Bill Swanger, APR, Fellow PRSA, the founder of William Swanger Communications, and someone whose ideas were once considered for Star Trek, shares a number of important ethical issues, including:
- Why it is important to ethically address financial mistakes and clarify misunderstandings
- Ethically navigating paid and unpaid content
Why don’t you tell us more about yourself and your career?
I came into public relations the old-fashioned way. I started in journalism. I attended a university near my home, and through some volunteer activities, lucked into a part-time position with the regional daily newspaper. I was in that stringer role for all four years of college, including two summer internships, and then they hired me full-time for two years. Quite honestly, no offense to my university education, but that was probably my best training in actual communications.
I worked for them for two years then I got into public relations with a large nonprofit organization that provided both senior living services and child and family programs, refugee services, and a number of community-based programs. I was with that organization through a large merger and a number of other changes for 43 years. I rose from being the single individual doing public relations through being the senior vice president and having five to six individuals at different times reporting to me. I retired from there in 2021 and I started my own communications practice. I’m doing primarily content creation for several organizations, including a health system.
I was lucky in 2010 to have a role in my organization and a relationship with my CEO that I could start teaching at the college level as well and then making up work time. So, I’ve been an adjunct instructor at three universities, right now at Penn State, since 2010, except for one semester during the pandemic. I’ve been able to teach public relations and crisis management and a lot of effective speaking since then.
I love talking to the students. It keeps you fresh.
Yes, since I was an English major, I did my formal training in public relations by doing the APR, and then I went back and got a master’s in strategic communications from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I’ve had some, I’ll say, unfortunate relationships at work at that point, which resulted in my interest in fundraising encroachment of public relations. So, I’ve since written both a popular article in The Strategist on that as well as a peer-reviewed academic article extending contingency theory to encroachment, so that’s been a special interest.
What is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever confronted at work?
Well, being a non-profit with both senior services and child and family programs, we have a number. I often think of being ethical in terms of how an organization responds to crises. Now, certainly we want to be open and honest with our audiences, both internal and external, as simply part of how we operate on a daily basis, but crises really test our ethics, at least in my mind.
We had a number of them over the years. We had youths, for example, who got lost on a wilderness excursion during a blizzard, and how we responded to the media requests about that. And also, we unfortunately had a murder-suicide in one of our nursing homes at one point.
But there were two that stand out the most to me.
The first was a totally unintentional record-keeping error. But the government had another term for that because it was financially focused and that was considered fraud.
Now, when we discovered the bookkeeping error, I was fortunate in our organization that ethics was really part of how we operated and how we treated everybody. So, the minute we discovered that we did two things. The first was to self-report and to let the government know, “Oops, we made a mistake here, and we actually billed for service in a way that shouldn’t have been done.” And the second is we of course had legal counsel who knew how to respond to those types of situations and could represent us well and ethically.
We came out relatively well. We did have to pay some damages, but it was not nearly as significant as they could have been. I think that was based on the fact we immediately self-reported and cooperated fully with the government’s investigation into that issue. I was even able to look at the press releases that the government was writing through working with our counsel. We did make some newspapers, but they were relatively small articles, and we had very little media interest in our service area, which actually surprised me. And I think that’s because, it was factually reported, there wasn’t a negative, and the government was focused on saying, “The organization self-reported.”
Ethics was very critical throughout that whole process and kept us from having to pay treble damages. We had no negative feedback from either donors or the general community. Again, I think because the tone was, “We made a mistake, it was unintentional,” and we responded ethically and honestly to it.
The second was when our organization went through a merger in 2000, and the CEO came in from the other organization, and the board, when he had been hired, had not funded his supplemental employee retirement plan, which is something a lot of senior executives may have.
It had to accrue. They didn’t fund it immediately, so it didn’t accrue over various years. Then suddenly as he approached retirement age, it was funded and it accrued and it was then reported, and because it was multiple years of retirement pension, it was more than a million dollars then when you looked at total compensation.
The regional business newspaper, which does lists of salaries, placed him at the top of the list of nonprofit executive salaries. We were a faith-based organization, and the local church jurisdiction then read about that and actually took up a petition to investigate this, what they called exorbitant salary.
We did two responses. We were very open about the entire thing. First, I ended up writing what came out to be a 10-page response to their petition, taking each item it mentioned and explaining it in as simple a detail as I could and explaining why this was unintentional. It should have been accrued over multiple years.
Now, did we please everyone with that?
No, especially when you have people who are making considerably less than that. But the synod did not take any more action and accepted our response to the petition.
Then I took a second step, which was to educate the editors who compiled the 990 reports in the business journal about what a SERP is and how including that as a separate column and explaining that it represents an accrual over many, many years, helped to mitigate negative responses in the future to anyone seeing that column, whether it was our CEO or another organization’s CEO.
Were the reporters receptive to that explanation?
Yes, they were. Yes, they were. And they added those explanations to columns that followed.
When I think about both stories you shared, both seem to be honest mistakes or things that happened that then didn’t become a bigger issue because of a strong ethical culture.
Yes, yes. That’s absolutely correct because we were open and honest, we provided as much information as the public, whatever that public was, requested. You won’t always please the public in those situations, but at least they feel they’ve been given open, honest communication. That’s an issue that I’ve seen in other organizations where they’ve tried to hide information or not be as forthright as they should be.
I could see potentially in some cases, somebody saying, “Well, don’t report it to the government. Maybe they won’t find it,” or “Let’s deal with the complaint and move on.” How do you build that ethical culture where the senior leadership on down is committed to doing the right thing?
For us, part of that was that we were church-affiliated. So, one of the key aspects of our mission statement is that we treat every individual as a unique person who deserves respect and integrity
Where public relations can help with that is over and over through internal communications and external communications is to drive home that point that we treat everyone, whether that’s a staff member or a constituent, we treat them equally with dignity and respect, and we try to be as open and honest as we possibly can. Now, dealing with healthcare, you’ve got HIPAA and other regulations, but we provide as much information as we possibly can.
One thing that I would recommend for organizations is environmental scanning. That’s an easy thing to tell people. I’ve talked about that in teaching public relations. It’s easy to say, “Keep your ear to the ground,” but it really involves having some detailed discussions with senior leadership and getting to work collegially with your CFO and your COO. What are the things that keep them up at night, things you might not, as a public relations practitioner, know offhand? Quite honestly, I had never heard of a SERP before that issue arose, so I had to learn a lot about that quickly.
That’s the one thing I focused on in teaching ethics or teaching crisis management is that you really have to look for all the crises that you immediately think of and then spend some time with others. That’s why when I’ve taught crisis management, you need that team of people who represent the other disciplines because they know the things that could go wrong ethically or operationally for them. So, you need to do that type of environmental scanning and make certain all the things that can occur, and then overlay that response with all of your ethical underpinnings, which is to be as open and honest and caring toward everyone as you possibly can be.
Beyond your personal experience, what are you seeing as some of the key ethical challenges for today and tomorrow?
Well, my immediate response when somebody would ask that is AI, but since I know so little about it, I don’t get into that. But one of the things that I think bothers me a little bit, and I think at one of the universities at which I’ve taught, they combine the public relations and advertising introductory classes into one. And I just think that’s a mistake.
I guess I’m a public relations purist, but I think of public relations as relationship management, and that means with every audience that you have. I’ve never been a fan of convergence or integrated marketing communications. We did marketing communications, we did news media relations, and we did all of those in my office, but we kept them slightly separate because to me, the overarching framework was this relationship management. You can’t manage a crisis well if you’ve got a marketing mindset. If your first instinct is to protect the organization or to sell the organization, you are not going to be able to fulfill your ethical responsibility to be open and honest with all your publics.
So, I always think of the organizational structure that way. Everything we’re doing is helping to sustain the organization, to make it successful, and move it forward. Our key goal is managing relationships, and it goes back to that long-time definition, with as much mutual benefit for both or all parties, not just internal, but also the external ones. When you become a spokesperson, for example, for an organization during a crisis, you have to be seen as a credible speaker, somebody who understands journalism and journalistic ethics, and you have to be able to talk to them, not as you would if you’re a marketing professional.
All of those responsibilities and functions are very important. I just see them as not converged, but as separate functions under an umbrella of relationship management. I think as we tend to merge all of these, sometimes we lose that perception that we are an open and honest spokesperson for the organization and I think that’s really critical, both for ethics and in managing crises.
What’s interesting to me when you talk about this, and I work with an integrated comms agency now, is the blurring of the lines that have happened since you and I first joined the profession. When we were joined if you told an editor about the advertising you were doing, you would have a very, very negative reaction. Nowadays, there’s so much more paid content, advertorials, paid speaking and more.
How do you recommend folks navigate that landscape when so much of some of the traditional aspects are now involving paid content?
A key concept that I have tried to teach is that role of boundary spanner. That’s really a role that a lot of organizations can have and it’s not always necessarily in public relations. In my mind, the CEO needs to be a boundary spanner. What I mean by that is that you have one foot in the internal world and the organizational world and the other foot in the external world, and it’s really critical that you are able to sort of distance yourself at times and to step outside that organizational role and look at yourself, look at your organization from that external perspective.
Now, research can be really helpful in doing that when you bring folks together and, “What’s your perception of our organization? Do you believe we are open and honest?” All of those types of things. But to me, that boundary spanner role was always one I tried to have in managing any crisis, in managing any ethical situation was to make certain that I had both perceptions in mind at all times. How would somebody externally react to seeing this report in the business journal? That can guide your response, that understanding and empathy in a way can guide your response to the public.
So that’s kind of the concept I always keep in mind.
What is the best piece of ethics advice you ever received?
The best piece of advice I gained simply by looking at and working with the senior managers.
The first president of our organization when I went to work, he was clergy, had a PhD, he was a former dean at a major college, and he exuded respect. In fact, we had a joke that he wanted me to call him by his first name, and I could never call him that. And when he finally retired, I wrote a column calling him by his first name.
I learned so much from him and I think the advice that I got from him was to be open and honest and fair with people at all times, and I’ve used that.
Listen to the full podcast with bonus content here:
- Acting Ethically With Financial Numbers - January 6, 2025
- How to best counsel your client when they want to respond unethically to an unethical competitor – Tatevik Simonyan - October 28, 2024
- Why it’s important to know many codes of ethics – Erin Kennedy - September 9, 2024
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