Although the City of Weatherford and the Aledo ISD had public information officers, it was a new concept for Willow Park, and City Manager Bryan Grimes thought Hoffman, who had been covering the city for The Community News, was a perfect fit for the job.
Hoffman said she had been thinking about making a switch out of journalism.
“I had a couple of different people tell me that this skill set transferred really well to school communications or government communications,” Hoffman said.
Among the friends she spoke to was Mercedes Mayer, the Communications Director for the Aledo ISD.
“And they all said these are really transferable skill sets. A lot of the skills that you already have in journalism are the same skills you're going to be using as a government communicator. And the things that were discussed in my interview with the city of Willow Park specifically, were things like newsletters and website, articles, and social media and those were all things I already had a background in.”
Any new job, especially being the first in a position, will come with surprises, and that was the case for Hoffman.
“I didn't know what I didn't know,” Hoffman said. “And once I really got in and got my feet under me, it turns out there were a whole lot of things that I didn't know.”
She undertook the process of learning what she needed to know to effectively perform her duties.
“Probably the biggest hurdle that I had, as far as training and education when I first started, was just the legal side of things,” Hoffman said. “When you run a social media, particularly social media for a government, there are a lot of very, very strict rules related to the First Amendment with government social media. And so there was quite a bit of legal training that I had to go through that now, looking back on it six years later, it shouldn't have surprised me at all, but it did surprise me a little bit, because it was a very, very different game than journalism — just the things that you are and are not allowed to say as a government communicator.”
Hoffman said she was also not prepared for the public’s distrust of government agencies.
“One of the things that I lined up pretty quickly when I started working there, is that the first thing we really have to do is work to establish trust with our communications.”
Her in-house education continued as she sat in on meetings with a variety of departments. In the process she learned about the processes in public works, the police department, and other city departments.
“I found generally that everybody was pretty welcoming and open and willing to talk to me and they were more than happy to give me the information that I needed to go out and do my job,” Hoffman said. “I had to do a lot of education of myself for a lot of those departments to be able to understand how do I take the jargon from this department and break it down into plain language for the public? But some of that then goes back to my journalism background, particularly covering municipalities where I already sort of understood how to do that. It's far more technical when you work for the city, because you get into it a lot deeper than you do as a journalist.
“One of the things that we really preach about in my professional associations is that you really want to establish those relationships and establish that trust, long before you have a situation where you're having to communicate something urgently, because your relationships are already there and you're ready to go as a team”
Hoffman said the city has been very supportive of her and fellow staff members in obtaining further training and education. One of the first bits of advice she received when she joined the city was to go to TAMIO (Texas Association of Municipal Information Officers), a statewide association. She pointed out that the job descriptions for her position vary wildly from city to city, and it was up to Willow Park to decide what her path would be there.
“The council and Bryan Grimes had a pretty good idea of what they wanted it to look like, but they weren't entirely sure what that path going forward needed to look like for the position,” she said.
About four months into the job, she attended the TAMIO state convention.
“I was absolutely astounded at the wealth of resources and knowledge that they have there,” Hoffman said. “And I got really good legal training. I got great social media training. I got great training on best practices for websites. Every time I would come up across a new challenge of, okay, this is something that I've never faced before, … the city, every time, hands down, has been like, yes, go get the training. Go take the workshop.”
As she attended conventions and workshops, Hoffman discovered that the most successful people in her field had received Certified Public Communicator training and certification.
The CPC is a professional designation that is basically awarded at the end of the program for someone who is a specialist in strategic planning and communication systems for some sort of public entity.
“I thought, ‘Okay, well, if I want to be the best of the best and really take this to the next level, that's where I need to go.”
Hoffman said the 13-month program at the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at TCU, in addition to providing new skills, gave her a boost in professional confidence.
“When you're building a communications department from scratch, you spend a lot of time putting out fires, and just kind of going from one thing to the next,” Hoffman said. “But because of the fact that I spent 13 months creating this strategic plan for the city's communications department, I now have a little bit more of a proactive approach. And when I have the things happen in the day to day, I'm able to look at that and say, ‘Well, how does that response to this fit within the goals we've set forth in the strategic plan and how does this kind of go with with the big picture.’”
Most recently Hoffman received training from the Emergency Management Institute, a part of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).
As a result of the training she received in Emmetsburg, Maryland, Hoffman is now classified as an Advanced Public Information Officer through FEMA. She had desired the training because, as she said, “in rural areas outside of the metroplex, there are not a lot of folks who have that level of certification for emergency management. And if we have something large scale happen in Parker County, it's very important that we have some people that have that training that are already here.”
Hoffman was quick to point out that she is not alone.
“I’m not the only staffer at Willow park that is constantly trying to learn and train and develop and know more. Our fire marshals, Kevin and Charlie, are constantly in training. We have a number of people around City Hall who are constantly in training. We have people that go to finance training and legal training, and Toni's in school to get a certified public manager.”
Last year the city secretary received her International Association of Municipal Clerks certification and the above-mentioned Toni Fisher graduated with honors from Tarleton State University.
“Part of our culture there is that we are always trying to know more and do more and be better, because we want to be prepared to meet the needs of Willow Park as we grow and as we move forward.”
In September, Hoffman was elected to the Board of Directors for the North Texas Public Information Officers group, which is for the public safety and emergency management side of public communication for the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“I was kind of shocked when I managed to get elected to the Board of Directors, but I'm also absolutely delighted at the opportunity to serve because one of the big things that I see, particularly in Parker County, looking at this through a longer lens, is as we grow it is going to be absolutely imperative that we train for large-scale incidents of whatever nature, and that's going to involve getting more training to some of the folks out here who may not have access to that training, and it's that way for pretty much all of the outlying counties around DFW.
“One of the things that I ran on for that board was trying to bring more of these rural and smaller agencies into this group and get them access to the resources and the knowledge and the training that that the bigger agencies have — that’s kind of a personal mission of mine, is to really try to not only be a leader in Willow Park, but bring some of these other folks in that could benefit from some of the the wonderful trading and connections that I've had.”
Hoffman also sits on the education committee of TAMIO.
“Those are two projects I'm really passionate about that I feel like give me some amazing perspective of knowledge to bring back to the City of Willow Park. Because every time I sit in on one of those meetings, I come up with something of, ‘hey, I got to take this back to Willow Park. We could implement that, and that would be really good for us.”
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