15th Dec 2007
Derry does advocacy very well
I have been meaning to say well done to the maiden city for officially becoming ‘Santa City’ after more than 10,000 turned up dressed as the big man himself. The brainchild of local businessman and chief Santa, Martin Mullan, it could not have been a better PR coup for the capital of the North West.
Apart from being great craic Derry is increasingly cornering the market on this part of the island for public celebration. The Halloween festival is serious business and now, as if it needed an excuse, stroke city dressed itself in red and white and santa’d around the walls to break the world record for most Santas in one place ever.
At the moment I’m reading a fascinating book by two Harvard academics that pull together from a number of different disciplines a theory of how human nature shapes our choices. The Book is called ‘Driven’ and its authors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria describe in detail four human drives - the drive to acquire, the drive to learn, the drive to defend and the drive to bond. It begins to explain human behavior and helps us to understand why gathering together is so important. It made me think about the first cities and the gathering of people together to communicate, trade and interact creating a whole that is bigger then the sum of its parts. Digital and social media has brought a new ease to this process. Having retired indoors in the 50’s to watch TV and be fed by the broadcaster’s taste our citizens are increasingly using new media to organise and have fun. I think there is a bit of society rediscovering community with a little help from technology. In that sense when as communications professionals we talk about Advocacy we are talking about conversation within a community, about interaction at a citizen to citizen level, about the thing societies are built on. Derry has always had a great sense of community although it was tested to breaking point during the troubles. In the last verse of his song, The Town I Love so Well, Phil Coulter sums it up:
Now the music’s gone but they carry on
For their spirit’s been bruised, never broken
They will not forget but their hearts are set
on tomorrow and peace once again
For what’s done is done and what’s won is won
and what’s lost is lost and gone forever
I can only pray for a bright, brand new day
in the town I loved so well
Last Halloween the media stood ready to report violence and civil unrest yet the people came onto the streets and gave them party. Yes there is the occasional eejit who is yet to get with the programme but the fact is that through their unique sense of community and clear pride in place the people of Derry are turning their city’s image around not through lofty articles in the press or big speeches in Guildhall Square but by smiling together and creating positive, fun images that get beamed around the world.
Just on the Halloween thing in Derry. I spoke to a PSNI sergeant about a week after the event and he told me that a similar crowd in Manchester would have generated around 200 arrests.