of an engineer and the art of a storyteller. I still think that is where the sweet spot is going to be, being able to develop teams that have a deep understanding of audience data and insight and the ability to translate that to new platforms.

‘But I don’t think any chief executive or minister is willing to say, just yet, that We can ramp down a little on the traditional media relations, even though they know, intellectually, it is less valuable than it used to be and, depending on which audience you are trying to reach, may not be valuable at all.’

As for Baugh, ‘Having done more than ten years in government and four in this role, I think now is the time for someone with different and new ideas to take it on.’ While hoping all the initiatives he launched ‘will have a real impact for them, it definitely feels like it is time for something new.’