How does the main organisation in the field of public procurement, SOE “Prozorro”, build its communications? How did their PR team work in the first months of the full-scale war, what did they change in their activities, how do they cope with and prevent possible negative feedback from the audience, and what is the secret of one of the main features of their SMM - procurement memes? We talked to Yevhen Hrytsenko, Head of Marketing and Communications at SOE “Prozorro”, about all this and much more.

How Is Your Team Organised and What Tasks Does it Perform?

Our task as the Prozorro Communications team is to help our users conduct procurement efficiently and successfully participate in tenders, as well as to show the benefits of our system for the country and civil society.

In general, our work can be divided into 2 areas.

The first is working with the system's direct users, procuring entities and suppliers. These are tens of thousands of people who use Prozorro every month: they make purchases or apply for tenders. And our task is to help them work more efficiently: with advice, explanations, and operational news.

And the second is working with a wide audience, with the media, with society. Here, it is important for us not only to show the effect of Prozorro, but also to make public procurement as interesting as possible for people. On the one hand, this is a complex and, believe me, rather boring topic. But people are really interested in how the state spends money, especially in times of full-scale war.

Team tasks

We also work with stakeholders – with the authorities, our partners from other organisations, and international donors, who are very interested in the progress of public procurement reform in Ukraine.

In general, two components, two capacities, have always been the most important for the Prozorro communications team. The first is analytics, because we need to work with large amounts of data from the Prozorro system, as well as with the legislative and regulatory framework on which our sector depends. And the second is creativity, so that we can package this data and this information in a way that will attract the attention of our audience.

In fact, this is how we built our team: in addition to me, there is an analyst, a social media manager, a designer, and a communications specialist with whom we are currently working on launching a national communications campaign.

Prozorro team

What Do You Look for When Hiring a New Employee for Your Department?

For our team, we are always looking for people who can write. This is probably the key filter, because you have to write a lot and on complex topics, which also need to be presented in the simplest possible language. And I am also convinced that for communicators, this is a basic skill on which other skills can be strung.

Team challenges

So our candidates must be able to work with complex information and at the same time look at it with a fresh perspective and be able to offer some interesting presentation. Traditionally, Prozorro's communications team cultivates people with universal skills, and this is something I learned from the previous head of the department, Olena Shkarpova. Yes, we each have our own area of responsibility and our own special skills, but a communications officer should be able to analyse Prozorro data a little bit, and an analyst should be able to come up with a cool meme or an event idea because this allows us to approach each task more versatile.

You Balance Serious Topics with Memes and Funny Stories Very Well. How Do You Generate These Ideas and What Content Resonates Best with Your Audience?

In the case of Prozorro, useful and fun content works best. And ideally, when they are combined. For example, if we talk about Prozorro customers and suppliers, they respond very well to articles and posts with useful tips and explanations. These are quite complex and professional articles or posts, but this is what our audience responds well to and shares.

Procurement humour

Some of our content is dedicated to the “hard life” of a procurer or tenderer. Perhaps, some other team would present Prozorro in their communications as the best procurement system in the world, decorated with international awards, and without any shortcomings. And, in general, holding tenders in Prozorro is always a great experience and an excellent result. But we try to be honest in all circumstances. That is why it is not a problem for us to admit that procurement is a very difficult and sometimes thankless, but very important job, that somewhere the system or legislation does not work perfectly, but that we see this and change it. In general, we try never to turn a blind eye to problems, and I think that such frankness helps us to be closer to our audience. Because people see that we care.

Communication of Prozorro
As for the general audience, it is much harder to get them interested in our topic and our news if it is not another scandalous drum procurement. However, our situations from the #alternative_prozorro section work really well, where we come up with Prozorro tenders that play on certain current events. For example, when it was still being actively discussed that the Crimean bridge should be blown up, we created a “Tender for dismantling the illegally built Crimean bridge”. At that time, many people reposted this post, including Michael Shchur from Toronto Television. Eventually, the bridge was blown up in another way, no less spectacular. And then again. Communication

The situational post in the wake of the debunking of Spartak Subbota, who, as it turned out, did not even have a medical degree, worked very well. In addition to Spartak, we also mentioned Dorzh Batu, who had never worked at NASA, and the UA Instructor, who gave very unprofessional lessons in weapon handling. This post went viral, and various communication resources reposted our post as an example of a cool situation. However, we try not to abuse this section, waiting for information reasons for a successful play, so as not to repeat ourselves and not to bore the audience.

Situational posts by Prozorro

How Do You Ensure Effective Communication Between Your Department and Other Teams to Share News with Users in a Timely Manner?

At SOE “Prozorro”, we have product managers – these are the elephants that support our system and are responsible for all developments. And our department works very closely with them, as well as with the Public Procurement Department of the Ministry of Economy. That's why we have no problems at all with getting some information and writing a release about a new development. And it's really great that we have no distance between the heads of departments and the communication department.

How Was Your Work Structured in the First Months of the Full-Scale War?

From the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, it became clear that it was impossible to hold tenders on Prozorro now, and no one had time for tender procedures. At the same time, our key principle – transparency – seemed ambiguous. After all, in the early days, we hid all defence-related procurement in the system, and there was a general belief that even data on some ordinary procurement could be used by the enemy.

Work in the first months of a full-scale war

First, how to benefit the country even when our system is hardly used. That's when we launched Prozorro+, a project that helped to procure entities find suppliers of the most necessary wartime goods. Secondly, the question arose of what the Prozorro system should become. After all, it was already clear that both the procurement rules and the system itself had to change to meet the challenges of real-time. We were also actively working on this.

Communication with users was an important task for our department at that time. Together with product managers, we conducted a lot of surveys to understand what their procurement problems were, both using Prozorro and outside the system. And the teams of Prozorro and the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine were thinking about how to adapt the system and legislation.

Within a few months, we heard more and more often from businesses that tenders had to be returned. And some customers, such as Ukrposhta, started making purchases in Prozorro on their own initiative.

Prozorro system

And then we became actively involved in advocating for the return of at least a part of tenders that have nothing to do with defence to the Prozorro system. The government made this decision at the end of June, and then we returned to our usual work. In particular, we fought off media attacks from people who were very happy to conduct procurement in the shadows and did not want to return to transparent rules.

Did You Stop Communicating When the Full-Scale War Started? How Did You Prioritise What to Talk About Right Now?

There is a funny story about this. It's the morning of 24.02.2022, rockets are flying, and we are scheduled to release new functionality in Prozorro Market on this day. The team is finishing this development and I receive a message that, “Let's release a post saying that the invasion is an invasion, and all releases are on schedule – here's the new functionality”. I replied that this is not what the audience would like to hear from us in this situation.

Prozorro continues to work

In the first months of the full-scale war, we did not stop communicating, although we published less frequently. We reported on really important news for our community, gave advice, held webinars, and slightly increased the degree of Russophobia. For example, there was a very big response when we shared DOZORRO's initiative to launch a massive DDoS attack on Russian procurement platforms and called it “russian tender go f**k yourself”.

In general, we understood that we shouldn't overload people with our news, which at that time was of little interest to anyone. For some time, we could not publish anything at all when we realised that we had nothing to say in essence, because no one would feel better from communications made for show. Instead, we conducted many surveys, webinars, and worked on the launch of Prozorro+.

What are the Main Tasks You Have Set for the Communications Department Since the Start of the Full-Scale War?

I really believe that at some point there was a big threat for the country to lose Prozorro, there were even legislative initiatives to completely abandon the system during martial law. After all, if the system had stopped working completely, it would have been very difficult to restore it later. In these circumstances, the biggest challenge for us was to show the public, key stakeholders and international donors the benefits of our system, which can be even more useful during martial law than before. And this is what SOE “Prozorro” and the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine have been actively communicating at the highest level.

Preservation of the system

All of this ultimately helped us to preserve the system during the crisis and continue to develop it further, in particular for the future recovery of Ukraine, during which transparency and efficiency of procurement will be of great importance. By the way, we have already launched donor procedures in the system so that procurement with funds from our international partners also takes place in the Prozorro system, and this is an important milestone for our system.

Challenges of Prozorro

Nowadays, it is civil society that is driving more and more procurement to return to Prozorro. Because people have a fresh experience of what happens when procurement takes place outside the system. After the investigations into eggs for 17 hryvnias, few people doubt that the Prozorro system allows for more efficient procurement and spending. Especially when the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine has already started holding tenders in Prozorro and is saving billions of hryvnias as a result. Similarly, the principle of “everyone sees everything” is proving its effectiveness now more than ever. Customers can still buy things of dubious expediency in wartime, but there are more and more stories of them being cancelled due to publicity. We try to show and emphasise all this in our communications.

Any Communication and Change Carries Certain Risks of Being Met with Negativity from the Audience. Have You Had Any Such Situations Recently, and How Did You Deal with Them?

There was definitely a story that can be attributed to our failures, and it is related to the cancellation of three-round auctions in Prozorro.

The decision to abandon the auction stage was made back in November when there were very tough blackouts in Ukraine. At that time, we received appeals from businesses that the participants were unable to participate in the auction, reduce their bid and, accordingly, lost the tender. This would have put all participants on an equal footing – the winner would have been the one who immediately gave the best price when submitting their tender offer.

But when a resolution was issued in early 2023 to cancel the auctions, it caused a very big resonance and negative reaction from society. Firstly, the auction has always been presented as an integral part of the Prozorro system, its feature. And so we seemed to have abandoned an important part of ourselves. Secondly, while the resolution was being adopted and changes were being made to the system, power cuts were no longer so severe and unpredictable. Therefore, at that time, the decision to abandon auctions no longer seemed so logical. And the third reason, no less important and purely communication-related, is that we did not conduct enough communication before making the decision. Yes, we informed users about it, conducted surveys, and did not encounter any rejection. However, it came as a surprise to many experts, journalists, and the public, and we had to put out the fire after the fact, in particular, by explaining that the cancellation of the auction stage on Prozorro does not mean the cancellation of Prozorro tenders as such, and procurement will continue to be transparent and competitive. Because a large part of the general audience understood this news to mean that Prozorro was over. This story has definitely become a lesson for me.

Do You Monitor the Public's Reaction to Your Communications? Are You Experiencing More Support or Negativity Now?

We always conduct regular surveys on how satisfied users are with our system. And by the way, the first survey after Prozorro became mandatory again showed that the level of user satisfaction has increased. After all, everyone saw what procurement outside the system looks like.

Of course, there are some negative aspects, especially because changes to the regulations or the system's operation are now being adopted very frequently, and not everyone always understands their feasibility. But I hope that as a result of this very dynamic period for procurement, we will come up with very good and clear rules and get a more modern and convenient Prozorro system in the near future.

What Activities, in Your Opinion, were the Most Successful During the Full-Scale War?

I would single out Prozorro's business breakfasts. This format is very important because it is exactly what users need: close communication with Prozorro and the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and answers to their questions. And almost every webinar is attended by Deputy Minister of Economy Nadiia Bihun and Director of the Department Hanna Medviednikova.

Prozorro activities

As it turned out, customers are used to purchasing fuel for a year or many months in advance, and then announcing the relevant tenders. Meanwhile, suppliers cannot predict and fix the price for such a period of time and simply do not apply for these purchases. Therefore, the speakers of the event delivered a simple message to customers: buy fuel for a period of 3-6 months, no more. Later, we shared the results of this conversation with our readers, and most organisers understood how to purchase fuel correctly and efficiently.

What Do You Focus on in Your Communications to Demonstrate the Effectiveness of the System?

This is a really painful issue for me. I often exchange experience with Kateryna Kunytska, the communications manager of Prozorro.Sale, because our systems are constantly confused, and we have to send each other requests from journalists. And so she is a little jealous that public procurement is better played out in memes, and I am jealous that Prozorro.Sale has a very cool indicator of the effectiveness of their system. We are talking about budget revenues from the sale or lease of property. This is a really clear, measurable indicator.

We used to use the procurement savings indicator but decided to abandon it because it is quite controversial. After all, the savings are calculated from the expected value, and therefore, there may be speculation that customers set an overestimated expected value. And because of this, the savings rate will be high, while the price itself will be overstated.

Key metrics

In addition, we also look at how many participants compete in a tender on average, what % of tenders result in a contract and how many procurements are made in Prozorro Market (a tool for fast and efficient procurement that we are actively developing).

Do You Have a Content Plan and Do You Manage to Stick to It?

For me, it is always a challenge to create a content plan and stick to it. Of course, we know in advance what will happen during the month. For example, the adoption of a new resolution or the implementation of additional functionality – we include this in the plan. But in general, the content published on our social media is split roughly equally: 50% are planned posts, and the other 50% are situational and operational news. Therefore, there is always a certain balance between the willingness to plan ahead and the quick preparation of something situational. And creative ideas often come when all the planned publications are over.

Situations

What Advice Would You Give to PR Professionals on How to Deal Effectively with Crisis Situations?

I believe that communication is about common sense. Communicators should be a kind of “information filter” for organisations. It is they who track what is happening, monitor the information field, so they can suggest what additional benefits or risks are possible with different strategies, warn against certain actions, or vice versa, point out a new promising direction for the organisation and help to consistently build a reputation.

I heard a funny joke that the gradation in companies used to be as follows: the CEO came first, followed by deputies - CTO, COO, CMO and so on, and then everyone else. Now the CEO comes first, followed by the communications manager, and then everyone else. This is, of course, an unhealthy trend, when sometimes it is enough for an organisation to just appear rather than be.

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