If you’re currently working on your internal communications strategy, you’re not alone. I’m working with two charities at the moment to help them develop theirs and strategies were the topic for yesterday’s CharityComms special interest group for internal communicatiors. It’s great to know that so many organisations are recognising the strategic importance of effective internal … Read more
Emails are generally held up to be the bane of business life. In fact, whilst planning this piece, I asked some fellow freelancers about the communication problems their clients faced and over-reliance on email took the top slot. I don’t personally feel that email is inherently evil in itself. I completely agree that it causes … Read more
In a Wall Street Journal article about employee engagement that was published this summer, a senior leader from a retail organisation was quoted as saying: “We used to prioritize our stakeholders as shareholders first, customers second, and employees third. We now realize we had it backward. If we put employees first, they in turn take … Read more
Last week I attended the Public Sector Communications Conference. It was a great day, with really interesting speakers and useful conversations with my fellow delegates to develop ideas further. It was the sort of day where you go home with a spring in your step and ideas buzzing round your head! As you might expect, … Read more
My original beginning for this blog piece was going to be something along the lines of ‘it’s summer, isn’t it lovely when the sun shines, let’s think about effective communication over the summer’. Then 2 nights ago we had an extremely heavy rain and thunder storm where I live – the garage flooded, the porch … Read more
I have just started a communications project with an organisation that has a high profile with the public, with content regularly appearing in the traditional media as well as on social media. This coverage can be mixed in terms of being positive and negative, based on fact and based on rumour and hearsay. It means … Read more
Happy New Year! As a general rule, I don’t tend to make new year’s resolutions. Like a lot of targets, they seem to me to often be setting yourself up to fail. They’re usually full of things I think I should be stopping or doing more of and not the things that I really want … Read more
With just a couple of weeks to go to the ‘big day’, many organisations are facing the twin pressures of lots to do before the end of the year and employees who in many cases already want to be winding down for Christmas. Offices are full of chocolates gifted by suppliers and the tinsel and … Read more
Change communication seems to be featuring even more regularly in my professional life than usual at the moment. It has been true for a long time that whilst I often hear people saying things like “here we go again, we’ve seen all this before, it’ll be better when the change stops”, change has become an … Read more
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. April is Autism Awareness Month. March sees Marie Curie’s Great Daffodil Appeal. Time-specific campaigns can be a great way for charities to raise awareness of their work and the difference they aim to make. They can also be an opportunity for different organisations doing similar things to work together. … Read more