Interview: Robert Parker, PIO For VA Dept. Of Health

With a passion for working with people, Robert Parker found his niche during his working career by going into the public information field.

Parker is currently the Southwest Regional public information officer for the Virginia Department of Health.  After becoming a Virginia Tech graduate in forestry, Parker actually started out his working career in the western part of the United States doing lumberjack work before moving back to the state in which he was born, North Carolina.

After his moving, Parker worked for the North Carolina Parks Department where he started out his public information career by serving as a public information officer for the department. Parker moved to Montgomery County and became its first public information officer/director in assisting the county in creating programs that helped manage the county’s public image, public information and interaction among its citizens.  Today, he still works in the public information field, but with a medical twist to it – the Virginia Department of Health.

What follows are some questions Parker answered during the interview.

Q:  What led you to go into public information work?
Parker:  “This is going to sound a little silly maybe, but it’s people. And I say that because as a forester, in which that’s how I began my [working] career, I had much less interaction with people.  Throughout the course of my career, you know, trees are interesting to a point, salamanders are interesting to a point, but if you inject people to that equation, then things become expeditiously interesting and unpredictable.  Trees do pretty much what trees do and you can predict that.  If you try to predict people, than you can pretty much forget it.  You can lose your shirt by betting on what people are going to do. I just found that very interesting and initially it was in the [public information] park setting - explaining things about natural history to people, or explaining things about park service to people. 

I also did law enforcement work.  I was a ranger-I carried a gun, wore a badge, carried handcuffs, the whole nine yards.  Those types of interactions were interesting in their own way, but over the time, I worked in other environments and the more I worked with people, the more I realized I liked it and in addition to that, the more I began to learn and be able to teach people about government in general. After this, then the more interested I became.  It’s been very satisfying in being able to do those things along the way-having the opportunity to be able to do them professionally. 

It is not uncommon to do one thing for a decade and do something else different the second decade, however, as long you end up working.  Some people go through that more than two times.  I went through a complete transition a couple of years ago-going from Charlotte to Blacksburg.  The package was very appropriate-every way except salary (laugh).  My wife and I decided that we couldn’t let salary dictate the decisions we make for our children and ourselves.  My advice would be to don’t make the mistake to lock yourself into studying things that you don’t care anything about for the sake of some well-paying job down the road.  To me, that’s not what college is for.”

Q:  What exactly is “public information” in your words?
Parker:  “Well, there’s a lot of ways to define that.  Let me see if I can boil it down.  I think its providing people enough information to make well-informed decisions and form well-informed opinions.  We all make decisions and form opinions every day, and I used to tell people when I worked for the county, ‘It’s not about what the Democrats are in or what the Republicans are in, it’s all about making everyone well-informed.  Whether they’re a decision maker, a citizen, or a voter, everybody in a public meeting can be involved in a debate with someone who is well informed about decisions pertaining to where we’re going to go, how we’re going to do something in our lives, and in protecting yourself.  You talk about the health department and informing about things that are designed to help people.  Public information is an effort to help distribute enough information that you have to work at everyday about decisions that they make.”

Q:  With mentioning “working with people” earlier, what other things have you found most rewarding in your career thus far?
Parker:  “It’s that [working with people] and it’s also a variety of things.  No two days are the same.  For me, that works.  For other people, it may not.  By doing this type of work, I never know when the phone rings and what that phone call’s going to mean. 

For example, I was in Williamsburg this summer at an annual conference thing and while I was coming home late one afternoon, I went up [interstate] 64 and I began getting phone calls from Richmond about a water shortage in Goshen, which is near Lexington in Rockbridge County. I was on my way back and I realized that I needed to go to Goshen that evening.  It was sort of on the way and I accepted the situation and looked into what we needed to do in terms of information pertaining to the water shortage.  I got to Blacksburg really late that night, unpacked one suitcase, packed another, and went back to Goshen the next morning.  I ended up spending four days-helping the public information effort about the water emergency.  It was long and exhausting, but it was really important to do and that’s the kind of variety that I enjoy. 

Another example is that I was on campus during the week of April 16th…I remember that I had breakfast with my family Monday morning and the next meal I had with them was a late dinner on Thursday.  The 16th was a tragedy in itself.”

Q:  What have you found most challenging in your career thus far?
Parker:  “I believe that I’ve answered this question before for someone else and I’m trying to remember how I did it.  I think I have to say, and probably everybody in the workplace feels this way, and I certainly don’t think that this is a unique opinion, but it’s the challenge of limitations of resources.  We always wish we had more time, more money, and more tools to do the work.  There’s never enough of those things and again, that’s a fairly common opinion.  I think it would be hard to find someone out on the street and say ‘I have everything I need, I’m good.’ I would like to find that person.”

Q:  What are your various duties with working for the Virginia Department of Health?
Parker:  “The main thing is working as a liaison between the public health professionals and the news media. Sometimes there’s things on the public health side and we need to let people know about things on a public health perspective and that we develop and deliver those messages-whatever those messages are.  If it initiates from the press side, usually in the form of a request, you develop reports of this and that; an outbreak of something, illness or emergency, whatever you can inform that the viewers, listeners, and readers need to know.  You can start on either side of that equation, but it’s really about maintaining those relationships between the media markets and the health profession.”

Q:  What were your various duties with working for Montgomery County?
Parker:  “I was that [liaison], and that I was involved in campaigns, internal staff communication, which consisted of newsletters, some computer trainings, and things of that nature.  These are some of the things that I don’t do here.  I had a staff, a small staff that I supervised there.  I had a budget that I don’t have here and so it was a little bit more administrative and more on base, internal communication in that office.  The video project I mentioned earlier, supervising video production and web production I don’t do here.  This was sort of a difference of environment if you will.  There were three people that worked for me, but I had no partners that I could do communication work with that I have now.  That’s a difference in environment.”  

Q:  Last summer, I had a co-op opportunity with Carroll County government and while I was there, I wrote a number of press releases, created a number of web pages, etc.  In your views, what makes a good press release and overall, what makes a good communicator in working for a local government?
Parker:  “Brevity and clarity.  How’s that for a short answer?  It really boils down to that for me.  The way I explain it to people is that press releases get deleted from the bottom-up. Usually, the editor will usually read the title and the first sentence or paragraph.  Sometimes, they’ll read the second paragraph and so on.  I tell people in respect that you need to put the most important information at the top so that when they read the headline, they’ll know what you’re talking about and they may want to read the rest of it.  With the first sentence, will they be able to understand it or read more.  I have helped train people with press release writing.  That’s a common element - modifying people’s writing styles.  Nurses write for nurses, engineers write for engineers, planners write for planners.  Public information people write for reporters.  It’s different.

[In reference to what makes a good communicator] Not using words like ‘umm.’  What makes a good communicator is having the ability to create caring information and inserting them into appropriate media channels, so that people will understand and it’s familiar to them and having a pageantry for your subject manner.  I think that communicators often believe that if we write something well and to be able to put it on the table, then we have done our job.  It’s now someone else’s responsibility to pick it up and read it, understand it, and act upon it.  We need to be more proactive in identifying how individuals access information so that they understand it, be motivated, make the decisions, and form the opinions.  When I worked with government, it’s about making connections that are familiar and effective for the citizens and the people who need it.”

Q:  What has been some of the differences you’ve found between working with government and now with the health field in public information?
Parker:  “It’s a lot more focused now with working in the health field than what I expected it to be, compared to my former job in representing 30 departments in a local government and what all they do.  This surrounds one department, primarily focused on public health and emergency preparedness, whether it would be a weather emergency, criminal emergency, a water emergency, or even a terrorist emergency.  Things are built into the work we do.  That’s one difference-subject matter.  Two other differences are one-coverage area; I represent 29 different counties and I work with half a dozen media markets; the other difference is working with communication professionals.”

Q:  Within your career so far, what have you found to be the most effective communication tool?
Parker:  “Writing.  Writing is the fundamental ability to have for effective communication.  I don’t think it’s possible to be a great speaker without being a great writer first, or having a good writer help you out.  For those of us who do this work, with having to do multiple task work, I think writing is the first and foremost important skill to have, and I would speak right behind writing because when you have to be effective in this work, you have to be comfortable speaking to a person or a thousand people, be comfortable in front of a microphone or a camera, and you have to be comfortable of the translation from effective writing to speaking.  All these things are what I would say revolves around effective messaging.  Usually, there is more than one message to create and there’s more than one way to present that message in several channels and it starts with writing.”

Q:  Within your career so far, what have you found to be the least effective communication tool?
Parker:  Sometimes we put the cart before the horse to do something spectacular without thinking about what are the communication objectives.  The objectives should drive the tactics and I have found that video hasn’t been the best choice every time.”

Q:  In your opinion, are there a lot of opportunities out there in the profession that you’re in?
Parker:  “I think over time and in the coming future, there may be more opportunities out there.  More citizens are relying on information being provided to them and the government agencies and companies are becoming more accountable of what they’re informing the public about.  The town of Blacksburg, for example, citizens are engaged into the decisions made by the elected officials.  With their engagement, there’s dialogue and there’s criticism.  As an environment like that as well as others, there is more of a need for a person who pays close attention to that.  Reputation management is an important concept and a lot of government agencies and companies are realizing that they need someone to follow it closely and not only communicate to citizens for their benefit, but manage the reputation within the organization.  There’s a lot of investment in that effort all over the country.”

Q:  What advice would you give someone that is really strong into going into what you’re doing today?
Parker:  “I think the reality of the job market is that you may need to work in places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, Chicago, D.C., or Los Angeles for some period of time at the beginning your career, until an opportunity opens up at exactly where you want to be and to do exactly what you want to do.  I think it’s rare for someone to go straight out of college and stay with an employer for 30 years.  That just doesn’t happen anymore.  People like you should anticipate being flexible on where you go and what you do, and to understand that it’s normal to have those two or three careers in the course of your working life.  Keep your options open.  Understand that there are opportunities out there but it may not be exactly what you want and it may be at the place you exactly don’t want.  Be flexible in your thinking.  Take the opportunities you have…realize that you will have options.”