153 (Communications, Mike Panebianco, Amy Robinson) Artwork

The SWAPA Number

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The SWAPA Number

153 (Communications, Mike Panebianco, Amy Robinson)

August 26, 2024 • SWAPA • Season 5 • Episode 18

Today's SWAPA Number is 153. That's the number of emails, education materials, videos, and podcasts you've received from SWAPA in 2024 so far. And each one has passed through the Communications Committee before you saw or heard it.

So today's podcast is about exactly that. We're sitting down with Communications Chair, Mike Panebianco and Communications Director, Amy Robinson, to talk about all the different areas the Communications Committee works in, what we're doing to improve those products and what you can expect down the road.

If you have any feedback for us at all, please drop us a line at comm@swapa.org
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Matt McCants:

Tony Mulhare:

Matt McCants:

I'm Matt McCants.

Tony Mulhare:

And I'm Tony Mulhare. And here's our interview with Mike and Amy.

Matt McCants:

Well, this is awkward. Usually we're interviewing another committee member and now we're just talking to each other like we do just about every day. But Mike, let's start with you, in the charter we have with the board and therefore the membership.

Mike Panebianco:

Yeah, so I think it's probably easiest just to start at the top with the overarching goal and mission before comm is number one, to do no harm. Obviously we're the voice for SWAPA and everything that we put out, whether we produced it or it came from another committee or the executives comes through us and we send it out. So obviously the replies come back to us. So we see the direct impact of every communication piece. So do no harm is where we start and we try to filter that to where we get the best communication. We push right into our mission where our priorities are accuracy, is what we're sending out accurate?

Is it timely? Does it make sense? I did notice some comm that went out. We follow a few organizations and some of the comm that goes out, you look at an event that's in the past and then 10 days later you look and you see comm go out about it. And is that timely? No.

And that impacts the third thing, is what we put out useful? And I think judging from the feedback over the last year and a half that I've been here in comm and just as somebody who consumes it regularly, I think that those are pretty helpful priorities for us in comm, and we maintained a good focus on that as an organization for a while. But how do we do that? You look at what we do for SWAPA and how we work. Everyone thinks that comm just comes from us, like we sit around and think this stuff up and send it out. Well, sometimes that's true, but most of the time it's actually we aggregate this information. I know you and Tony, Amy, Casey Castile, everybody's running around the building constantly grabbing our SMEs and aggregating information so that we can put it together, and you guys have done a great job with the Ride Reports and now you're hearing some of our staff members read the Ride Reports. But we run around the building and we electronically run around our committees and gather that information.

Tony Mulhare:

Sometimes I feel like that is more than just gathering the information. We try to take a pilot's perspective who doesn't spend all of their time in a particular committee. Often the Scheduling Committee for instance, that's all they do, and they're versed and they've made up terms that maybe not everybody else would understand. My favorite being the [inaudible 00:03:33], which almost no one outside of that committee knows what that means. And just trying to take what they've been doing and turn that into something that your average aligned pilot can see and understand. "Oh, that's the gray bar. Got it."

Mike Panebianco:

Yeah. Curating a lot of this information is an interesting process because we don't all speak the same language. I mean, a third of our pilot force is new. And so a lot of these things that someone like myself, I've been here 24 years, a lot of what's old to me is just very common. And some pilots coming from another company or even coming from the military, there's a level and there's diversity in our committee for that reason, to make sure that what we put out is something that our membership can consume.

Amy Robinson:

From our perspective, it's easy to try to change it so that it's digestible for the common when we're looking at outside audiences as well, because there's so many acronyms and things that come with pilot speak that sometimes it's very difficult to translate. And to be honest with you, some of our newest members don't even know all the acronyms that some of you older guys have been using for years.

Mike Panebianco:

Yeah, it's a good litmus test when you go out and fly a trip and you turn to a first officer that's 170, 180,000 number, and you start talking to them and they go, "What does that mean? What is that?"

Matt McCants:

I genuinely don't know.

Mike Panebianco:

And I'm like, "I don't know. I think we're going to have to look that up." So that seeking of clarity across the membership, it's not just the tournament level players that we communicate to. We have to actually make it consumable by everybody and then provide the platforms because things have changed. I mean, I remember even five years ago, pilots and social media weren't really a thing. And now it's like, man, if you're not on social, we're hitting you with emails. But that's really where a lot of this game is played. And they're not even on SWAPA specific channels.

Amy Robinson:

As an example, six years ago we only had something like 300 Facebook followers.

Tony Mulhare:

Amy, what's that number now? Do you know?

Amy Robinson:

It's over 20,000 currently.

Tony Mulhare:

We certainly use Facebook, but what other social media avenues do we pursue?

Amy Robinson:

We have a handle on Twitter, X, we have an Instagram, we have a LinkedIn, we have several different social media channels that we're using currently.

Tony Mulhare:

And I think that's an important point is that not everyone consumes media in exactly the same way. And so we're trying to reach a variety of audiences and meet people where they are and not make everybody use one particular platform or another.

Amy Robinson:

Correct. And I think too, pilots vary. We have a wide spectrum of ages and demographics that we're speaking to. So you have the person who is a big fan of printed media and we still have a little bit of that left. And then we have all the way to the newest people who want to digest everything in a very quick, easy format. One of the reasons we came up with a podcast was newer members may want to hear a podcast, they may want to just read a blurb on Twitter, or maybe they just want to see just bits and pieces of things more so than, and reading a longer form article. So we're trying to reach pilots wherever they may be looking at this material in whatever manner they want to consume it.

Tony Mulhare:

Amy, we've talked about how some of our internal customers might consume some of our information, but I know you also have external customers and try to get our message out through the press, and you're the primary point of contact for all our partnerships in the press. What can you tell us about the relationship building we've done over the years and in particular during this last negotiation cycle in that pursuit?

Amy Robinson:

I've had press contacts, some very, very specific press contacts. I've been with SWAPA for 10 years, so in the past 10 years, I've kind of built those relationships with some of those people to try to move our message along. It's very difficult to get just the general population to read a press release any longer because there's so many of them, it's hard to get reporters to pick those up. Sometimes they do. It does happen. But if you don't have a compelling story, but let's say for instance, we just want to kind of reiterate a small point and I can reach out to those people and say hey, and just kind of talk them through. And so they are a lot more amenable to our message now than they were let's say five or six years ago because a lot of our stuff is very data-driven. So we've kind of proven ourselves in the space of being much more approachable and much more thoughtful in our analysis.

So when we do have something that we want to bring forward in the press for negotiations or whatever, it's much easier for us to be able to make that a complete story with these relationships than it would've been say six years ago where we're just trying to sort of hawk our stories without knowing or talking to these people more regularly. There's been a lot of press for Southwest over the last couple of years, so some of that was kind of a natural thing, but some of it just comes from speaking to these people regularly and talking to them even about things that sometimes we don't get quoted on. But talking to them about things that they have questions on and giving them data that they don't necessarily have. And sometimes we don't even ask to be attributed that information to, but it helps them see a clearer picture, and it also kind of allows them to come back to us and tell the stories that we do want to tell.

Matt McCants:

So a bit of a follow-up here, and I think we talked about this the last board meeting, but one of the keys to turning the corner this past fall was the public perception of how the company was treating negotiations. How did that translate over in the room as we got closer to a deal?

Mike Panebianco:

To what Amy was just talking about, we pulled out all the stops. The mission from Casey Murray was hit every front, and it was Amy's efforts with the relationships that she has with the press. It was putting a very motivated and professional member of the strike and Operational Support Committee in his uniform going to news stations with a picket sign, a letter and Amy's card, my card, and a basic in-person invitation. He went to television stations and newspapers, and a lot of these reporters actually responded to that. And I think the one that really hit well was the culture event when the company sold tickets to have businesses come to headquarters to talk about culture and celebrate culture and our pilots showed up. I think the capacity of what our original picket was supposed to be. Not a shining moment for us or for Southwest, but to put a real spotlight on the gap between what Southwest says it is and what we wish it was. And we wish it was what they said, what Southwest was advertised to me as 24 years ago.

I wish it was what they advertised. And if anything we can do to push it back in that direction, and even during negotiations to have a fully functioning strike center, and Tony, you were in the room with a reporter. You were the one standing there with a reporter being interviewed in a fully functioning strike center. We were able to track pilots, we were able to track airplanes, we had air traffic control, we had everything lined up to successfully execute a strike.

Matt McCants:

Yeah, it was very clear this was not a pickup game.

Mike Panebianco:

In the final days. I mean, we opened the Dallas Strike Center and then we opened the Baltimore Strike Center, and that is right when the NC was pushing to that final negotiating session and brought out a TA. All those things happening together was something that was somewhat by luck, somewhat by severe planning and real hustle by everyone in this building. All of our staff, the Kara Monahans, Amy and her team, Twig and the Strike Committee guys that were really hustling to make everything happen on a very compressed timeframe, that was some pretty impressive work.

Matt McCants:

And all the pilots that showed up.

Mike Panebianco:

Yeah, and the pilots, the membership itself. I mean, you can put a seed in the ground, but those are the guys that go and pull the weeds and make sure it's watered and they bring out the harvest when you get hundreds and hundreds of pilots that show up for all these events and the media shows up. We actually had a helicopter on one of those events too, but major news coverage, the execs were on TV. We were all over social media in the right places in the right markets. That was a huge team effort, but that's what we're here for. We're kind of like that little hub in the middle or the linchpin, bringing it all together and making sure that it all happened and went out.

Tony Mulhare:

We keep tabs on our traffic across all platforms, and we did targeted geofencing campaigns during negotiations. So what's geofencing and can we shed some light on the analytics we got out of that?

Mike Panebianco:

Sure. So social media wasn't a big thing for SWAPA back in '22 and '23 as we started in, and you get towards the Nashville picket and then into Wall Street, and we were talking with other unions that had used it. I come from a marketing family and talking with my brother and talking with other pilot unions, getting Amy and bringing in another consultant to talk social media and actually the mechanics of geofencing and it's targeted ads. It's picking a neighborhood and dropping an ad on it. And when people would open up their phone, whatever social media platforms they're using, or Google websites that they'd visit, all those banners, we'd have something there.

Matt McCants:

Right. This is a scientific approach. We're not just trying to go viral here.

Mike Panebianco:

It wasn't carpet bombing the entire internet all over the country. It was finding Southwest markets. If we had something going on in Baltimore, we were hitting Baltimore, we were circling around the city, we were circling around ... Heck, when Casey went and testified in front of the Senate, we geofenced DC, we hit some of the major markets and we saw our message popping on everybody's phones. And meanwhile, you had people getting that message and a very specific message for each target audience. And our effort was to make us a lot bigger for a more reasonable cost because we wanted to make sure you could buy ... Amy what did a Wall Street Journal full page ad cost?

Amy Robinson:

The cost for the Wall Street Journal ad was about $350,000 for the full page rate. And I think their reach was just about, I want to say 2 million views or something like that.

Mike Panebianco:

So the significance of that is that with geofencing, you just heard what 300 grand would get you. What we did with geofencing, very specific, very targeted messaging. We were able to do with $12,000, 4.5 million.

Matt McCants:

Wow.

Mike Panebianco:

That was an average spend on a campaign. And we had multiple campaigns running, and some of our budgets never went over 3,000, $4,000, but guys were landing in Love Field and their phones, they'd open up their phone and touch social media and boom, there's a SWAPA.

Amy Robinson:

And I think that's one of the things that when pilots come back and say, "Well, we didn't take out enough ads or we didn't ..." Print ads are extraordinarily expensive. And when you're looking at, first of all, you have to assume that people are looking at it to get the information, and a lot of people just don't read papers anymore. And so it's sort of a dying breed. So it's like where do you want to invest your money and get the most bang for your buck? Like Mike said, it doesn't make sense to spend the membership's money on something that is so expensive on a regular basis.

Mike Panebianco:

And that's really what drove a lot of our members to start paying attention. And back in 2015, I think Amy and I had this conversation back when we did this iPilot thing where we had a bunch of pilots going out with an air droppable PDF with negotiating information and just go out there and talk to guys in the jetway, other pilots in the jetway and share it, share that PDF because the iPad was new for us. The EFP was like, "Oh, wow, this airdrop thing is pure wizardry. Hey, we're going to give you a PDF, you can go out." Because pilots weren't opening the email, they weren't paying attention. Nobody knew what was going on. And boom, it was a very short turnaround time to where the pilots were really paying attention, which is what we really needed. And so our internal customer, our membership, we got them back on the train towards paying attention more because when we had pickets running up 2021, '22, and then going into 2023, we never had a lack of participation at a picket.

So we had the membership and they were paying attention, and they listened for Casey, they listened to the SWAPA number, they listened for ... They look at their Friday email blast from the NC or from the execs, and they get their news and they paid attention. But when we start looking at an external customer, SWAPA plays on five chess boards all the time. You've got the governmental, the three-letter agencies, you've got the staffers that work for congressmen, and they start getting nervous like, "Hey, are you guys going to strike? Because we use Southwest to get back and forth to DC and that's bad for me and that's bad for my constituents." But really it's bad for them. And I'm not sure that they were as concerned about their constituents as they were about getting to work.

Not to be negative about it, but I mean when they pay attention, people start paying attention. Buy side, sell side, Wall Street. You had Eric and Greg going up into Wall Street with the execs and they're like, "What is going on over there?" They start waking up and across the industry, Boeing issues, other airlines, and then they're looking at what we're doing and the other unions are looking at what we're doing and we're collaborating back and forth. And then obviously across our peer groups using social media and using geofencing, we were able to deliver very specific messages to very specific markets.

That's this war, that's this campaign, what 2027 and 2028 will look like is yet to be seen because AI is changing the landscape. So we're very closely monitoring that. How are we going to target messaging there? So yeah, I mean it's not just the forum, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, the build out on those channels is going to be pretty interesting over the next few years to build awareness and keep pilot branding positive with the traveling public and keeping our pilots informed and letting them know where they can be active.

Matt McCants:

Yeah, this is a theme here is that communication and how we communicate with the membership, our internal customers and our external customers, it's going to change and pivot. And that's what we've done in the recent past, and that sets the stage of what we're doing now and what we will do in the future. Amy, some listeners might be familiar with everything we put out, but can you take the membership through the monthly battle rhythm and our deliverables.

Amy Robinson:

Monthly, we do the RP articles, those go out on the 15th, around the 15th of every month. That's still printed. We're transitioning that a little bit, but we still produce the RP every month. We do a weekly snapshot, which is collated from a bunch of different committees to put together a sort of a condensed version of what's going on that week. We do the Ride Report, which is the other podcast for everybody to do a really quick run through of what's happening as far as the updates to the CBA and where we landed on implementation, and at that certain point in time. We put out an annotated CBA every, I think we're now down to every couple of weeks on that. I don't think that's running every week, but it's pretty regularly. We are also social media and we do social media posts at least once a day, putting those together, writing those, getting the content together for those. We also do The SWAPA Number as you're listening to now, and that's every other week.

In addition to that, we host town halls as needed. We've done a lot of one-off things, all the billboards strike signs. When we were going through the negotiation, we did all of that stuff, press releases, we do those kind of infrequently, but back when we were doing them very frequently. And then in addition to all of that, collating everything that's on the website, we do blogs, we read all of those, we put those together. We've also done everything from every chart, every graph that you see on the website that you see in these emails, they all come through comm and we have a team that makes them look nice, look pretty, make sense. So we kind of touch everything that the membership sees. And then even sort of outside of that, like I said, billboards, any campaigns that we run, when we did run a few ads, we designed those and put those out there as well. So a lot more than I think what you expect to see.

Tony Mulhare:

Amy, you have your eyes on some of our backend analytics. What can you say about how the information is being consumed, what our click rates are, what avenues are being the most used?

Amy Robinson:

When you say click rates, I assume you're referring to our click rates for our emails because that's kind of what we do have the most information on. And we have a really good open rate on our emails. So about 84% of the emails that we send out get opened, which is good. The click rate is pretty high as well. It's not quite that high, but especially compared to industry standards. So industry standard open rates are typically more along the lines of 40 to 50% open rates. So 84% is really high comparatively when you're looking at from a marketing standpoint of sending emails. So thank you to the pilots for opening the emails and at least looking at them. We really appreciate that.

And then we have the click rate's a little bit lower. It's about 20%, which is lower, but we kind of attribute that to, people may not be interested in all of the clicks that you have in there. So if I send an email out and I have three things on scheduling, maybe I'm really only interested in one. So while it's low, it's still not abysmally low. It's high compared to average again. And so that's a very good thing. It shows that our membership is definitely being engaged, at least with our emails.

When you look at social media metrics, we mentioned earlier that we had about 20,000 followers on Facebook. We have almost 12,000 followers on Twitter. So I mean we have a considerable number of people following us in that regard as well.

Mike Panebianco:

And those channels, just to give you kind of a hit on that, Tony was over the past 60 days, 144,000 reached through the 20,000 that we have as followers, and then you've got 10,000 people watch videos that we posted. And there's not that many of those, but we can actually look at them and we know what our net followership looks like and what our engagement is, and all those numbers are up and we're in peacetime.

Matt McCants:

All right, so Tony, you've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work with some of the bigger projects that we have going on. We have a lot of plates spinning at all times, but these are the big ones. We've got a massive app refresh operation in the works, the public facing side of the website is going through some changes and we're making the RP a better product and revamping the canned that goes out to reflect the new CBA. Walk us through what to expect in the future on those fronts.

Tony Mulhare:

Well, now that we've wrapped up the negotiation cycle and taken our emphasis onto what's going to help SWAPA move into the future and help us communicate with our members over the next several years, the primary goal here is to modernize and increase the utility in the SWAPA app, keeping the pilot as the central focus of that. So we're trying to make sure that depending on where you are in your day or your week, whether you're commuting to work, that we have the app set up, if you're at home wanting to improve your schedule for this month or look at the scheduling tools that are available for next month that those will be prominent. And then making our communications products more easily accessible on your phone without having to go log into the website or go find the most recent podcast on a podcast app. It'll be there available to you on the SWAPA app.

We're trying to make that mobile friendly. And so you should see things like easy login capabilities, using face ID, some of those kinds of things. And I'd just like to point out that I haven't really done any of the work here, that this is all our graphics team here, the Communications Committee, that's Jason and [inaudible 00:24:26] and Kristen and Ella who have been doing a lot of this work along with our third party vendor that's actually making this into a useful app for us. And pilots, we're in beta testing right now.

The goal is to have the app up and running here early in the fall with both versions for Apple and your freedom fighters in the Android committee like myself. And then along with your being on the iPad, which is now on everybody's EFP. So just little things like being able to on a commute, "Hey, I've got some time here, let me be able to get to the most recent reporting point right there on the app and read that while I've got two hours to kill on the back of the airplane." The Reporting Point, like Amy mentioned earlier, is being moved to a more online friendly version as well, because that's how most people are consuming media is via their phone or their iPad.

Matt McCants:

And we need those application-based features, I.E. the RP, the app itself and everything that's going to live on there to talk with the public facing website and the website that's behind our login information. So all those things need to talk together too. So we're kind of making sure that that tech integration is happening before we release it to the public.

Tony Mulhare:

Yes. And speaking of our website, that's kind of a longer term product, a little bit on the back burner right now. That's an external customer who's not quite as important as our internal customers. Dealing with our pilot group is certainly our first priority. And then we'll move on to making sure that anyone looking for outside information about SWAPA will have a little bit friendlier of a website here in the near future.

Matt McCants:

Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the intents of the app is to keep the membership from having to go to the login portion of the website to access all the information where they're used to seeing it.

Tony Mulhare:

Yes, somewhat. We're sensitive to the fact we're not trying to download all of the information on the website onto your phone and crush your phone's memory. So there'll be a little bit of interplay there between the website and your app, but the things that are most commonly used will be right there available at your fingertips on the app.

Amy Robinson:

Well, and I think one of the biggest things that we've gotten complaints about in the past is it's a single source sign on. So you should be able to use your face ID to go directly to the website without having to log in. It just creates your phone or your mobile devices, will automatically send you through, and you don't have to log in from that point too.

Mike Panebianco:

Yeah, having looked at what you guys have done and the work that has gone into the app, the look and feel is better, the usability is better, and that was the whole point was to get our pilots back into their mobile device because that's where they live. They're out in the terminals or they're at home and they got their phone in their pocket. It's just user experience, making it simple.

Amy Robinson:

So I had a question for you, Mike. You've been splitting time between comm, the Strategic Planning Committee and you're still doing the advocate discipline thing occasionally. What are you working on with the Strategic Planning Committee and is that something you could share with the membership?

Mike Panebianco:

Yeah, a little bit. SWAPA hasn't really, in the time that I've been here, put a lot of time into a strategic plan. And one of Casey's parting gifts, I think to the membership and the board and to all of us who work on committee was to do an extensive strategic plan and actually go through everything from the organizing principles, which is your mission statement, your vision statement, all your values and your priorities, and putting them in stone and agreeing to them so that we have really a north star for everybody in the building, everybody on the board and what the membership can expect from us going forward.

And then working on those five chess boards that I talked about earlier, what's going on with the government, the three-letter identifiers, the FAA, the DOT, the DOJ, the court of public opinion, what's going on with the industry, the single pilot flight decks that are being threatened in Europe, bringing all of that together and making sure that our board is the most informed and agile and has the ability to make decisions on guiding this organization. And it gives us very clear marching orders on how we conduct our business here on the committee. So that's what the SPC is doing. It's going to be a robust presentation to the board, and we're going to try to have that wrapped up and available to present for the September board meeting because obviously our budgeting is going to be built off of what our strategy is and what our strategic plan is.

So it's a much, much heavier process this year and it's taking a lot of time, but our comm is probably going to adjust. We go last in that because we watch how everybody else is new in their work and what the goals are, and then we start implementing how we communicate that to the membership. So you'll see some of that towards the end of summer and into August and September especially.

I want to spin around to Matt because he's been over there hiding under the table there, hiding behind his microphone and hasn't really had to be put on the spot, being that you've dodged questions the whole time and there's no way Tony and I are going to let you out of here with that. Let us know what's going on with the Ride Report. How's that going to evolve? Give us some heads up on some of the stuff that's common.

Matt McCants:

Fair enough, Mike. I think it's worthwhile to point out first maybe that we just finished some polling and we had some comm-specific questions in there. What do you want to hear read, see more about? How do you want to consume it? Are we putting out enough? Has it been too much? I don't think there's any wrong answers there. And we are immediately putting that feedback to use. The products will evolve and pivot with that feedback, and I think that's the way it should be. We don't want to have the same product over and over again that doesn't change and ebb and flow with what's happening in the industry and what's happening with the company and what really pilots are concerned about. So that's what we want to reflect. And the Ride Report has focused on implementation, a lot of Q&A, but as that slows, we want to try to get more into tips and nuanced parts of the contract that would benefit the whole membership here, not just select few.

I envision the app playing a key part of this, and for those who've been around a while, you probably remember Contract Admin Tip of the Week. We're leaning towards something that kind of resemble that, so maybe calling it quick turn videos, just little tips and tricks about the contract that you may know or haven't taken as much advantage of as you possibly could. And we're working closely with the SRC and Contract Admin Committee to get a good solid product that's consumable and mobile like you've asked for.

So everybody learns in different ways, which is why we always have a written version of any audiovisual product that we put out. And we're going to try to continue to have a good balance of info that's short and to the point, and from time to time, go into things that need to get into the weeds, that need those details, that need that nuance. There's a balance there and we try to make sure that we're striking it all the time.

Communication is more of a loop than it is aligned, so the more feedback we get, even if it's negative, it really does help us design the products, tools, and services to do SWAPA's part on this pilot experience that we continue to preach about. We certainly have a role of communicating out. Everybody knows that, but I think we pride ourselves on listening just as much as we do speaking. As I mentioned in one of the Ride Reports halfway recently, all the comm that flows into the committees from the line, that turns into data points that serve as fact patterns and substance when we go to approach the company with problems all the way up to arbitration. And lastly, to go back to our charter, pilots talking to us on formal channels really does facilitate our ability to be timely, accurate, and useful.

Tony Mulhare:

This is the part where we normally thank our guests for stopping by to speak to the membership, but the committees were in the trenches taking care of business this week. And that's actually a good thing.

Matt McCants:

Today's bonus number is not a number at all. It's our email address comm@swapa.org. Drop us a line if you have any ideas, feedback, or questions. And if we can't take care of it, we'll certainly get you to the folks who can.