DISSCOMM 2019
A A AThis year's edition of the workshop organized by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) for sharing and communicating statistical data took place in Gdańsk between 12 and 14 June 2019. Its participants were experts from all around the world – employees of statistical offices, higher education institutions, central banks and international organisations (e.g. OECD, Eurostat).
The axis of the workshop consisted of three sessions during which the best practices in the field of crisis management, internal communication as well as the role and place of the communication department in the organisation were presented and discussed. The issues of “best practices” in terms of branding as building a public statistics brand as well as “tailoring” strategies and communication frameworks were also discussed.
Each of the sessions was interwoven with works in working groups, where in a small group particular issues discussed earlier were analysed. This allowed to formulate key conclusions regarding the thematic areas discussed. Among other things, it was established that internal communication in the organisation plays no lesser role than external communication and it should be carried out with no less involvement. In addition, attention was paid to the need to develop communication skills among the senior management of the institution, as well as to the need to develop clear procedures for responding to communication crises and adaptation of data presentation methods to different groups of recipients - entering into dialogue with them, which will allow better identification of their information needs. There was also a surprise consisting in the preparation of a real communication crisis for the participants to deal with by Statistics Poland and U.S. Bureau of Statistics.
Traditionally, the last part of the workshop was devoted to identifying topics that should be addressed during next year's edition of this event. The participants suggested that the focus should be on the following issues: access and communication (differences, common parts); strategies of activities in social media; reaching new, potential recipients of data; change in organization; audience segmentation and construction of messages tailored to different groups; increasing the communicative competence of statisticians, including how to make them “ambassadors” of public statistics; measuring the effectiveness of communication activities. In addition - with the approval of the majority - it was decided that the range of topics of the next year's workshops will also include the so-called lessons learned, in other words sharing bad practices with other participants, i.e. discussing not only the successes and the things that worked, but also paying attention to issues that have already been tested without success in other countries.