Motivated reasoning and elections – how clever communications can help
Heads up: Political nerd post coming in hot! Years ago when I was thinking about what to focus my psych honours thesis on, I was reading a book called The Political Brain, by Drew Westen. (Strong recommend btw if you…
How to beat the social media algorithms
Post at least once a day. Only post three times a week. Make sure to put links in the caption. Put links in the comments. Post in the afternoon. Post in the morning. Use five hashtags. Use twenty-five hashtags. Short-form…
Taking an audience perspective
How often do you get so caught up in doing the doing and forget who you are doing it for? No matter how long you have worked in communications, we all fall into this trap at one point or another.…
Communicating with diverse audiences
When developing a communications strategy or designing stakeholder engagement, we often talk about segmenting your audience—defining who they are, their demographics, needs, challenges, and pain points. This segmentation is supposed to help us tailor our communication so it resonates more…
The importance of promoting communications careers
A couple of weeks ago, the Elm team participated in the St Clare’s College career expo. You might wonder why. At Elm, we aren’t a large consultancy looking to recruit high school graduates, so why would we attend? It’s a…
Year 6: The best and hardest year yet
Every year, I stop to celebrate Elm’s birthday. It’s a milestone—fifty percent of all small businesses don’t make it to five years. We have now exceeded that. It’s a moment to celebrate the hard work and effort my team and…
Managing imposter syndrome and embracing imperfection
Do you ever feel like you’re just one step away from being exposed as a fraud or that those around you think you’re so much better than you actually are? Even when you know you’ve worked hard to get where…
- Australian Government, Behavioural science, Blog post, Communications professional, Team performance
Diversity of thinking in your team
This week, I sat down with Elm’s newest team member Amy. When I say new, she has been with us for six months, but we agreed that time has flown by, and it feels like we haven’t had a real…
The #1 way to make your communications team more efficient
In communications, we never have enough resources, time, or capacity to deliver everything that is asked of us or to meet our own expectations. It means we need to be efficient in how we operate. To be efficient, we need.…
Dismantling the Pink Ghetto in communications
This wasn’t the blog post I had planned for this week. In fact, you could say it practically wrote itself (and no I don’t mean AI – this is very much all me). It all started with a really touching International…
