Opinion: Why Should Services Promote Themselves?

I like Wiltshire County Council's leaflet about its youth centres. But I'm not sure it needed a costly PR company to come up with it. Young people and youth workers together could have done just as good a job.

My worries, I suppose, are twofold. Notwithstanding Hugh Disley's contention that better communication protects budgets - a reasonable supposition - it is inevitable that communication and publicity also consumes budgets. How much human and financial resource do we think should go on this area of our work?

This question leads directly to the second point. The stuff that attracts the sound bites and photo opportunities is, necessarily, visible - or audible - youth work: it is tangible practice with a concrete, dare I say it, product at the end. The video, the carnival, the youth council, the outdoor adventure, and so on. But a lot of youth work is, or should be, of a less tangible kind - one-to-one support, debate and conversation.